Disaster Sydicalism

These are the dying days of the West. The apocryphal (in the West) “Chinese curse” wishes for us to live in interesting times. “Interesting” is one way of putting things.

The postwar boom the United States has been riding since 1945 isn’t in good shape. A bit of naughty exorbitant privilege-exercising didn’t help. Whether the accumulation crisis on Wall St coming to the boil or World War 3 engulfing the planet as major powers maneuovre around the Middle East, things are only bound to get more “interesting times.”

Naomi Klein has enlightened us all as to the predatory opportunism around disaster capitalism. The Gazan Genocide is disaster capitalism; it removes claims to the natural gas reserves off the coast of Gaza by removing the claimants. You can take your counterterrorist conspiracism all the way to the bank.

Disaster capitalists clearly understand the crisis-opportunity nexus. They appear highly adept at manipulating crisis conditions to their favour; conditions appear malleable. If disaster conditions are malleable, my question is, why can’t a terminal structural crisis caused by, say Wall St finally shitting the bed, be an opportunity to learn to cooperate for our common survival, like we’re even half-aware of the meaning and importance of social solidarity?

No one is an island; as heinous as it might be to have to admit even to oneself at times, we need each other. We might need each other when it comes to the sure moment its all over, ie when all the boomers are stockpiling TP like it’s the war again because there’s still going to be functional sewerage.

And maybe this is the rub: once all the corrupt AF grubs running the circus have scurried off to their doomsday bunkers in New Zealand and South America, could the sewerage workers not just keep showing up and have a better time without having to go through a cavalcade of nutsack petty raging egomaniacs and control freaks to try to get one tiny thing done? Would the absence of management not be good for morale?

What if doomsday for the West is a bit like Ayn Rand’s wet dream of the oligarchy going on strike, like from fucking everything and leaving endless shitwork for anyone halfway responsible to have to grapple with, for generations. Because you can’t extract a profit from an enterprise, no one should go to that enterprise or attempt to continue operating the enterprise cooperatively and collaboratively. Why?

What if it’s good the oligarchy went on strike? Stay gone lol.

The generalised crisis of the 21st century is on us: an insurgent global corporate oligarchy reveals a private empire of capital lording over the world: capital as the commodity fetish looking out over its collectively paranoid capture-bondlings like the Eye of Sauron. It needs endless planet to expand into and plunder to service the endless-growth economy the social bribes of middle-class selfish individualism need to facilitate endless upward mobility.

The old world of positively sacred social and class hierarchies personal boundaries not so much is playing its endgame. The planetary ecology can’t physically sustain ruling classes, their ultracompetitiveness, their voracious, locust-like rapacity, or their ferocious, sadomasochistic, sickenly codependent tyranny. Elites like green technocracy because it promises technological solutions to not being able to make an endless-growth economy work on a finite planet. That speaks for itself.

The big knob oligarchy has no plan–not one that doesn’t involve large-scale sacrifice of the peasantry at any rate. Your culling was for the greater good, peasants. Having any plan is a step ahead. Suggesting that, since we can see the crunch coming, we should get ready, might be a step ahead again. And oh shit, now that we put our thinking caps on, there are all these worker-recouperated enterprises in South America, and there’s all this stuff coming up in the US about rapid response networks and coordinated mutual aid in response to ICE invasions, and workers’ councils reappearing in Iran if you don’t mind.

Are they pointing someplace, do you reckon?

The most powerful tool in the possession of the slavemaster is the mind of the slave, it has been said. The mind of the slave has to understand that we need the parasite, not the other way around. We are to externalise our own power to the parasite, and internalise their weakness and dependency as our own. We are not to understand or appreciate the levels of free rent the enslaved has in the mind of the dependent parasite and control freak.

We must understand that it’s our worth and not the opposite, as individuals and collectively, that demands our devaluing: don’t believe in yourselves and each other, peasants. Believe in authority. If authority is bought and can exploit opportunity in crisis to run disaster capitalism, the working class can exploit opportunity afforded by crisis to survive their downfall.

With any kind of revolutionary discipline behind us, maybe we can show ourselves and each other what cooperating in solidarity and good faith looks like. Maybe we can halfway survive the downfall of a class of spiritual beggar shitlords who just couldn’t give up the gilded national security blankie. We have the power; we might exercise it in putting ourselves in a position to address encircling ecocide minus every fuckhead who has to be clocking bank before we can survive the century.

Everyone should be organising anarchist cells if at all possible. We should be organising community defense unions, or councils even. Community defense councils. Not an ideological grouping, a union of common interests as members of the community.

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, bolted-on syndicalist, personally . . . anarcho-syndicalist if I’ve had a few beers down the pub. Mmm beer. It’s insane to me that Earth isn’t run as a global confederation of industrial unions, starting with domestic care work–the most valuable labour to global capitalism, and naturally also the most devalued and invisible. A bunch of invisible domestic care worker unpaid brood mare for capital predominantly women should organise mothers unions and just absolutely pulverise the patriarchal status quo.

But yeah, if you can get three people together, that’s a quorum. Get your friends and neighbours together with the idea of forming a community defence union; let’s not leave ourselves to the mercy of the grifters who got us all into this mess in the first place. Who will for sure leave us holding the bag when something finally gives, and a whole lot of people going through dopamine withdrawal all at once are asking themselves, should I have gotten off social media before it came to this.

(Nb. Yes.)

Disaster syndicalism. Two cents.