One Year On: Under Empire, All Life is Imperiled

This is my latest published writing, and my first appearance in Counterpunch.  I wrote it for the one-year anniversary of the publication of Imperiled Life.

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“After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it.” – Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Channeling Adorno, it would I think prove difficult today to characterize the prevailing world-situation as anything other than highly negative.  Such an interpretation is arguably seen most readily in reflection on environmental matters—specifically, the ever-worsening climate emergency, not to mention other worrying signs of the ecological devastation wrought by the capitalist system.

Perhaps a short summary of key recent findings on the state of the environment is here in order.  Less than two weeks ago, the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai’i confirmed that the average global carbon dioxide concentration had reached 400 parts per million (ppm)—more than 50 ppm higher than James Hansen and the eponymous 350.org movement claim to be a safe level, and approximately 120 ppm higher than pre-industrial (or pre-capitalist) concentrations.  According to the Guardian, such CO₂ concentrations have not been seen on Earth for the last 3-5 million years, during the Pliocene geological era, which saw an ice-free Arctic, savannahs in northern Africa (where currently the Sahara resides), and sea levels between 25 and 40 meters higher than those which obtain today.  In Professor Andrew Glikson’s estimation, the annual rise of 3 ppm in atmospheric CO₂ seen last year (2012-2013) is entirely unprecedented during the past 65 million years; as he writes, “regular river flow conditions such as allowed cultivation and along river valleys since about 7000 years ago, and temperate Mediterranean-type climates allowing extensive farming, could hardly exist under the intense hydrological cycle and heat wave conditions of the Pliocene.”  This should hardly be surprising, given that such atmospheric CO₂ levels as those we suffer today have never been seen in the entire history (and prehistory) of Homo sapiens sapiens, though our ancestral Homo habilis arguably did endure them.  Indeed, the Earth’s current average global temperature—a slightly different matter than the atmospheric CO₂ level, given lags in the latter’s contribution to the former, in addition to the masking effect of aerosols (SO₂ et al.) emitted by industry—has recently been found to surpass 90% of all average global temperatures experienced since the emergence of agriculture some 12,000 years ago—and hence also of “civilization.”  Arguably most worrying is Nafeez Ahmad’s recent citation of a 2011 Science paper which projects that, given the current, unprecedented rate of increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, global average temperatures could rise a full 16°C by the end of the century—that is to say, nearly three times  the worst-case scenario considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2007 report (a 6°C increase).

Such considerations are no doubt horrific; they are nonetheless reality.  Some other truths manifested of late that can be associated with these trends include the following climatological news and reports: the 260,000 persons, half of them young children, who the UN recently announced to have perished during the 2011 famine in Somalia, itself catalyzed by the region’s worst drought in the past 7 decades; the hundreds of millions who Lord Stern has recently reported can soon be expected to be forcibly displaced from their homelands due to unchecked global warming; the millions who will face starvation in Africa and Asia as agriculture withers under unprecedented heat; the numerous people of Bangladesh who are losing access to freshwater as rising sea levels cause saltwater to intrude into aquifers, or the millions of Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Burmese, and Rohingya threatened by cyclones like Mahasen; the innumerable species, plant and animal, that face destruction and extinction under the projected average global temperature increases promised by climate catastrophe…  The nauseating list goes on indefinitely.

Consideration of these problematics is the focus of my Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe, published a year ago now by AK Press in collaboration with the Institute for Anarchist Studies.  Strangely enough, this one-year anniversary of publication is, unlike the case with more joyous occasions, hardly one to be celebrated, for the problems considered within the volume unsurprisingly have only worsened over that time, in keeping with the laws of physics and chemistry.  I would nonetheless continue to vouch for the work’s conclusions: its “diagnosis, prognosis, and remedies,” as mentioned in the preface by my editor Paul Messersmith-Glavin, stem from a social anarchist, anti-systemic perspective on the ecological crisis that I believe to be rational and helpful—insofar as such standards have a place today within political and environmental thought, as I should hope they might.

In structural terms, it should be clear to all honest observers that the climate crisis is the result of the dominance of the capitalist mode of production over the entirety of planet Earth; basing itself fundamentally on ceaseless expansion, the imperatives of capital profoundly contradict the modes of living—cooperative and competitive—observed throughout the world’s various ecosystems.  Capital’s “grow-or-die” maxim resembles that of the cancer cell or a deadly virus more than it does human, animal, or plant life, as theorists from Murray Bookchin to John McMurtry have rightly noted.  As against liberal analyses, then, the State has proved itself to be a mere facilitator of capital’s ecocidal project: consider Obama’s recent profession of enthusiasm for the “development” of the substantial hydrocarbon resources that are believed to reside below the Arctic ice cap, once capitalism has melted that away entirely.  In this vein, David Schwartman is right to cite Michael Klare in his formulation of the U.S. military as constituting the “oil protection service” of transnational capital: imperialism’s long and sordid history of accommodation with its autocratic Gulf petrol-enablers—and its various intrigues and interventions targeting those, from Mossadegh to Qadhafi, who might seek alternative uses of such resources—is well-known.  Recall the Iraq War.

So we cannot look to the State for meaningful assistance in the struggle to overturn the trends which are delivering humanity and Earth’s systems into ruin—as John Holloway notes rightly, the State is “their organization,” referring to the capitalist class.  What of the putative non-governmental organizations which espouse environmental concerns?  Clearly, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and company rightly merit the label of “Gang Green,” in light of their toxic incrementalism and their related willingness to accommodate the very structures which are perpetuating environmental destruction.  Similarly, Cory Morningstar has recently written a legitimate denunciation of Bill McKibben and 350.org on these pages, declaring McKibben’s world-famous yet entirely reformist and thus inadequate organization to represent little more than the “soma of the 21^st century,” given its papering over of any critique of capitalism, productivism, militarism, or imperialism.  Essentially, then, what we are faced with is the omnicidal steamroll of the capitalist machine as oiled by the world’s rich and their State, and then the anemic responses from the official “opposition” which has taken it upon itself to attempt to resolve the various environmental crises by doing essentially nothing of substance to achieve those ends.

Thankfully, of course, the story does not end there.  Humanity, as I write in the penultimate paragraph of Imperiled Life, cannot be reduced to the forms of capital and the State; these “do not have the final word.”  We are, then, on a desperate search for radical groupings among the subordinated, or l@s de abajo (“those from below”).  In strategic terms, it would seem that generally to diffuse anti-systemic ecological analyses—assuming these be tied together with humanistic, emancipatory concern for social oppression—remains a crucial task at the present juncture: the counter-hegemonic war of position today retains all of its relevance!  As should be self-evident, of course, efforts seeking merely to “raise consciousness” and metaphorically arm the populace with critical perspectives on the present multi-dimensional crisis should hardly be taken as the end of organizing; rather, such should serve as means to the “happy end” (Ernst Bloch) of a world freed from capitalist and State control, and the attendant looming risk of climate apocalypse.  How these two trends might inter-relate—and whether we can even theoretically hope that they will, this late in the game—is the question on everyone’s minds (or, at least, it should be).  As Allan Stoekl closes his recent review of Adrian Parr’s The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, summing up the struggle to achieve a post-capitalist ecological society: “But how to get from here to there?”  The question is a burning one.  In this vein, we can turn to Max Horkheimer’s obvious yet crucial point that “[t]he revolution is no good” insofar as it “is not victorious.”[1]

Horkheimer is right: it would indeed seem problematic for thought merely to appeal to airy philosophical abstractions amidst the decidedly pressing matter of capital’s destruction of the world—to speak of the promise of the Hegelian Geist, say, or the inevitable triumph of the proletariat, as managed by an enlightened Leninist vanguard—but I would argue that Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality could prove particularly useful at the present moment.  As I understand, she first introduces this idea at the close of her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), when she counterposes the possibilities of birth to inherited tradition and history, particularly of the imperialist and fascist varieties: “With each new birth, a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being […].  Freedom as an inner capacity of [humanity] is identical with the capacity to begin.”[2]

Arendt expands upon these fragmentary comments on interruption and beginning in her 1958 magnus opus The Human Condition.  Largely repudiating the repressive, fatalistic philosophy of her former mentor Martin Heidegger, she writes the following: “If left to themselves, human affairs can only follow the law of mortality, which is the most certain and the only reliable law of a life spent between birth and death.  It is the faculty of action that interferes with this law because it interrupts the inexorable automatic course of daily life, which in its turn, as we saw, interrupted and interfered with the cycle of the biological life process.  The life span of man [sic] running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that [humans], though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.  Yet just as, from the standpoint of nature, the rectilinear movement of [humanity]‘s life-span between birth and death looks like a peculiar deviation from the common natural rule of cyclical movement, thus action, seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course of the world, looks like a miracle […].  The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted.  It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born.  Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.”[3]

This hope for new beginnings—essentially, for a multiplicity of interventions which, à la Albert Camus and his Rebel, assert to power that it has transgressed vital brightlines, and hence cannot be allowed to continue on its path of destruction (“thus far, and no further”)—accords well with Walter Benjamin’s vision of a “leap into the open sky of history,” or Adorno’s contemplation of “a praxis which could explode the infamous continuum.”[4]  Each of us likely has similar visions, whether waking or unconscious—“fuck the police,” “world peace,” “fire to Babylon,” “there is no planet B.”  It is crucial that we somehow coalesce these anti-systemic passions into a generalized movement to overthrow the totalitarian systems that degrade and abuse humanity and, in a most final sense, threaten to destroy future human generations as well as much of the rest of life—millions of species—on the only planetary system that we know is amenable to its emergence and evolution.  Hope today, then, is not passivity and sedation (as with religion) but rather radical struggle (as in revolution).

While there indeed have been positive signs in the past few years in the direction of the development of what dissident historian George Katsiaficas terms a “global people’s uprising,” clearly such developments have met with distressing limitations, many of them indeed emanating from constituted power—think of the police’s dismantling of the Occupy/Decolonize encampments in the U.S., or the various imperial manipulations of and interventions against the numerous uprisings in the Arab-majority world.  The preferred approach, in my view, remains what György Lukács saw as a “mass rising on behalf of reason,” an idea he took from the 500 million signatures to the 1950 Stockholm Agreement calling for unconditional nuclear disarmament—a tradition we have seen well-illustrated throughout the streets and squares of much of the world in recent memory.[5]

The point, in sum—as well as the hope—is to radicalize and intensify these encouraging social strides from below against the system, to help along the birth of the new—or, as Bloch termed it, the “Not-Yet.”  It is past time to sound the tocsin, whether physically like Jean Paul Marat did to defend the Great French Revolution, or musically like Dmitriy Shostakovich did in defense of the memory and future promise of the 1905 Russian Revolution (as well as other revolutions).  The alarm must be continuous, not so that we grow accustomed to it, but rather so that we never lose sight of the substantial tasks with which we are confronted today, and the anarchist means by which we would most likely best respond to these.  Positively and concretely, I would here reiterate some of the proposals for action made by my comrade Cristian Guerrero nearly a year ago in the run-up to planned counter-protests against the G-20 summit in Los Cabos, México: agitation, indignation, mobilization, direct action, occupation, blockade of capital, popular assembly.

Particularly promising, I would say, is the Industrial Workers of the World’s new conception of the ecological general strike, whereby environmental sanity is to be achieved through the disruption of capitalism’s colonization of the life-world and its replacement with participatory economic models.

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[1]   Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes, 1926-1931 and 1959-1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 39.

[2]   Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harvest, 1968 [1951]), 465, 473.

[3]   Ibid, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 246-7.

[4]   Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 117.

[5]   György Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Torfaen, Wales: Merlin Press, 1980), 850.

“Climate change ‘will make hundreds of millions homeless’”

Reposting this article from The Observer/The Guardian, which comes just a day after monitoring stations in Hawai’i confirmed the global atmospheric carbon concentration has surpassed 400 parts per million, corresponding to levels within the geological record that “ha[ve] not been seen on Earth for 3-5 million years, a period called the Pliocene. At that time, global average temperatures were 3 or 4C higher than today’s and 8C warmer at the poles. Reef corals suffered a major extinction while forests grew up to the northern edge of the Arctic Ocean, a region which is today bare tundra.”

 

By Robin McKie in The Guardian, 11 May 2013

“Carbon dioxide levels indicate rise in temperatures that could lead agriculture to fail on entire continents”

It is increasingly likely that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homelands in the near future as a result of global warming. That is the stark warning of economist and climate change expert Lord Stern following the news last week that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere had reached a level of 400 parts per million (ppm).

Massive movements of people are likely to occur over the rest of the century because global temperatures are likely to rise to by up to 5C because carbon dioxide levels have risen unabated for 50 years, said Stern, who is head of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.

“When temperatures rise to that level, we will have disrupted weather patterns and spreading deserts,” he said. “Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will come when they try to migrate into new lands, however. That will bring them into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth.”

The news that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have reached 400ppm has been seized on by experts because that level brings the world close to the point where it becomes inevitable that it will experience a catastrophic rise in temperatures. Scientists have warned for decades of the danger of allowing industrial outputs of carbon dioxide to rise unchecked.

Instead, these outputs have accelerated. In the 1960s, carbon dioxide levels rose at a rate of 0.7ppm a year. Today, they rise at 2.1ppm, as more nations become industrialised and increase outputs from their factories and power plants. The last time the Earth’s atmosphere had 400ppm carbon dioxide, the Arctic was ice-free and sea levels were 40 metres higher.

The prospect of Earth returning to these climatic conditions is causing major alarm. As temperatures rise, deserts will spread and life-sustaining weather patterns such as the North Indian monsoon could be disrupted. Agriculture could fail on a continent-wide basis and hundreds of millions of people would be rendered homeless, triggering widespread conflict.

There are likely to be severe physical consequences for the planet. Rising temperatures will shrink polar ice caps – the Arctic’s is now at its lowest since records began – and so reduce the amount of solar heat they reflect back into space. Similarly, thawing of the permafrost lands of Alaska, Canada and Russia could release even more greenhouse gases, including methane, and further intensify global warming.

Noam Chomsky: “Palestinian Hopes, Regional Turmoil” for MECA’s 25th Anniversary

Anarchist theorist Avram Noam Chomsky spoke on Wednesday, May 8, at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, on the subject of “Palestinian Hopes, Regional Turmoils.”  The eighty-four year old philosopher’s address, presented to a packed audience, marked the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance (MECA), with which Chomsky has long been associated–among other roles, he has served as a founding advisor for the organization.

Focusing, as the title of his talk would suggest, on the present situation for Palestine and the Palestinians, Chomsky drew parallels between Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s legitimacy and Mexicans’ refusals to recognize U.S. territorial claims to its southwestern states, which of course were acquired by force during the Mexican-American War of 1846-8–this being a war that Ulysses S. Grant claimed to have been “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”

The professor pointed centrally to the role the U.S. government (as a Mafia Godfather, or “master”) has played in preventing the implementation of the international consensus in former Palestine: that is, a two-state solution, with Israel withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders.  Of course, Chomsky himself questioned whether any state can be considered legitimate ipso facto, but he insisted that a two-state solution would be an important step forward toward a more final, binational solution, a stateless resolution, or even the development of an anarcho-socialist federation in the region, based on solidarity among working-class Arabs and Jews (as his own youthful interpretation of Zionism advocated).  “Nothing need ever be an end,” he insisted.

Noting that the situation in Palestine would be one of the easiest contemporary global conflicts to resolve, Chomsky envisioned a sudden withdrawal of support for Israel on the part of the U.S. government, followed by a withdrawal of IDF/IOF forces from the West Bank and the voluntary forfeiting of territorial claims presently being made by the nearly half million Jewish settlers who now occupy a great deal of Cisjordan, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.  In closing, Chomsky observed that societal support for Israel comes overwhelmingly from settler-colonial societies (the U.S., Canada, Australia), both in terms of state policy as well as public opinion–this is likely the case as regards the latter, claimed Chomsky, particularly because Israel’s behavior mimics that undertaken historically by these genocidal colonial entities (“felling trees and Indians”).

Against all these trends, this rights-advocate stipulated that the oppression of the Palestinians proceeds with our complicity–”we let it happen.”  However, in his view, there is no reason for observers to accept this state of affairs as given, just as there is no reason to accept the putative legitimacy of prevailing power arrangements.  Prospects for hope can be found in the chance for the U.S. populace to force its state radically to alter its orientation to Israel.

In passing, Chomsky also observed that it was “not at all obvious” that there will shortly exist a future in which humans can continue considering these types of questions.

Guardian: “Millions face starvation as world warms, say scientists”

“World is unprepared for changes that will see parts of Africa turned into disaster areas, say food experts.”

By John Vidal in The Guardian, 13 April 2013

Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.

As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor.

Frank Rijsberman, head of the world’s 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: “Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt.”

America’s agricultural economy is set to undergo dramatic changes over the next three decades, as warmer temperatures devastate crops, according to a US government report. The draft US National Climate Assessment report predicts that a gradually warming climate and unpredictable severe weather, such as the drought that last year spread across two-thirds of the continental United States, will have serious consequences for farmers.

The research by 60 scientists predicts that all crops will be affected by the temperature shift as well as livestock and fruit harvests. The changing climate, it says, is likely to lead to more pests and less effective herbicides. The $50bn Californian wine industry could shrink as much as 70% by 2050.

The report lays bare the stark consequences for the $300bn US farm industry, stating: “Many agricultural regions will experience declines in crop and livestock production. The rising incidence of weather extremes will have increasingly negative impacts on crop and livestock production. Climate disruptions have increased in the recent past and are projected to increase further over the next 25 years.

“Critical thresholds are already being exceeded. Many regions will experience declines in crop and livestock production from increased stress due to weeds, diseases, insect pests and other climate change-induced stresses. Climate disruptions to agricultural production have increased in the recent past and are projected to increase further”.

Lead author Jerry Hatfield, director of the US government’s national laboratory for agriculture and the environment, said that climate change was already causing weather extremes to worsen. Very hot nights, fewer cool days and more heatwaves, storms and floods have already devastated crops and will have “increasingly negative” impacts, he said.

The report follows recent disastrous harvests in Russia, Ukraine, Australia and the US. In 2010, climate-driven factors led to a 33% drop in wheat production in Russia and a 19% drop in Ukraine. Separate climate events in each case led to a 14% drop in Canada’s wheat output, and a 9% drop in Australia.

A separate US government-funded study of the fertile Lower Mekong basin, which includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, states that temperatures there could rise twice as much as previously expected, devastating food supplies for the 100 million people expected to live there by 2050. “We’ve found that this region is going to experience climate extremes in temperature and rainfall beyond anything that we expected”, says Jeremy Carew-Reid, author of the Climate Change Adaptation and Impact Study for the Lower Mekong.

Two major food security summits are being held in Ireland, organised by UN World Food Programme, the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change and the Mary Robinson Climate Justice foundation.

Ertharin Cousin, the UN’s World Food Programme director, said: “We are entering an uncertain and risky period. Climate change is the game changer that increases exposure to high and volatile food prices, and increases the vulnerability of the hungry poor, especially those living in conflict zones or areas of marginal agricultural productivity. We must act quickly to protect the world’s poorest people.”

“Anarchism or annihilation”

 

In Wayne Price’s newly published The Value of Radical Theory: An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (AK Press, 2013), his seventh chapter is entitled “Socialism or Barbarism?”  Therein, Price discusses Rosa Luxemburg and Marx and Engels, among others, on the question of the prospects for social revolution vs. collective destruction and the suicide of humanity.  In this discussion, Price also presents Murray Bookchin’s brief, simple, and witty counter-positioning of the historical alternatives, one that was previously unknown to me, which I share here:

“Anarchism or annihilation.”

“Extinción 2,” Santi Armengod

Counterpunch Repost: “Syria Teeters on Obama’s ‘Red Line’”

This essay by Nile Bowie, published originally in Counterpunch on 22 March 2013, provides a useful corrective to much of the mainstream media’s portrayal of the ongoing conflict in Syria.  I do not think I agree with Bowie here on everything (particularly on civilian casualties, as in his antepenultimate paragraph), but overall I find his argumentation important, and so I repost it here, hopefully without violating copyright, etc.

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Syria Teeters on Obama’s “Red Line”

by NILE BOWIE
The pages of history tell us that beautiful civilizations emerged and prospered in the ancient cities of Damascus and Aleppo, some of the oldest continually inhabited cities on earth. The harrowing circus of brutality that is the Syrian conflict, now in its third year, will soil and blacken those pages indefinitely. No matter the political outcome of this horrible war, a once tolerant and diverse state has been shattered and terror itself has eaten into the destiny of Syria’s people, inexorably changing the courses of their lives forever. Children have been orphaned; parents have faced the loss of their children – and by uncompromising means. Infants have been beheaded, the fates of innocent men and women have been sealed through summary executions, and families have been torn apart or destroyed all together. Recent developments in Syria are alarming.

Spokesmen of the Assad government recently accused foreign-backed militants of launching scud missiles containing chemical weapons in the city of Aleppo, killing dozens. Witnesses claim to have seen powder emanate from the rocket, causing those who inhaled the substance to suffocate or require immediate medical attention. An unnamed chemical weapons expert cited by Al-Jazeera claimed that the causalities were not consistent with Syria’s reputed stockpile of chemical agents, stating, “If it’s a chemical warfare agent, it’s not working very well.” Syria’s ambassador to the UN, Bashar Ja’afari, called on the UN Secretary-General to form an independent technical mission to investigate the use of chemical weapons by terrorist groups operating in Syria.

While on his first state visit to Israel, Barack Obama cast doubt and expressed deep scepticism toward the Assad government’s version of events, stating that if the government did indeed use chemical weapons, then it meant a “red line” had been crossed. Obama vowed not to make further announcements until concrete facts were established. What this essentially means is that Obama is now in a position to act on his statements and intervene more boldly and directly than the United States has already been doing since the beginning of the conflict. Additionally, NATO personnel have also indicated that they are prepared to employ a wide range of operations. US-European Command Admiral James Stavridis recently told media that the alliance was “prepared, if called upon, to be engaged as we were in Libya.”

Those who have critically monitored the situation from the beginning are under no illusions. The way in which mainstream media sources have covered the Syrian conflict, perhaps more so than any other topic in recent times, shows unequivocally how certain content providers have moved in step with the foreign policy of the Western and Gulf states who have enabled insurgent groups and provided diplomatic cover for opposition politicians who represent their economic and strategic interests. The Obama administration’s policy toward Libya and Syria eyes the same familiar endgame as what the Bush administration sought in its foreign policy adventures. The fact that many of those on the left who campaigned against Iraq and Afghanistan are now generally silent, or even supportive of Obama’s agenda, is proof that his policies have been packaged far more intelligently for mainstream consumption. The reality is that Syria is “Shock and Awe” by other means.

There are a myriad of reasons why Bashar al-Assad must go in the eyes of policy makers in Washington and Tel Aviv, and the destruction of his tenure could not have been possible without the financial muscle of Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s wretchedly opulent Sunni Monarchs. These glittering kingdoms of disaster-capitalism are not only responsible for supplying weapons and cash; a major incentive of theirs is exporting the Wahhabist and Salafist ideologies that many of Syria’s imported jihadists subscribe to, a warped and primal interpretation of Islam that has fueled the sectarian nature of the Syrian conflict and deepened social divisions to their most dangerous point – in a country that was once renowned for its tolerance of religious diversity. These Gulf kingdoms, which are more-or-less given a trump card to commit deplorable human rights violations institutionally, are also responsible for propping up the political arm of their militant foot soldiers, and that comes in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Syria’s opposition coalition, which is itself entirely a creation of foreign powers, has recently elected its own interim prime minister – enter, Ghassan Hitto, a virtually unknown political novice with a US passport and a computer science degree from Purdue University. Hitto is an Islamist Kurd with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood has politically dominated the Syrian National Council since its creation, in addition to organizing tactical elements of the insurgency. The backbone of the Brotherhood’s relationship with the medieval monarchies of the Persian Gulf is grounded in a firm opposition to Shi’a Islam, as extolled by clerical leaders in Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah; Assad himself is also an Alawite, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam. It should be clear enough by now how enflaming sectarian divisions in the region was a prerequisite for those bank-rolling the insurgency, aimed at demolishing the secular Syrian state.

Several high-profile members of Syria’s opposition coalition boycotted the vote for interim prime minister, citing what they viewed as a foreign-backed campaign to elect Hitto. Kamal Labwani, a veteran opposition campaigner, was reported as saying, “We don’t want what happened in Egypt to happen in Syria. They hijacked the revolution.” Those who abstained from the vote accuse Hitto of being a puppet of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that the SNC’s decisions were being dictated from the outside. Walid al-Bunni, another senior figure in the opposition, stated, “The Muslim Brotherhood, with the backing of Qatar, have imposed their prime minister candidate. We will keep away if the coalition does not reconsider its choice.” Let’s just get this straight – Assad, a leader whose presence today is a testament to the fact that he continues to enjoy majority popular support, is considered to have lost his legitimacy. On the other hand, Hitto, a man with no political experience who received 35 votes out of 49 ballots cast during a Syrian National Coalition meeting, is supposed to be legitimate representative of the Syrian people?

These realities can only be interpreted as the boot of the so-called “International Community” squashing the face of the Syrian people, imposing on them a man who does not represent them, but the business interests of multinational corporations who seek to plant their flags in the soil of a post-Assad Syria. Let’s not humor ourselves by thinking John Kerry, William Hague, Laurent Fabius or Qatari Emir Khalifa Al Thani actually care about the people of Syria. However many casualties the Syrian conflict has incurred thus far can be attributable to the influx of foreign funds, foreign arms, and foreign fighters. It would be intellectually dishonest to deny that the tactics of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian Arab Army have also caused widespread civilian causalities and suffering. It is an enormous challenge for a state military to quell unconventional insurgencies of the sort carried out by militants in Syria when these battles take place in densely populated residential areas.

One should not cynically credit Syrian government forces with intentionally killing their own people; this does not serve the purposes of the state in anyway. Civilian deaths that have occurred as a result of government forces engaging the insurgency should more accurately be seen as a heinous by-product of a foreign campaign to topple the Syrian government. While the foreign ministries of Western capitals cite politically charged death-toll statistics to justify their campaign against “Assad the Butcher”, it is absolutely unconscionable that Paris and London have called for lifting the Syrian arms embargo, and for vowing to arm militant groups with or without the consent of the EU. Apparently some seventy thousand people have been killed in Syria according to the United Nations, and these cited European states, which allegedly are so concerned about terrorism, want to dump more guns into Syria – this is madness.

Western states want to install proxy leaders who will grovel to their multinationals and swallow IMF medicine, Gulf states seek unfettered hegemony in their own backyards, and they all want to see the Shi’a resistance smashed to pieces. Following the news of chemical weapons being used in Syria, the most immediate conclusion of this observer is that foreign-backed militants, who have used every opportunity to call for more material and support, employed the use of a smuggled chemical weapon of poor quality to bring about direct military intervention in their favor. Right on cue, Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain are frothing at the mouth, urging President Obama to “take immediate action” and consider deploying troops. Graham was quoted as saying, “If the choice is to send in troops to secure the weapons sites versus allowing chemical weapons to get in the hands of some of the most violent people in the world, I vote to cut this off before it becomes a problem.”

There is no surer sign of a pathological mind than when one credits others with the blood on their own hands.

Nile Bowie is an independent political analyst and photographer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com

Publication of For a Free Nature

My masters thesis from 2008, “Critical Theory, Social Ecology, and Post-Developmentalism: Towards a ‘Free Nature,’” has now been published by Lambert Academic Publishers as For a Free Nature: Critical Theory, Social Ecology, and Post-Developmentalism.

The description is as follows:

“This work explores the critique made by early theorists of the Frankfurt School and by Murray Bookchin of the human domination of external nature–a process and reality inextricably linked to domination in the social realm, both of self and others. These similar schools of thought are placed into conversation and mutual regard, with the clear conclusion that humanity’s domination of nature, like the domination of humans by other humans, must be radically dissipated if humanity and the millions of other species on Earth are to enjoy any sort of decent survival. The text then moves to examination of post-developmentalist critiques of mainstream development theory and practice and attempts to synthesize this with the Critical Theory-social ecology hybrid of the first half. Its conclusion examines some of the prospects for the realization of these theorists’ hopes, given in particular the presently ever-worsening environmental crisis.”

The listed price is exceedingly high, especially given the shortness of the text–indeed, the price comes out to more than a dollar per page!

Review of Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth

Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth (PM Press, 2012) by Sasha Lilley, Eddie Yuen, James Davis, David McNally

NB: also published on Truthout.org (copyright); reprinted with permission.

José Clemente Orozco, La Katharsis (1934-5)

“No other hope is left to the past than that, exposed defencelessly to disaster, it shall emerge from it as something different.” – Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

The newly released Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth would seem to address a thoroughly relevant intersection of contemporary critical issues: the ongoing climate crisis, economic decline, right-wing resurgence, and general social anxiety regarding the specter of collapse. Given the strong praise found for Catastrophism on the inset of the book – it is “definitive and momentous,” in George Katsiaficas’ estimation, while Andrej Grubačić “cannot overstate how critically important this volume is” – one might be led to think that Catastrophism in fact features a great deal of new, critical thought on these questions. While it is true that the authors of the work make some important points regarding the very real catastrophes of capitalism today, it is my view that much of their argumentation is not that innovative, with some of it serving to obscure rather than illuminate. It is also not clear that the principal interventions in the book are very helpful in political terms. In my comments below, I will focus mainly on Lilley and Yuen’s contributions to the volume, to the exclusion of McNally’s pop-culture analysis of the famous “zombie apocalypse” and Davis’s treatment of right-wing catastrophism – largely because I feel these essays are less interesting.

For Lilley, Catastrophism represents a “political intervention, designed to spur debate among radicals” about questions revolving around catastrophe. She, like the other contributors to the book, defines the eponymous socio-political orientation that comes under fire here as one that “presumes that society is headed for a collapse, whether economic, ecological, social, or spiritual”; catastrophists are held to believe “frequently, but not always” that said collapse is to be “regarded as a great cleansing, out of which a new society will be born.” Among those who see destruction and decline on the horizon, catastrophists of less authoritarian persuasions are said to “believe that an ever-intensified rhetoric of disaster will awaken the masses from their long slumber,” catalyzing radical breaks with the false consciousness imposed by bourgeois-patriarchal hegemony and presumably leading to the insurrectional overturning of the prevailing system which itself is responsible for the prevalence of destruction and despair. On the other hand, Lilley and company warn that catastrophism, in stressing “panic and powerlessness,” runs the risk of promoting “the vanguardist politics of the few,” with a putatively enlightened cadre leading the supposedly heretofore conservative masses to smash unreason and realize freedom and revolution, à la Jacobins, Bolsheviks or Maoists. Claiming empirically to examine the “track record” of politics framed in catastrophic terms, Lilley et al. conclude that such philosophies “do not serve the left and the environmental movement,” given that an increased awareness among the general populace of catastrophic conditions – social, ecological, political – in no way necessarily leads people in general to shift toward radical, anti-systemic positions. This phenomenon is especially evident in US society, the main focus of the contributors to Catastrophism. Nonetheless, Lilley is forthright about her own analysis of the capitalist system – “[b]y its very nature, capitalism is catastrophic,” with the “ecological catastrophe” driven by capitalism undoubtedly being “the greatest and most serious” of all others facing humanity and life on Earth in the present day – and she and her comrades clearly reject any sort of Leninist attempt to resolve the present crisis, affirming instead the “importance of mass radical organizing.” Rapidly closing off the chance for an exploration of these tantalizing suggestions, Lilley demarcates the scope of Catastrophism in a rather limited way, excluding from consideration historical analyses of revolutionary mass movements and their relationship to catastrophe, as well as that of important thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, who largely dedicated their intellectual lives to investigating the “question of catastrophe and the left,” as Lilley herself observes in passing. Also consciously excluded is an analysis of possible methods by which activists and concerned people might “politicize the apathetic and revitalize a broad anticapitalist project.”

Lilley expands upon her introductory comments in her essay “Great Chaos Under Heaven” – the title itself a reference to Mao Zedong’s infamous observation on his Cultural Revolution, that “the Situation is Excellent.” Following from the overtly anti-capitalist aims delineated in her introduction, Lilley here writes that capitalism is neither natural nor eternal, thus clearly opposing bourgeois apologism as well as the highly alienated comments made by thinkers like Slavoj Zizek regarding the relative ease with which one can foresee the destruction of the planet before imagining the end of capitalism. Claiming that the “cardinal strength” of capitalism is its “immense and terrible dynamism,” she controversially notes that capital cannot be expected to be dismantled by anything other than “protracted mass struggle.” Lilley’s main focus in this essay is to examine what she calls the “dyad” of left-wing catastrophism: determinism and voluntarism. Though largely old-fashioned these days, the former position is no less well-known; perusing the various examples Lilley provides of Marxist and Lenino-Stalinist proclamations about the terminal crises of capitalism over the past century – bourgeois imperialism cannot last more than ten years, and so on – one cannot help but be amused at such delusional optimism, if it were not for the grim fact that these very same forces rule the day presently, with clearly catastrophic results. Lilley shows voluntarism on the other hand to be equally problematic, if not more so: it is predicated on the mechanistic notion that the worse conditions in general get, the better these must be for revolutionary prospects. Arguing (perhaps inadvertently) against orthodox Marxian analyses, Lilley points out that labor strikes in the US historically have been most frequent and intense during periods of economic expansion, with the notable exception of the 1930s. Analyzing this same time period in Germany’s history, she, like many of the theorists of the Frankfurt School, roundly states that the “ascent of the Nazis to power ought to have provided a mortal blow to the concept that catastrophic political and economic conditions inexorably lead down the road to radicalization and socialist revolution,” the fanatical-triumphalist declarations of the German Communist Party (“After Hitler, Our Turn”) notwithstanding. Moving forward in time from this point, she takes groups like the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction (RAF) to task for their strategy of “heightening the contradictions” toward the provocation of thoroughgoing state repression – an attempt, as they theorized, at revealing the truly fascist nature of the State, hidden temporarily behind its liberal-democratic facade – that might stir the subordinated into rising up and smashing the system altogether; indeed, she associates much of contemporary insurrectionism, anarchist and libertarian-communist, with this constellation of tactics.

Personally, I think Lilley vastly overstates her critique of insurrectionism here by indelibly linking it to a centralist practice that seeks coercively to force the inactive masses into action: she repeats this mistake in her analysis of the December 2008 revolt in Greece, in which she greatly distorts the role insurrectionists played in those events by claiming that their goal was to provoke the declaration of martial law and hence catalyze a “civil war” from below in response – so as to fit her general thesis regarding groups like the Weathermen and the RAF.[1] Nonetheless, her criticisms of the dismissal by some insurrectionists of strategies like working toward workers’ self-management seem legitimate, as clearly do her denunciations of the entirely authoritarian proponents of anti-civilization/primitivist viewpoints; her comparison of these types with the Trotskyist Juan Posadas and Mao, who madly found revolutionary potential in the prospect of nuclear war, is a fruitful one. In sum, she critiques her objects of study as desiring a “shortcut for the urgent,” claiming that the common link between left-wing determinism and voluntarism is “political despair,” a “deep-seated pessimism about mass collective action and radical social transformation.” While Lilley does not explicitly say so, it would seem that she instead favors the analyses of Anton Pannekoek, who, as she notes, theorizes the “collapse of capitalism” deriving from “the self-emancipation of the proletariat.” Against orientations she terms adventurist, Lilley defends the old-school notion of “understanding the conjuncture” and “engaging the presumably deluded masses” – a praxis she arguably exemplifies well with her Against the Grain radio show (KPFA).

In “The Politics of Failure Have Failed,” Eddie Yuen focuses on climate change and the prospects for radical movements to address it from within core-imperialist societies. He notes clearly that “[c]atastrophism is rampant among self-identified environmentalists, and not without good reason – after all, the best evidence points to cascading environmental disaster”: the present environmental crisis corresponds “unquestionably” to a “genuinely catastrophic moment in human and planetary history.” In the footnotes to his intervention – though strangely, not in the text itself – Yuen enumerates some of the various socio-ecological catastrophes promised by the climatic destabilization being driven by (post)modernity: “the displacement of millions due to coastal inundation, the salinization of much agricultural land, the ‘cooking’ of Africa, the obliteration of entire ecosystems such as coral reefs, the desertification of the Amazon, the disappearance of the glacial-fed rivers of Asia and South America, the extinction of at least 35 percent of global species,” and so on. Faced with these horrors, Yuen declares it to be absolutely imperative to begin to attempt to resolve this crisis by “effectively and rapidly changing the direction of human society,” noting in particular that it is the “status quo of capitalist production of unnecessary commodities and services for the global elites and ‘middle classes’ [which] is the ongoing catastrophe that must be addressed.” The revolutionary social goals he identifies aside, Yuen dedicates much of the space of his essay to warning against an “undifferentiated catastrophism” which holds, in standard traditional-environmental terms, that “apocalyptic warnings will lead to political action.” Citing a 2008 investigation into US attitudes to climate change, Yuen claims that a strategy which relies on increasing popular awareness of eco-catastrophe in fact hinders the crucial effort to bring about the social transformations that would be commensurate with the depth of the ecological crisis, as those under study were seen to become more apathetic rather than less following exposure to news of the ever-worsening crisis. While his conclusion here seems somewhat strange, given that elsewhere he decries the “ignorance of the general public, including the political left” about recent climatological findings, noting that the horrors global warming promises to entail for the peoples of the global South are “largely unknown to the publics of the rich world,” he does offer some productive analysis regarding this strange phenomenon, identifying four main barriers to moving toward policies to promote climate justice within US society: “catastrophe fatigue, the paralyzing effects of fear, the pairing of overwhelmingly bleak analysis with inadequate solutions, and a misunderstanding of the process of politicization.” Yuen observes that notions of the apocalypse have been largely banalized within mainstream US culture, given its ubiquity within the mass media, such that this oversaturated cultural field makes hope for a general transition to more ecological lifestyles on the one hand coupled on the other with activist orientations targeting capitalism as the root cause of the very real crisis rather illusory. He also criticizes rhetoric espousing environmental doom as playing into the hands of the political right and the State rather than those of the left; comparing eco-catastrophist discourse with DARE programs that seek to discourage youth from using illegal drugs, Yuen observes that most people subjected to such framing inevitably dismiss such approaches for being inadequate in their proffered solutions, which are individualist and hence blind to structural considerations. As with electoral voting in the US, most people “know better” than to endorse such strategies, claims Yuen: but one wonders, is the converse true? Is there a radical potential latent within the US populace at large that seeks seriously to dismantle the institutions that perpetuate the precipitate destruction of the biosphere – one that would readily emerge, if given an actual chance to influence the course of society and the future? Yuen seems to think so – hence his endorsement of “a range of creative, directly democratic, and collective projects” to deal with climate change – yet his analysis regarding the fourth major barrier he sees to the creation of an effective, radical environmental movement – the differing societal conditions of 2012 as compared to the 1960s, with cynicism, resignation, and egotism now far more hegemonic within the US populace at large (consider his comparison of the popular reactions to the 1968 My Lai mass-killings with the relative indifference evinced following news of the 2005 Haditha massacre) – does not provide for a great deal of optimism in this regard. It is nonetheless curious that Yuen does not here explore or even mention the rise of Occupy/Decolonize in the US and its great potential.

Yuen closes his essay by warning once again against the employment of environmental catastrophism, as he feels a reliance on such rhetoric can “only encourage a positive feedback loop of chaos and authoritarianism.” Rather questionably, he claims that left-green catastrophism “remains Malthusian at its core”: he thus associates warnings of the coming eco-catastrophes with the “world-historical reactionary” Thomas Malthus, as Doug Henwood refers to him in the preface to Catastrophism. This labeling is indeed problematic and mistaken: to stress the centrality of imperialism and capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative, as many leftists concerned with ecology do, is in no way to blame growing populations of impoverished peoples for environmental decline![2] One can detect other instances of similar problems in Yuen’s essay, particularly when he juxtaposes the possibility of four billion deaths due to climate-induced mass-starvation in the twenty-first century with claims that such eventualities would merely constitute “evidence of consistency [rather] than novel catastrophe” in the history of capitalism, given the “triage of humanity” this imperialist system has been overseeing during the past five centuries. Rather self-evidently, this framing appears sedative rather than revolutionary; it does not seemingly lend itself to activating the militant, insurrectional outrage which considerations of such horrors likely should catalyze!

In this sense, Yuen’s closing comments regarding the “spirit of joyful rebellion” seem somewhat bizarre – indeed, schizophrenic. Faced with the enormity of barbarism and destruction threatened by capital, a sad militancy might be more appropriate. Similarly questionable is his announcement in closing that those concerned with the destruction of the climate “can’t wait for capitalism to implode before offering solutions” – perhaps they should, as Henwood suggests, anemically call for “things like regulations [and] limits on the freedom to invest”! Urging the emerging climate-justice movements to offer residents of the global North a positive “opportunity to escape alienation and exploitation for a chance to build something new,” Yuen stresses that such associations must “make a positive appeal to community and solidarity, rather than a moralistic plea for austerity and discipline.” Framing the issue in this way, Yuen seemingly ignores that any meaningful sense of solidarity and community includes within it strong ethical imperatives regarding political justice and social organization[3] – surely principal among these would be averting complicity with the mass-destruction of the most oppressed of the world first and foremost, rather than indulgently working to better one’s own lot and shore up one’s geographical privilege!

——

Moving beyond the passing criticisms I have offered of Catastrophism in my exegesis above of its principal essays and contributors, I should like to dedicate this second half to a more considered critical discussion of the points raised by Lilley and Yuen (and Henwood), given the importance of the questions they examine in the work, as set against the undoubtedly catastrophic backdrop of capitalist rule in the world today.

For one, I would very clearly like to express my concern regarding the empirical basis of one of the book’s main arguments, if not its most central one: that is, that the resort to employing catastrophic rhetoric produces apathy rather than activism. As much as Lilley feels she is justified in claiming that “catastrophic politics” have “a lengthy track record of failure” – a “very poor track record” – it can hardly be said that she and her colleagues prove this claim in any sense. Indeed, “[t]he evidence” she cites as being brought forward in Yuen’s essay on environmental politics amounts to nothing more than one study conducted of US attitudes on climate change in 2008! Obviously, this is an extremely weak basis for grounding such strong claims regarding “catastrophism,” not to mention an entire book dedicated to condemning it. What is more, such claims contradict the recent shifts seen in US public opinion regarding climate change, with a far greater percentage of the populace now believing in its existence and immediate urgency, following last summer’s drought in the Midwest and especially Hurricane Sandy. Beyond that, one could readily point to a number of shattering human successes arising from the intersection of catastrophe and mass-radical politics – the “history” that Lilley decides to exclude from consideration in her volume – from the destruction of monarchy and feudalism that began with the revolutionary intervention of the starving masses in France, 1789, to the overthrowing of formal slavery in Haiti/Saint Domingue a few years later, the mass self-defense and self-management engaged in by Parisian proletarians during the few weeks their Commune flourished before its suppression in 1871, the heroic efforts by the Russian people to topple tsarism in 1905 and again in February 1917, the resort to mass armed struggle by the Spanish when faced with the specter of a fascist takeover in 1936 – recall that this experiment yielded the most thoroughgoing anarchist reorganization of society in modern history, and was catalyzed importantly by the catastrophic recognition of the prospect for barbarism, as summarized eloquently in Dolores Ibárruri’s radio announcement “Danger: to arms!” – in addition to the Algerian Revolution, the Palestinian First Intifada, and the Zapatistas’ rebellion against the Mexican State – the “war against oblivion” – which began in 1994. Clearly this list is partial and uncomprehensive, but it does include many of the more seminal and progressive events seen in modernity, ones that show the resort to catastrophic politics is far different than indelible failure. Indeed, many of these affirming episodes of recent human history have been entirely insurrectional; hence they show Lilley’s analysis of this tendency to be very incomplete as well as highly misleading.

Furthermore, I believe the charge of catastrophism which permeates Lilley and company’s volume to be analytically questionable. As mentioned above, Lilley defines a catastrophist as one who “presumes society is headed for a collapse,” and then adds that catastrophists often welcome the prospect of such an eventuality. The rest of the book largely conflates these two aspects of catastrophism, rather unfairly. There is little differentiation made between the “belief” that what G.W.F. Hegel might call the “world-course” presently tends toward collapse and the positive view one could take of this possibility, while clearly this separation should – and does – exist!  Rationally to understand the profundity of the environmental crisis being prosecuted by capitalism – the “colossal ecological crises” and “justifiable fears of ecological collapse” Lilley herself acknowledges – is in no way necessarily to welcome such an eventuality. The problem here is not with a postmodern denial of objective reality (say, of biology, physics, and chemistry), for indeed, the very first paragraph of the introduction to Catastrophism mentions “the urgent and warranted need, following Walter Benjamin, to sever the lit fuse before the spark ignites the dynamite.” A fairer assessment of the intersection between politics and the catastrophic, in my view, would integrate the rather self-evident point that a mere adoption of apocalyptic rhetoric does not by itself activate mass-revolutionary movements that would presumably address the forces contributing to destruction, yet not altogether discard a resort to recognizing the urgency of the present predicament, particularly in environmental terms. The alternative would seem to be to engage in some sort of mass-delusional Noble Lie, a strategy that self-evidently is permeated with authoritarianism, for to hold that people in general cannot face reality and therefore should not is greatly elitist, beyond being mistaken in its pessimism regarding the supposed relationship between the contemplation of decline and the chance for radical intervention – which is not to accuse Lilley and her colleagues of promoting such views. It is instead to ask what exactly Lilley and the rest are proposing, for the text is cagey and contradictory on this question.

Relatedly, it should also be stated that Lilley’s putatively innovative analysis of her “dyad” of left-wing catastrophism is not terribly revelatory. I greatly doubt that many people hold either the determinist notion that capitalism’s days are numbered or the voluntarist idea that a descent into more barbaric social conditions necessarily bodes well for the chance for social revolution to be rational appraisals of the present situation which would then require demystification. Lilley mentions Adorno in her closing remarks to the essay on left-wing catastrophism, noting that he warned against views which undialectically hold that capitalist brutality can be displaced only by external forces like the catastrophic collapse some of her opponents would seem to hope for (primitivism); she should also know, far more centrally, that Adorno and many others associated with the Frankfurt School clearly demonstrated the poverty of both determinist and voluntarist orientations several decades ago, with special focus on the latter. Their major conclusion – unmentioned explicitly by Lilley and her colleagues, though integrated in a way into Yuen’s cultural analysis of US society – was to invert the voluntarist thesis and hold out the “catastrophist” view that capitalism could very well simply result in an ever-worsening barbarism, and that the radical hope Marxism saw in the proletariat was far from obvious and justified. Clearly, such considerations are germane to our own time; again I state that the volume would likely have been more interesting and useful, had it examined this “third option” within left-wing catastrophism. However, were Lilley and the others centrally to have explored Benjamin and Adorno, among other “critical catastrophists,” they likely would have had to revise their broad conclusions, given that this alternative could be said to represent a “‘good’ catastrophism” which undermines their undialectical condemnation of approaches that warn of impending destruction, as Jehan Alonzo rightly observes in his review of the volume.

In closing, I return to Yuen’s essay. It is very far from clear that the principles he offers in his conclusion for Northerners radically to address climate change can serve practically toward that end. If the reason to act on climate catastrophe is little more than the goal of transcending alienation and overcoming exploitation, why is the struggle any different than it was a century ago, or even during Marx’s own lifetime? The question of catastrophic climate change is principally one of imperial social relations, ones from which Northern residents benefit, to the extreme detriment of the world’s social majorities. If the matter is one of improving oneself and one’s in-group rather than assisting highly vulnerable others, there is a serious risk here of losing sight of the very solidarity that Yuen notes as crucial to our times, together with the absolute imperative of working actively and tirelessly to precipitate the destruction of the capitalist system so as to avert overwhelming destruction. Toward this end, we need not accept the neoliberal calls for austerity Yuen criticizes nor the general implied critique he suggests as regards the question of overconsumption/overproduction in the global North (would a jettisoning of the private automobile, meat-based diets, and air travel be “austere”?). The examples set by indigenous peoples across the globe show clearly that living with fewer material goods hardly means a necessary reduction in one’s well-being; many such groupings are based instead on the very concept of sumak kawsay, buen vivir, or “good living” – granted, as far as such considerations may be from mainstream US society. Faced with the enormity of capital-induced planetary destruction, Ted Trainer’s invocation of “the simple way” seems to be rational, one that we should not dismiss as we struggle very uncertainly to try to topple the system which threatens absolute darkness.[4]

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[1]    For a more considered treatment of the December 2008 events, consider We Are an Image from the Future, eds. Tasos Sagris, A.G. Schwarz, and Void Network (Oakland: AK Press, 2010) as a whole.

[2]    See for example the website Climate & Capitalism; the Capitalism, Nature, Socialism journal; Monthly Review; or Ecosocialist Horizons

[3]    “[A]nything that we can call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world.” Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001 [1963]), 76.

[4]    Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2007).

The Guillotine by The Coup and M. Robespierre

“The power of reason, and not the force of weapons, will propagate the principles of our glorious revolution….

All fiction disappears before truth, and all folly falls before reason.”

– Maximilien Robespierre

For a revolutionary new year