I've lurked here since day 2, but I haven't made a post on here yet so let my first one be an effort post, even though I suck at posting and efforts.
Ever since I read Mark Fisher's “Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative?” a couple of years back, my politics and the lens through which I view and understand the world has been pretty much unchanged. Nothing that I read or watched after that really had an impact on me, or at least not one of this size.
In the country/region I was born in the most popular party has a concept called “climate realism”, and this morning rereading Capitalist Realism I couldn't help but think that it's pretty much the same deal. Climate realism is a position held by absolute ghouls, it's acknowledging that there's catastrophic change coming for us and things will keep getting worse; but that we can only try to prepare or mitigate within the confines of our dear capitalist system, where the only truth is the market, and the only tools are taxes.
Climate realism is capitalist realism. Capitalist realism is the idea that there is no alternative, that only solutions that work within capitalism are even conceivable. Which is why the most radical idea somewhat accepted by liberals is a carbon tax, because taxes is pretty much the only tool governments have left after privatizing almost everything.
Capitalist realism is of course so completely ingrained into politics and culture, that even proposing alternative solutions like nationalizing electric companies so you actually have direct control over future investments, would immediately condemn you to the political margins. And maybe we won't get ridiculous situations like when corona first hit, where Germany's coal powerplants kept running even though lack of demand resulted in negative electricity prices.
Don't get me wrong, having green parties and left parties in power that function within capitalism is still way better than neolibs and neocons, but their policy would still be confined by our political culture of capitalist realism. However in said country/region I'm from, neolibs have way more power, so we won't even get that.
So I guess we just end up waiting for some giant contingency that will change everything and make things possible again.
I hope I'm wrong and I probably am.
What book has cemented your politics? Is there anything I could read that might evolve me beyond this extremely depressing worldview?
tldr: shitty effortpost
As a third worlder in the equator it absolutely pisses me off how the western world is likely going to survive the catastrophe with their lands being warmer, while we burns to death in this fucking hellword desert.
Sometimes I fantasizes that in this scenario the global south unites to build a nuclear arsenal to fucking annihilate the north. Itll be the end of fucking humanity but Id rather go down killing everything rather letting these colonizing fucks smugly survives into the future.
As a Chilean I've always thought that, if a socialist revolution ever comes out of a country here, its primordial effort should be to make a unification of Latin America. It's very unlikely to happen, but it's something to think about
Have you heard of the "export land model"? A petroleum geologist came up with a model which, oversimplified, predicts that countries peaking in oil production and increasing oil consumption will tend to withdraw their oil production from the world market. Oil is a critical source of energy whose demand curve is remarkably inelastic, and so is food. To the extent Americans grow and process their own, they'll be alright. To the extent they send chickens to China for processing and don't get them back, they'll be fucked.
you know climate change is real when the elites are speculating on artic trade routes
Well, first of all I'd like to say this is an excellent post and I very much appreciate you sharing it here.
I think you're absolutely right, climate change is utterly outside of Capitalism's ability to confront and any capitalist program claiming to attempt this will be utterly ineffectual and probably have the primary goal of making it seem like they were making an effort rather than actually attempting to solve the problem.
The capitalist position on climate change is always going to be propagandizing, accepting and adapting because under capitalism the people with the power to stop climate change can instead orders of magnitude more cheaply make climate change not have a significant effect on their lives and are in no way accountable to the many billions of people whose lives climate change will destroy.
I find hope in that climate change is very much a capitalist problem, it's very solvable under a socialist system, and that capitalists utter neglect of the rest of humanity and refusal to compromise their own power or lifestyles even the tiniest bit are creating revolutionary conditions the likes of which this planet has never seen. The French, Bolshevik, Indian and Chinese revolutions were all preceded by famines their ruling classes were perceived as doing nothing about. The natural disasters and global food insecurity climate change will cause in the next 50 years are going to make them look like nothing. Let's work to make sure the same can be said of humanity's response.
I'm going to recommend you read Desert even though I also agree with your view that accepting climate collapse as inevitable does reify the idea that capitaliam cannot be stopped (and instead suggests that the only thing that will "end" global capitalism is the collapse of the infrastructure needed to mine resources and the availability of the resources themselves)
Desert opened my eyes to the idea that this is the most likely scenario if capitalism (and thus capitalist realism) is not combatted with socialism, but that in the face of it humanity can survive in nomadic non-state communities because people already are living like this (also because the climate is already collapsing)
States will contract as arable and liveable land gives way to desertification, but the amount of arable and liveable land can be increased if states decouple from capitalism.
We got and still are getting a healthy dose of Covid realism, it's a taste of what's to come in upcoming crises.
It sounds like you need Graeber's Possibilities right now. It consists of a dozen essays that suggest spaces where those opposed to the absolute nature of corporate capitalism and private property can experiment with freer ways of living and working. It helped me see many aspects of Western society and its political-economic system in different, discrediting ways that are hard to unsee.
Also from the anarcho-anthropological vein, I offer Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies to stretch your vision of time and causality. For me it helped inspire thinking in terms of setting up forms and patterns and small facts on the ground for the future to elaborate, as the Whigs who created the progress myth did, or in the reverse terms of breaking, bending, or embrittling forms and patterns and small facts of the enemy to distort, prevent, or even pervert their intended elaboration in the future.
I think state and revolution cemented my politics, but I have a gf called Tina and she insists that socialism is a pipe dream.
Aight, well just remember to do a little mouthwash rinse right after you hook up with her huh
TINA believes she is your girlfriend too, and she doesn't take no for an answer.
lol I thought it was about meth somehow :| This makes much more sense.
Very Good post indeed I agree with both of my hand up in the air however have you considered... crisis theory? It states that (oversimplified) since the global capitalism has reached the level of concentration and management that the it could not be either attacked, threaten, or undermined the only force to bring it down is a general collapse. The material conditions get knifed out it might literally be stopped via running out of its steam.
I subscribe to this theory, since it indicates everybody is essentially running on a platform of survivalist mode. Everybody is fully aware of the danger of "climate realism" the problem is that a) human brain is just biologically unfit to process such information which is out of their material realm. As long as the time-frame or numbers reaches astronomical or geological level human brain literally learns to stop processing the info and shrug it off b) much more urgency stuff could and would happen well before the eventual climate catastrophe walls in on all of us, for instance, a PANDEMIC. I think Covid-19 is a preview of what would feel like living in the (at least early half of) 21 century. Crisis after crisis will hit in which makes all of us busy at hands and distracted until the eventual climate Evangelion.
Hurricane realism is really frustrating because an alternative to insurance and praying exists in Cuba. I reckon most yanks would prefer death over adopting some ideas from the commies.
A lot of yanks are Liberty Prime from Fallout 3 unironically. "Death is a preferable alternative to Communism," and you see that with the reactions to even mild life-saving reforms. Sad to see, really.
Realistically is there any hope that we will build the momentum to overthrow capitalism not even in 10 years but this century? What will it take to stop people from resisting even trying to understand left wing ideas? We can go on chanting "capitalist realism" and how "it's easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of capitalism" but we aren't building momentum fast enough to take charge of the situation.
Right now the rich are cutting their losses and are building doomsday bunkers. While you are planning on dying alone on rice and beans the chuds are training to slaughter you and have twelve kids. We need a back up plan on the left just to keep our ideas alive. Small pockets of determined leftists maintaining gene banks to ensure the diversity of the species reproducing only at a scale at which human life can be supported on the new earth. It's problematic as fuck but I'd like to think somebody will be left to rebuild.
Dom't worry, when famines start those neoliberals contorting themselves crying "nothing can be done" will
rebrand/let the mask slip/"be defeated" by turbo-eco-fascists.Yeah, I’ve also heard them called ‘climate delayers’. It has the same effect as denying it entirely, but with a slightly more reasonable veneer.
