Have you stopped to think how the government might react in the future if climate breakdown makes life impossible for us?
Have you considered that maybe they're planning on acting on climate breakdown the same way they're acting on Covid? As in, not really, not fast enough, sufficiently thorough or universally applicable?
We need to start demanding more from our governments. But that won't happen so long as we continue to believe, consciously or subconsciously, that any and all government intervention is suspect.
Today, in “Capitalism vs Communism”
Someone on Twitter shared this photo of the maximum monthly rations per citizen in Poland under martial law in the mid 80s.
Of course the reactions were predictably spread between "Capitalism good, Communism bad" or "Capitalism bad, Communism good".
I'm not interested in this argument for now. Nor do I want to focus on the specific history of Poland in the 80s (though this thread is interesting)
Instead, I have one single question, and it concerns all our futures.
"Does anyone think that in the coming years and decades we will experience more abundance than we have now?”
It's a simple question, and there's only a "yes" or "no" answer.
I suspect most people reading this would be acutely aware of the environmental reality humanity finds itself in, and would therefore answer "No". No, we won't return to the abundance we have known in the past. In the not too distant future we can expect to run out of everything.
OK. So... what should we do when goods become scarce? Should we "leave it to the market", so that some people feast while others starve?
That's what we are doing right now, by the way, and a lot of people are unhappy with this arrangement. It's not hyperbole to think that in the future we can expect people to oppose this state of affairs even more. It could get very ugly. People with guns defending the plunder of the wealthy... Or the opposite. I don't want to indulge these fantasies further; you get my point.
So if "hoarding" by the few while the many starve isn't an appealing proposition, then what is the alternative?
Well, rations, of course. Everyone gets the same amount, no matter who they are. That may not be pleasant, but it would be fair, and it would conveniently prevent people from massacring each other.
See, it is easy to "poo poo Communism" while you're living in plenty. It looks very different when food becomes scarce, and governments need to make difficult decisions.
But people in the rich, comfortable West are unfamiliar with governments having to make difficult decisions…
Nothing will really change, because nothing ever changes
Why am I writing about Communism (again...). (though any excuse am I right?)
Because there is this pernicious assumption amongst people in rich countries that "things won't change that much". Yes, you may have had a terrible government, but did it really change things? Nah. Nothing ever changes, and nothing ever gets all that bad. You mind your business and keep on trucking, because there will always be food on the shelves, the economy won't collapse (much), there will always be jobs, and everything will remain as it always has.
Meanwhile, I, sole representative of the Third World for miles around, know for a fact that things can get much worse than anyone imagines, overnight.
The army can take control of your government, overnight. They can start kidnapping people, overnight. The economy can collapse overnight, and your life savings can evaporate overnight.
This got me thinking, about how rich nations appear "frozen" in the face of tragedy. How they are unable to believe that anything can ever change, or that if change is to happen, it will be done through governments benevolently acting for the benefit of all. All democratic, like.
There's this sense that even though each "bad government" is unarguably worse than the previous one, the "effects" are not cumulative. In other words, things stay the same, even after wave after wave of terrible policies.
This mindset is so pernicious that more than once the very people in responsible for these policies have shown surprise that they've had undesirable effects. David Cameron famously expressed dismay at the cuts being made to local services in his constituency, cuts his government was directly responsible for.
And recently one excuse of a politician, Hunt, expressed dismay at the UK’s inability to train new nursing staff… even though his party was responsible for the disappearance of nurses’ bursaries, and he himself voted for cuts to the NHS budget.
I believe this disconnect between cause and effect, between "government actions" and "tangible results" is because the "appearance" of the system remains in place.
“All that is solid melts into PR” (Mark Fisher)
"an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'".
Mark Fisher, “Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?”
If you need legal advice in the UK, you will be directed somewhere, you will be given a phone number to ring. Even though "Legal Aid" was cut back in the early 2010s, and there is almost no actual aid for people taking cases to court.
One time I was looking at doing a Master’s degree. There was a page somewhere in a government website titled something like "Funding for Master’s Degrees". It said, in short, "there is none, but have you considered crowdfunding?".
The page is there, and as far as the system knows, there are paragraphs under the title "Funding", so nobody will notice that the actual support itself is gone.
There are phone numbers you can call if you need psychiatric help. Of course, the "help" is non existent, and, as someone I once knew discovered the hard way, any “help” available is solely reserved for people actively attempting suicide, whatever that means.
In short: when you actually need support, you find out there isn’t any. But the appearance of support grants legitimacy to the system, the illusion of immanence, of infinite permanence, as if an untouchable baseline will always be there, no matter who gets to power, or how bad things get, because “this is America” or “this is England”.
And the illusion works, until it doesn't, as millions of Americans are finding out today. When politicians are asked, point blank, for help, they say "look it up".
There you go, I suppose. An action to follow. You asked for something to do, and that is ‘something’. They always have an answer at the ready, even if that answer might be pointing nowhere.
That’s what matters most in this world: the appearance of a thing, more than its substance. Point at the actual hand pointing, and forget about what is being pointed to, because it doesn’t exit.
There is nothing there, but the conjurer can make you believe anything. And people want to believe, which is essential for any spellbinding to work. We are frozen in space, forever pointing at a support network that was dismantled decades ago.
We can "see" the houses, we just cannot inhabit them. The electricity and gas does work, we just cannot afford the bills. The food is on the shelves, it's just unaffordable.
As “@ClimateBen" says: the world we think we are living on no longer exists.
The illusion cannot be maintained forever. Eventually people get hungry.
Do you know what happens when the food sits on the shelves but nobody can afford to buy it? It rots.
And when people can no longer afford to stay alive, they certainly cannot afford put food on the shelves to begin with.
Little by little we will begin to see the cracks in the system. Eventually it will become clear that there is no there "there", no running infrastructure underneath the facade.
Sooner or later it will be obvious that some feast while others starve.
We might come to see "rationing" a preferable alternative to chaos.
The banks print money, and the illusion is maintained
Couple this reality with what you know from first experience, that increasingly everything we know is heavily "mediated". "Looking" the part is cheaper than "being" the part, and so the government crafts its images of a complex, sturdy system guiding our lives, holding society together, when in actual fact, most of that system is gone.
Still don't believe me? Take banks. Like a good Marxist, I look for evidence of cultural (or superstructure) changes in the "base" or "economy".
Banks are no longer required to hold the money they lend, merely to "look" the part. In the case of banking, image and fact collide: banks "lend" money and suddenly the money exists, because they made it so.
You may think "so what, Mary? Banks make money, big deal". Yes, very big deal. Because money can be converted to real, physical, material things. When has anyone been able to create real, physical, material things from speaking them into existence?
What is happening underneath the "official" economy, the banking sector, and whatever the government claims to be "wealth" and "growth" is that Rich Western economies have entered a period of inevitable decay. America may claim that its economy is "really growing", and it may get away with it by "printing" more and more dollars, but in a real globalised economy, the illusion won't hold forever.
While America's economy "grows", we see no evidence of material improvement on the ground. Its institutions are hollowed out, its infrastructure is crumbling and people are sicker, less educated and more desperate now than they were decades ago. Where, exactly, is this "Growth"?
It doesn’t exist. And all the spectacle, all the PR, all the illusion in the world cannot hide a crumbling bridge.
Meanwhile China's economy is really growing. Each passing day they have more bridges, more hospitals, more trains. More people are healed from incurable diseases. Poverty eradicated, homelessness vanished. China's economy doesn't create "imaginary wealth", it creates real, tangible things.
An astute observer would notice that America's "growth" is not real, while China's is. In a very real, concrete way, America is broke, and China is wealthy. The collapse of the American empire is imminent.
You cannot run a country forever on PR alone.
Claiming back systemic action
Can you begin to grasp the severity of the situation? The world is standing face to face with incoming crisis after crisis, and most people are opposed to any systemic, organised action.
Because a generation raised on PR and individual choices, rather than solid, tangible, material improvement can only ever think that PR itself is the solution.
This is why the environmentalist movement is failing. Behind the committed facade of ‘Extinction Rebellion’ or ‘Insulate Britain’, lies its very middle-class core. People who, when push comes to shove, do not support government action.
They drink their oat milk, try out "veganuary”, go gluten-free for fun. They boast about this or that lifestyle choice, all of which, conveniently, come with a serious price tag. They don't want to change the world, they want to feel good about themselves, assuage their guilt for having more than most people around them, much more than most people on the planet. They want to justify that old adage that says people’s suffering is caused by their poor lifestyle choices.
The problem isn't that they insist, nay demand, we all go vegan to save the planet. The problem is that they oppose Communism. They oppose government intervention because their "freedom" is more important. It always has been.
These are people who cannot conceive of political aims that were discussed openly one century ago. Land redistribution, the abolition of private property, a uniform wage for all workers, state-planned housing… centrally planned economy. You yourself may be horrified at the mere mention of any of these policies.
Just one small thing, as Columbo would say: how many of these are precisely what humanity needs to implement across the board if we are to avert ecological devastation?
On this point, the liberal faux-environmentalism is exposed for the sham it is. Surely state-planned housing would offer better insulation than private housing. Surely land redistribution is the best way to ensure everyone has a stake in maintaining their property in the best condition possible.
Surely the only way to divest from fossil fuels is… to centrally manage the economy.
Logically, it makes sense. Socially, it would mean the "extermination" of the middle class, their bougie lifestyle, their "specialness".
It's not like this hasn't happened before (see: the Chinese Revolution, where the middle classes were forced to live with the peasants, and they have been bitching about it ever since. I repeat: they were forced to live with the peasants.)
If we want to understand why things are not changing, and they patently aren't, we need to understand the ways in which people are opposed to change. The middle-class liberals have never wanted change. They are ideologically and psychologically invested in the idea that “nothing can ever get too bad”, because “nothing ever changes”.
To wrap this up, let's go back to our rationing in Poland. What should the government have done? Sit tight, watch how some people hoard food while others starve, watch the price of basic foodstuff rise exponentially? I bet the middle-classes would have piped up with “meatless Mondays”, or something equally asinine.
That's what we have now, by the way. Food prices soar, people go hungry… while the middle-classes preach “veganuary”, the food they consume having barely risen at all.
The next time you see anyone outraged at government measures to ensure a population is fed, housed or healed, think of the poor middle-classes who oppose it all. And ask yourself why that may be.
I’ll leave you with a quote by Amitav Ghosh, from “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable”
“Climate change is often described as a ‘wicked problem’. One of its wickedest aspects is that it may require us to abandon some of our most treasured ideas about political virtue: for example, ‘be the change you want to see’. What we need instead is to find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped.”
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