There is no escaping the fact that human civilisation is reaching a great, epochal crescendo. The mournful din of our apotheosis rings out to the very furthest reaches of the planet. No ecosystem, no landscape, no community, can escape this existential cacophony. Mountains shake and forests are toppled in its wake. Within this tortured landscape stands humanity, toes clawing into the precipice, buffeted from behind by a dry, ashen wind, staring down into the tempestuous benthic depths of our own oblivion.
For those of us with our ears to the ground, the signs are obvious. Anthropogenic climate change is accelerating and intensifying. We will very likely reach 1.5°C of global warming this year. Ostensibly, we can anticipate 2°C of warming by 2040, and upwards of 3.3°C by 2100. Decadal extreme weather events are now a yearly occurrence. The Amazon Rainforest is turning over to savannah. The output of carbon emissions is accelerating. A recent initiative in Europe to detoxify the atmosphere through the banning of certain aerosols has, paradoxically, resulted in a dramatic increase in global temperatures. Swathes of our oceans are acidifying and being sterilised. There is plastic in everything we eat. There is plastic in the air. There is plastic in our blood. One might be inclined to say that we have lost control of the situation, but that would be a misnomer, as it implies that humanity was ever in control in the first place.
Of course climate change is the tip of the iceberg. Capitalism is in its death throes, and the approach of a devastating collapse of the global economy is impossible to ignore. The fact this collapse did not occur over the worst period of the COVID epidemic is in and of itself incredible. Rising tensions in the Middle East may precipitate a regional war. The governments of almost every country on Earth have shut their eyes to the escalation of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people. By all accounts, Israel is undertaking a genocide, and the US and the UK are explicitly abetting it. Dozens of countries are freefalling. Living standards in the UK are collapsing. The USA has sloughed off a mass of its population to subsist in utter destitution. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, all crawl with throngs of homeless and drug addicted wretches, cast adrift and left to die by the state, and by wider conventional society. The media may seek to separate us in the western world from the apocalypse by suggesting that the apocalypse is a localised phenomenon. It is not. Wet-bulb temperatures in Pakistan are now becoming unsurvivable, but the southern states of the USA are soon to follow suit. The Sudanese Civil War has displaced six million people, but when 31% of the British population already live pay cheque to pay cheque, similar turmoil could just as easily take route at home. The most powerful nations on earth are in no less danger of collapse than any other. The unequal and immense pressures exerted by capitalism upon the so-called ‘first world’ countries will precipitate the most spectacular supernovae of all. A large star does not simply wink out of existence. It roars a violent and catastrophic death. Indeed, a star must die in this way for new life to emerge. Likewise, perhaps the collapse of civilisation must be this horrendous for there to exist any hope of something better emerging from its ruins.
Even before I fell into Marxism I was a millenarian. I have been obsessed with depictions of dystopia and apocalypse for as long as I can remember. These are not particularly gleeful fascinations, although I will admit that when I have bad weeks at work I find myself quietly hoping that the whole stinking system will soon fail so utterly that I don’t have to sit in the office. Let’s be clear. Marxism is correct. In socialism and communism we find a mode of production that would, were it enacted successfully fifty years ago, give us the tools to muddle through the confluence of crises that beset our species, and our planet. Restorative ecology cannot exist in a for profit system. Scarcity cannot be annihilated when it is scarcity that betters the fortunes of the capitalist class. Unfortunately, the Marxists have run out of time. International proletarian revolution is stillborn. We will not see socialism prevent civilisational collapse. Socialism may indeed emerge in some form in the future, but it will lack the tools to rebuild anything but a shadow of its potentiality. Unfortunately, we have simply run out of time and resources. A lot of communists will disagree, will be aghast at this proclamation. As a communist myself I take no joy in telling you this, but there is no point in pretending that our ultimate goal is still within reach. Those organisations ‘building socialism’ might do better to focus instead on helping people endure the coming atrocities. In this sense, perhaps the anarchists, in their obsession with mutual aid, are onto something that has slipped through the fingers of the ‘authoritarian’ communists. I would love to be proven wrong, but I don’t foresee the communist parties, with their reading groups and their newspapers, their money making schemes and their limp-wrist-raised-fist photo ops, capable of posing themselves as appealing to the bulk of the working class, let alone capable of taking power. None of these groups seem to have a plan of action, or even a developed and cohesive programme, beyond getting money and acquiring members. It took three thousand revolutionaries to overthrow Batista’s Cuba.
We are entering into the second phase of human development: that of a psychic species. We can see this cerebral evolution occuring already in our day to day lives. We have fashioned the technology to move, at times, almost as one great and unified creature. Like a colony of ants, or a slime mould, we surge and throb and pulsate in whichever direction is decided by the psychic whole. Oftentimes this psychic direction is facilitated by the unthinking machinery of ‘social media’. In this way we have simultaneously created the tools for our own psychic evolution and become beholden to their thoughtless whims.
There is an alluring misnomer propagated by Marxists, including myself at times, that supposes the wheels of our civilisation turn at the behest of the bourgeoisie. As though they are as much the thinking class as they are the propertied class. This simply cannot be the case. Civilisation moves against them in many ways, just as it moves against the proletariat. We need look no further than to how resolutely miserable they all are to understand this. They live in a time where there is more than ever before, and they have all of it. And yet, they complain. They demand more. They sacrifice swathes of their own kin in the pursuit of something that they cannot name, let alone buy. The bourgeoisie is only materially wealthy, of course. Spiritually they are atrophied. Psychically they are beneath beggary. This is perhaps partly why they so often turn to paedophilia. It cannot be a mere coincidence that so many of these billionaires and their gleeful lackeys have turned over to this most disgusting taboo. They are so numb to the simple joy of existence that they must seek out the absolute darkest and most debased avenues for pleasure and feeling. Only those fascinations which have been proscribed by every righteous culture to have ever existed can now satisfy the disgusting and inhuman urges of the bourgeoisie.
The psycho-eusocial development of our species (should we survive the transition into the next epoch) is dependent on a glimmer of directed unconsciousness casting these elements out into the wilderness. It is very likely that this will happen as the collapse intensifies. Many of these pampered princelings are reliant on their underlings to sustain themselves to an extreme degree, even within the context of our hyper-assisted western society. In the absence of the ‘help’, who will certainly desert them as soon as they are faced with acute, bludgeoning precarity, the bourgeois rats and the uplifted media class, will likely be the first to either humble themselves, or simply die off, when the time comes. When money is nothing and human labour reasserts itself as the undisputable and unobscured motive force of our species’ perpetuation, those who can do in the real world, will rise to the top. The end of days are a time when new mythologies are weaved. When Yggdrasil is cleansed of its parasites, its fruit will be able to ripen, and heroes will finally emerge from within.
We should be excited about all of this, really. There is every possibility that we will be invited to experience the most exhilarating chapter of the human story to have ever been written (or, the most exhilarating chapter to have been written for many volumes). After all, as Golovin is supposed to have said: “There is nothing more pleasant than when the ground is slipping out from under your feet. This is the first experience of flight. It kills vermin. It tempers angels”. As I said at the beginning of this diatribe, the world is ending and it cannot be avoided! Is a prolonged and tedious collapse in any way preferable than the prescription of an immediate bolt gun to the brain of our civilisation? If you cannot be joyful about all this, then you must at least be phlegmatic. Can individual human life really develop meaning if its connection to life and death is severed? Even if we are less dramatic, there is no joy in a life of microwave meals, commuting and spreadsheets. The most evil conditions have been imposed upon billions. Soon the time will come when we are liberated from those conditions. Only in this realm of chaos and unrest will we be absolved of our attachments and thus truly freed to pursue a meaningful destiny.
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