The world is not just in crisis. Humans as a species are in crisis. But if you see fire and are fine with calling it “fire season,” and you see torrential hurricanes and flooding in places hitherto relatively immune, and are fine with calling it “volatile weather,” and you see melting glaciers and icecaps and are fine with calling it “cyclical” on a presumably-geological scale you know nothing about — then you are ingesting too much corporate media propaganda designed to justify business as usual in both the economic and political spheres.
These are not just localized and regional oddities. These are global phenomena, linked to human (and more precisely, capitalist) industrial, resource-extraction, and war-making activity. Every dollar spent on war, and on transferring wealth upwards to the super-rich (not just via tax cuts and exemptions, and public subsidies for private gain, but via surplus value itself — a systemic boondoggle Marx and others were absolutely right about 150 years ago), is more money for cops, more money for anti-social, privatized, harmful endeavors, and less money for education, universal health care, fire-fighting, road repair, water purification, potential pandemics and vaccinations, libraries, and research and development related to ecological sustainability.
This is not “volatile weather.” This is the razor-thin edge of human and biological viability on a closed, finite, miraculous eco-system in a relatively marginal solar system in an infinite universe. Carl Sagan was right about that. There is absolutely nothing in human history, nor in our knowledge about prehistory and the history of life itself, that says things **must** turn out well. In our hearts, we know this. Everytime we read (or watch) something like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” and we don’t immediately ridicule the premise — we are basically confessing to a kind of fear or resignation about human extinction.
The powers that be want us to feel resigned. Every crisis is an opportunity **for them** — as Naomi Klein pointed out well in her book “Shock Doctrine.” We are in a political crisis, too, that manifests itself as extreme polarization and violence — not just at the international level, but also internally within many countries. The genocide in Gaza is in many ways ground zero for the struggle for human liberation — not just Palestinian liberation, but all of us. The silence and indifference of people over the last 14 months has altered my being, in a way that almost 40 years of being an activist, and confronting western imperialism since the Contra war in Nicaragua and the invasion of Panama, never quite did. The scale of the crimes is staggering.
And state-corporate elites are absolutely shocked at the absence of popular empathy for people like Brian Thompson (CEO of United Healthcare) who was assassinated by Luigi Mangione. This is a reflection of this polarization, but also a reflection of class war politics and consciousness overcoming the usual barriers to analysis. Elites and pundits were shocked that ordinary people displayed the kind of callous regard for *their* lives (and *their* homes) that they have long been accustomed to displaying (and more importantly, enriching themselves upon) with respect to everyone else. This is one of those “let them eat cake” moments. I’m sure the French Revolution, and the popular mantra “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” was also something of a shock to 18th century equivalents to our “rich and famous”.
In recent days, the same divergence has made itself apparent with the California and L.A. fires. Elites and pundits are shocked that the preponderance of popular sentiment has been one of contempt for the plight of millionaires like Keith Wasserman and movie celebrities like James Woods — both of whom have been appealing for aid or sympathy for their threatened or lost mansions. Wasserman was so widely shamed for his rarified hypocrisy (saying he would “pay anything” for privatized fire-fighters to save his mansion, after boasting that people like himself should pay no taxes) … that he was forced to delete his own social media presence. So, too, with James Woods, whose reactionary and indeed bloodthirsty call for every last man, woman and child in Gaza to be incinerated from the sky — has been contrasted with his whimpering appeal for aid and sympathy during the recent devastation in L.A. So yes, elites are “shocked” at the lack of empathy for their plight, when the chickens they have been hand-feeding to become apocalyptic wyverns, and the absolute disdain they have ever-had for ordinary peoples’ hardships, have finally come home to roost.
I am genuinely concerned and horrified for ordinary people in Southern California, experiencing the loss of their homes and communities. This is not “fire season.” This is capitalism-induced, human-centred, climate change. This is the world we have told our children they must inherit. But that is a double-lie. There is nothing inevitable about this trajectory, just as there is nothing inevitable about the political and economic system we find ourselves subjected to. Another world is possible, as Arundhati Roy once famously said in Porto Alegre (Brazil). But it’s also true that life itself is not inevitable. There is no god watching over us. No one died for our sins. No messiahs are coming, not even revolutionary ones. The only worlds possible are the ones we’re willing to fight for.
