frag_10_2023

The most recent IPCC reports were supposed to put an end to the fictitious debate about the empirical reality of human-made climate change, and instead shift the focus too discussions on probable outcomes and possible adaptive strategies. Unfortunately the zombie delusions of deniers and delayers continue to stalk the halls of extant institutions creating just enough inertia to allow the mainstream establishments to adjust.

Yet, the scale and immediacy of these crises continue to expand in direct proportion to the weakness of the social and political forces currently available to address them. The only recourse for this already dead but still functioning Zombie Civilization in the underacknowledged face of ecological breakdown will be for it’s managers and capitalist heroes to strongly militate toward a form of “do something-ism” that veers headlong into whatever profit-making project can achieve a majority, however inadequate it might be.

There is, of course, nothing really pragmatic about settling on a compromise that doesn’t solve the problem it claims to.

Meanwhile the comforting eco-liberal trope that, really, “we’re all in this together” and have an interest in protecting the Earth for all of our sakes remains enabling of the whole circus of half-measures and techno-fix-it fantasies on offer. It’s only a banal truth that we are all in this together, but how we are in it, and where, matters so much more.

The political and class project of the zombie establishment is designed to ensure that the costs of ecological chaos will be borne exclusively by the sedated consumer masses and targeted underclasses. It’s clear that the wealth-hoarders and right-wingers among “us” never believed in the mythic “we” yo begin with and are fighting an everyday war against less severe outcomes for particular people. The wall-seekers and security focused rush to provision their life-boats while the liberal hordes moralize without borders and demand peace by any means — including world-ending compromises and the sacrifice of those at the margins.

We wonder how satisfying moral fortitude will feel as the vacated majority scrambles for what’s left of a ruined Earth?

So do we come back around to the old, ‘What Is To Be Done?’ Is there a drawing board large enough and inclusive enough to go back to that might erect and new set of deliverances in the form of a People’s Green New Deal, or some other package of plausible social democratic reforms?

Perhaps, instead of slipping back into the warm platitudes and ideological comfort of reformism, within its weak moves towards “smart” grids, renovating buildings for energy efficiency, and windmills and solar panels for all, a new generation of sufficiently motivated anti-cowards can show up to this catastrophe by replacing the loudly self-proclaimed radicals of the Age of Organizers and enacting intensive politics adequate to the task of genuinely reshaping how we are in it together.

The natural consequence for bourgeois sociopaths who frivolously waste the biosphere with a platformed luxury dependent on the labor of millions is direct, intense engagement that definitely and without apology renders the status quo void.