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
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.