I catch glimpses of regular people starting to wake up from the narcoleptic dreamworld that capitalism has put them in. I work in a very working class environment, and it's now very easy to get people to talk about the big structural issues driving our civilization to ecocide, in a way that it wasn't just a couple years ago. People truly…
I catch glimpses of regular people starting to wake up from the narcoleptic dreamworld that capitalism has put them in. I work in a very working class environment, and it's now very easy to get people to talk about the big structural issues driving our civilization to ecocide, in a way that it wasn't just a couple years ago. People truly want to live in a better world, they're mostly just exhausted and dispirited by the vampiric powers they live under. Until just a few years ago, a huge majority of people labored under the delusion that if they just hustled as hard as they could, they might be able to "make it" in this economy. Now the great majority are waking up to the fact that not only can they not make it, if they stay on this hamster wheel, they will die. This is a great big pill to swallow. Not everyone will take it well. But it's part of the conditions of history that must work itself out in the human psyche before we can ever hope to come together around an agenda of survival and caring for our biosphere. There's a whole process of grieving, bargaining, anger, all that shit, before most people will truly understand what their situation is. For those of us who have seen it for some time now, it's incredibly dispiriting and irritating to have to wait and watch as people figure this shit out.
The question is, as always, how bad will the damage be before we wake up from the dark dream that Capital has lulled us into. Possibly the damage will be terminal- a slow motion extinction that we all must live through until we perish from whatever local disaster takes us: starvation, violence, wildfire, drought, what have you. But also possibly, as more and more people fall into poverty and desperation, the power valences and socio-economic incentives will flip. People will be forced by their shit circumstances to look out for each other. The ego-driven, money-driven, success-driven societal structures will simply cease to interest people and they will find that they get more acclaim, more respect, more power over their own lives by helping their communities than by exploiting them for their own benefit.
One thing that has helped me calm down a little about this has been listening to this EXTREMELY long and detailed podcast about the French Revolution. The people who underwent this massive series of crises/changes had no idea how it would end up, where it all was heading. Each stage of it was run by groups of people trying to get their own agenda through. It was, if you include the Napoleonic Wars, a nearly 30 year period of disruption, war, and chaos. But it birthed a new societal order. The Ancien Régime was never again able to be reestablished, a Republic is what France became. But to the people taken up by these changes, that was not clearly going to be the outcome. Even the beginning stages of the Revolution weren't planned as revolution or recognized as such. They just had to undergo every horrible step of that process until it was over. (Interestingly, there was a climate change element to the whole thing: the genocide of native people in the Americas resulted in wild overgrowth of their carefully constructed agricultural system, which sucked a bunch of carbon out of the air, cooling the planet for a while and resulting in poor harvests and food shortages in France. This was one of the things that drove the old regime to dysfunction and collapse.)
Techno-capitalism seems unbeatable, but we're just ants on the ground, observing what we can. We don't have the perspective to see this huge crisis objectively, therefore we shouldn't assume that the depressing parts of it are unchangeable. The Ancien Regime seemed inevitable until it just wasn't anymore.
On the other hand, maybe we really are all fucked. <Hollow laughter of the damned>
I catch glimpses of regular people starting to wake up from the narcoleptic dreamworld that capitalism has put them in. I work in a very working class environment, and it's now very easy to get people to talk about the big structural issues driving our civilization to ecocide, in a way that it wasn't just a couple years ago. People truly want to live in a better world, they're mostly just exhausted and dispirited by the vampiric powers they live under. Until just a few years ago, a huge majority of people labored under the delusion that if they just hustled as hard as they could, they might be able to "make it" in this economy. Now the great majority are waking up to the fact that not only can they not make it, if they stay on this hamster wheel, they will die. This is a great big pill to swallow. Not everyone will take it well. But it's part of the conditions of history that must work itself out in the human psyche before we can ever hope to come together around an agenda of survival and caring for our biosphere. There's a whole process of grieving, bargaining, anger, all that shit, before most people will truly understand what their situation is. For those of us who have seen it for some time now, it's incredibly dispiriting and irritating to have to wait and watch as people figure this shit out.
The question is, as always, how bad will the damage be before we wake up from the dark dream that Capital has lulled us into. Possibly the damage will be terminal- a slow motion extinction that we all must live through until we perish from whatever local disaster takes us: starvation, violence, wildfire, drought, what have you. But also possibly, as more and more people fall into poverty and desperation, the power valences and socio-economic incentives will flip. People will be forced by their shit circumstances to look out for each other. The ego-driven, money-driven, success-driven societal structures will simply cease to interest people and they will find that they get more acclaim, more respect, more power over their own lives by helping their communities than by exploiting them for their own benefit.
One thing that has helped me calm down a little about this has been listening to this EXTREMELY long and detailed podcast about the French Revolution. The people who underwent this massive series of crises/changes had no idea how it would end up, where it all was heading. Each stage of it was run by groups of people trying to get their own agenda through. It was, if you include the Napoleonic Wars, a nearly 30 year period of disruption, war, and chaos. But it birthed a new societal order. The Ancien Régime was never again able to be reestablished, a Republic is what France became. But to the people taken up by these changes, that was not clearly going to be the outcome. Even the beginning stages of the Revolution weren't planned as revolution or recognized as such. They just had to undergo every horrible step of that process until it was over. (Interestingly, there was a climate change element to the whole thing: the genocide of native people in the Americas resulted in wild overgrowth of their carefully constructed agricultural system, which sucked a bunch of carbon out of the air, cooling the planet for a while and resulting in poor harvests and food shortages in France. This was one of the things that drove the old regime to dysfunction and collapse.)
Techno-capitalism seems unbeatable, but we're just ants on the ground, observing what we can. We don't have the perspective to see this huge crisis objectively, therefore we shouldn't assume that the depressing parts of it are unchangeable. The Ancien Regime seemed inevitable until it just wasn't anymore.
On the other hand, maybe we really are all fucked. <Hollow laughter of the damned>