In the same way that I cannot imagine the destruction of capitalism by any hand other than its own, I cannot imagine the United Kingdom emerging unscathed from the ripening calamity of civilisational collapse. Moreover, there can be no hope for the survival of the British people if indeed a single shred of the United Kingdom does endure. There is nothing at all of the U.K. that could or should be weaved into the fabric of a functional and sufficiently elastic socialist state, and any attempt to do so would only infect a communist project with gangrenous rot. There can be no rosy hope of unbroken lineage, no inheritance of musty political history or state building or economics. A Commonwealth of Great Britain must absolve itself of the past and assert its hegemony by grounding itself in the present moment, rather than by cleaving to the tattered shreds of the butcher’s apron. To conserve Britain we must consign everything that came before to the museums.
There are many, even amongst communist ranks, for whom this is a nauseating idea. I myself believed until recently that certain facets of the British bourgeois state could be rehabilitated. That some traditions, steeped in a most ancient past, were worth keeping. I now know that this is not, can not be the case. These traditions are not those of the people, but of the aristocracy, the merchant class, the landowners and the bourgeoisie. There is nothing ‘of the people’ in the formalities of Parliament or, of course, Windsor Castle, and therefore there is nothing there worth preserving. The lack of political spirit amongst the British masses can work for us when the time comes just in the same way that it works against us now. Preventing reaction in the long term by heaping the totems of the old order onto the funeral pyre of British capitalism is unlikely to inspire any real uproar in the majority of the population. Those who find our actions reprehensible will be so neutered by the precarity of approaching oblivion that they will be unable to pose a challenge to us. This fact becomes all the more evident if we explore the conditions within which socialism will arise.
If ever socialism is born in Britain, it will awaken into the choking effusions of a burning world. Indeed, perhaps the burnt offering of capitalism and the sacrifice of the Earth will produce the magic needed to breathe life into an avatar of communism, which time and time again has emerged as stillborn into the world. I have stated before that I believe we are all now enduring the collapse of civilisation. What I mean to say is that the first ever truly global, complex human society, is no longer able to sustain itself. It is contracting. Sloughing off portions of itself to desperately maintain a shrivelled core. This crisis will only intensify as more time passes. I firmly believe that capitalism will meet its ultimate end this century. I presume financial collapse (stage one in Dmitry Orlov’s five stage presentation of collapse) may occur at some time in the next decade, and I suppose that once that first domino falls, the rest will topple fairly quickly. My belief is that socialism has one final opportunity to emerge organically amidst the apocalypse. Somewhere between the point at which commercial collapse is absolute, where the market no longer provides, and commodity production and distribution is no longer guaranteed, and the point where the commination of state ordained hyper-violence is more distant than the threat of starvation, when the difference between taking and not taking (of food, power, weapons, or life itself), is a matter of life and death, socialism may again tentatively raise it’s head.
We cannot comprehend how quickly the state will lose legitimacy when it cannot prevent looting and violence, when it can no longer facilitate or preserve the private sector and the distribution of resources. The state is the defender of capital. It exists to reify property and profit for the wealthy. Its reach will contract in ever decreasing spheres as it forsakes the working class and the swelling lumpen-proletariat. Law and order will break down outside of the cores of control in wealthy areas, and areas of high economic value. And let’s be clear: swathes of the population have already been abandoned by the state. The working poor, the disabled, the out of work, the elderly. These demographics are more and more being cast off to fend for themselves. Once the NHS collapses and the Everything Bubble bursts, the masses will be thrust into the same acute precarity that perhaps millions already endure.
In a state of decay such as this, when supply chains are breaking down and money is worthless and brigandry is a means of survival, a sufficiently determined core of revolutionaries may be able to wrest control of the state. The difference between their success and their failure may be in part dictated by the sympathies of the military, or of militarised fractions of the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat. Should it come to open war against the state, guerillas operating in small easily supplied cadres may be able to inflict exponential damage upon the armed forces that engage them. The army would likely be stretched thin under these conditions already, facilitating the role of support to a critically underfunded, undertrained, and undersupplied police force (our police are already treated almost in polarity to their U.S. counterparts by the U.K. state). We can also anticipate that the army will be suffering from poor morale if its soldiers are tasked with regularly dispensing reactionary violence against their own class on behalf of an increasingly distant and parochial bourgeois government.
Socialism may organically emerge under these conditions on a local scale. Humans are of course a eusocial species, we are ill-equipped to survive adversity on our own. In a state of civilisational collapse it is likely that communities will be forced to reknit for the sake of perpetuating themselves. When neighbours find the courage to turn away the bailiffs, knowing that the state may be unable to exact its vengeance, then the first seeds of genuine solidarity within communities will be sown. When postcodes band together to produce food, tools, weapons, energy, it is entirely possible that localised socialist relations will emerge. In the absence of state-backed money facilitating commodity production, we can hope that the obfuscations of labour’s ultimate value will fade away. Perhaps the production and distribution of use-values will be undertaken not for the sake of profit, or so that one person can get a leg up over his fellow, but to ensure the survival of the wider community. Certainly, a contraction in social complexity precipitated by the unavailability of high-EROI energy stores such as oil and gas, combined with the pressures that will be exerted by our atomistic division of labour amongst the proletariat, will result in any chasmic class divides being filled. Everyone will have to pull their weight. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
The apocalypse is here, my friends. Its intensity will be felt more and more year by year. In this great and awful civilisational collapse there is perhaps one last hope for socialism in our lifetimes. One fleeting moment where humanity can salvage its survival, and build a new epoch from the ruins of the last.
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