We Are All Ukrainians Now!

Lessons in how to win back our freedom

I couldn’t force myself to attend Climate Week events in NYC last week because the prospect of trying to connect with the mindset — an ideological, rhetorical framing that tends toward knee-jerk positivity — held by many people there was too hard for me. Some people call Climate Week the new fashion week or a kind of “Burning Man in NYC.” Those seem like accurate ways to look at it. In retrospect, I probably made a mistake by skipping it. Sometimes, I over-indulge my sense of ostracism, nurturing the jouissance of outsider-ish irascibility as my existential kink. Right now I feel too heartbroken and dismayed about what’s happening here to commune jovially with many people.

We confront an ongoing Fascist takeover in the US, with devastating consequences for the planetary ecology and for many communities, starting with poor and marginalized people. I believe we need to deal with that before we get enthralled about regenerative, transformative, cooperative whatever. Many efforts to build little nice ecological businesses, projects, etc, right now seem — to me anyway — about as sensible as building sand castles on a shore when you know a typhoon is going to hit within a few seconds, wiping all of it out.

On the other hand… I do know many people in the climate community doing excellent work. They start with an understanding that we need new infrastructure for the time ahead, as things start to collapse and unravel. Or they seek to hold back the forces of destruction as long as possible, preserving some small segment of coral reefs or tropical forests, with the hope that some kind of authentic transformation of civil society happens soon, before it is too late to salvage our planet.

As a student of the evolution of consciousness, I seek to witness and understand the transformations that human consciousness undergoes in real time, due to ongoing technological, ideological and socio-economic changes in the immediate environment that impact language, rhetoric, social behavior, and so on. The political philosopher Antonio Negri wrote about how, in a post-industrial civilization such as our own, the most important thing that gets constantly produced and reproduced is not anything material. “Immaterial production” via media, social networks, networks of affective relationships, and so on, is the “hegemonic,” or most important, form of production in our post-industrial civilization. What immaterial production produces and reproduces is “subjectivity,” in itself.

Because we experience reality through our subjective lens, we don’t tend to think that “subjectivity” is actually mass-produced, manufactured on an industrial scale, but, if we reflect on it a bit, we find that this is the case. We can see this happening, in an ongoing way, in the movement of the U.S. toward fascism, White Supremacy, and Christian nationalism. I was just learning about the Ryder Cup, some golf tournament, and how the MAGA men acted like boors, jeering and mocking the European players. This would never have happened just a few years ago. The combination of indoctrination by Musk’s X, Murdoch’s Fox and NewsMax, and Trump’s ongoing assault on the Psyche have had the cumulative effect of unleashing the beast of ugly American-ness on an unprecedented scale. Now we are seeing the next layer of Right Wing mass media consolidation, which will make this psychic degradation far worse.

In the liberal, Burning Man-inflected, health-conscious, psychedelic, eco-conscious community, I encounter a different kind of subjectivity that has been shaped by transformational festivals, Post New Age media, green entrepreneurial conferences, Peyote ceremonies, yoga retreats, and so on. This consciousness is explicitly “nice,” sensitive, and tends to seek harmonic agreement in groups. People who have absorbed or entered into this rhetorical framing often are quick to jump to a sense of unity consciousness as a means of bypassing and avoiding difficult topics. There are topics that everybody loves to discuss and others — harsh political ones — that are implicitly off limits. Many people in this coterie refuse to make distinctions between Left and Right, Red and Blue, because they don’t want to be pigeonholed and still believe they can find common ground with Fascists.

The people on Earth I find most inspiring right now are the Ukrainians. Astonishingly — against incredible odds — the Ukrainians appear to be winning their war against Putin. They have decimated Russia’s army and destroyed their oil-producing capacity, to the point where people across Russia are experiencing severe fuel shortages. When the U.S. under Trump cut off their weapons supplies, the Ukrainians learned how to build their own long-range missiles and mastered the art of drone warfare, striking deep inside Russia. Recently, Trump had to reverse himself. After showing disgusting fealty to Putin, Trump is now saying that Ukraine may not only win the war but take all of its territory back, including Crimea. He is saying it because it is true. What Ukraine has done is as amazing — as legendary — as what the British accomplished in the Second World War against the Nazis. It proves that a free people, even when they have far less wealth and resources, possess incredible asymmetic advantages over people squished under the boot of a despotic tyrant, which is what Trump, Vance, Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk seek to do to us here. In a future essay, I will look at the structural differences in our situation compared to Ukraine, and what that means for developing assymetric strategies that can produce real change.

At the moment, we are not seeing effective counter-movements in the U.S. to stop the destruction underway. When I listen to the vast majority of the rhetoric I hear in the “transformational” community or among progressives now, I keep thinking to myself that, as the devastating consequences of Trump-ism inevitably hit closer to home, we will become more like Ukrainians in how how we understand, think, and respond to our situation as we relate to a ruthless oppressive force that seeks total domination and destruction in every sphere — in the external domain of economic and social relations and in the internal domain of consciousness itself. We need to stop being so soft, stop cutting ourselves so much slack, and stop focusing on things that don’t matter anymore (a long list).

Part of our problem is that we do not share a coherent understanding of what’s happening and what is at stake for people here. I very much appreciated this long analysis (please share it widely):

And this short analysis of the Right Wing’s economic plan for America (please share it widely):

I believe it is very clear that if everybody in the U.S. was fully aware of what they are attempting, 80% of Americans would do everything in their power to stop it. This requires large-scale economic boycotts and a general economic strike.