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Title: Anti-Economics: Disability Against the Logic of Production Author: Dole Army Ex-Worker Collective Date: 11/04/22 Language: en Topics: health, australia, anti-civ, insurrectionary, post-left,
There's been a disturbing trend over the last few years as people have
turned to soviet & spanish nostalgia in order to cope with the collapse
of the left as alter-globalisation and occupy produced no visible
results, by returning to communism's "true" sources, diving back to the
past and trying to organise ideologically. Everywhere I talk to the
left, I run into the same problem: productivist logic. When questioned
on it, people often jump to things like "public transit everywhere" and
"but what about insulin?" etc, fearing the loss of the current benefits
of industrial society in case minorities (normally the disabled) get the
short end of the stick. As a an incredibly disabled green anarchist,
it's horrifying to see, and even worse to be the subject to be debated
over but totally ignored in practice. Speaking up often means getting
called ableist, eco-fascist, transphobic etc, despite the sheer
hypocrisy of accusing me of wanting me and others like me to die en
masse. It's pure liberalism from people using ideology for social
capital.
This way of seeing the climate crisis and the capitalist economy as a
binary state between the way we live today and a totalising hypothetical
post-collapse "primitivist" society in which everybody is a
hunter-gatherer is completely disingenous and shows a total lack of
regard or care for addressing the crises we're in the middle of. First
of all, the planet's biosphere is collapsing in the here and now, and
the process started a long time ago. This means that whether we like it
or not, the entire capitalist global work machine has begun to self
implode into a patchwork of warring states as resource scarcity kicks
in, mass famine hits most of the world, and global supply chains go to
total shit.
Stop using disability as an excuse to not criticise your relationship to
ecology. People like me who rely on medicine to survive, and who can't
work to feed ourselves, will be the first people to starve and die as
Empire enters its death throes. There won't be a hypothetical society in
which our biggest concern is producing insulin, because states don't
give a shit about the sick in the face of war and economic ruin. Many
people will be wiped out, and it'll be brutal. The reality of the future
we face is one of imminent collapse. Without a level of energy
production that's completely above and beyond what the climate can
handle, the "cloud" will fall apart. Global finance capital, the tech
industry with it's massive server farms, crypto mines amd datacentres
won't continue, they physically won't be able to except in more
localised, isolated forms. This won't end the capitalist economic order,
but it will cripple the war machine & technocapital's hold over Empire,
and the ability for capital to continually grow worldwide & project it's
power will be diminished the more it's cut off from the energy and
resources like lithium, cobalt etc it relies upon.
So what does this mean for healthcare and production? It's pretty
simple: we're fucked so long as it's patented anyway. The corporate
healthcare system makes medicine for profit, which means the direction
of all research is railroaded toward what companies can sell, not what
will help people the most. Copyright law directly prevents medical
science from being able to do much, research on cures for common
diseases is regularly shut down in exchange for long term treatments
that can be sold for life instead. From top to bottom, the entire global
healthcare network is a sham designed to uphold the liberal order via
biopolitics and there is no revolutionary outcome that won't involve a
huge loss of medical expertise, productive capacity, and availability.
Most medicine currently produced creates extreme amounts of waste and
ecological damage due to excessive packaging, overproduction, ending up
in the water supply and relying upon unsustainable crop monoculture and
chemical industries. Like every part of the capitalist economy, the
healthcare industry is far more destructive than it has any right or
need to be.
Nobody has the answers for an ecological healthcare system, there's far
more people don't know than they do know, we can only speculate and
guess at ways to make treatment work for the most amount of people. It's
going to take a lot of research from people who know what they're doing
to really maximise the amount of people we can treat given the limited
resources we'll have as the century unfolds into ecological collapse.
But also, healthcare is not the biggest threat to the planet right now,
and this is where I'm extremely pissed. I see so many theoretical
debates, but unless you're creating diy & underground medical mutual aid
networks that lower people's dependancy on the capitalist supply chains,
get your head out of your fucking ass mate.
People want to imagine the death of capitalism as an overnight process
after a worldwide revolutionary war, or as a series of smaller
revolutions creating marxist leninist states that will wither away into
nationalist oligarchies or something. This is completely out of touch
with our modern conditions. For anybody on this planet to survive,
fossil fuels need to end, ecology has to be defended, logging and
monoculture farming need to end, etc etc. You don't do this by
"organising", these are international megacorporations that your little
protest won't do shit about. If your goal as a leftist is to avoid mass
death and destruction caused by capitalism and such, you'd be getting
off your ass and directly stopping fossil fuels (stopfossilfuels.org),
shutting down the pipelines, sabotaging the industrial equipment, and
making it as expensive as possible for capitalism to maintain the growth
economy. Your parties and organisations in the west are not a threat to
any state, and while they might be able to do some good social support
work, you won't be leading the proletariat to a revolution, you'll be
leading a group of like minded people that are a minority among the left
spouting communism as the sollution to the end of the world like a
millenarian preacher, right up until you get wiped out by famine and
bushfire.
The death of capital is not a binary, no war will be declared, because
war has already long since been declared on and by the oppressed
multitude under empire. The social war began long ago. There is an
active global struggle of resistance already being undertaken as the
centres of capitalist power are attacked directly by clandestine
activists looking to stop Empire's techno-capital war machines from
tearing the planet apart. Typical ecocidal industry like fossil fuels
and livestock farming, the arms industries, technocapital & various
parts of the state machine are attacked every day, and communiques are
thrown up wherever. Notice that in all this time talking about
insurrection, I haven't mentioned anybody firebombing up a hospital, or
a medicine factory? There's a fucking reason, there are way more
important targets, nobody wants to get random sick people killed, and we
can deal with that shit later when we can seize back control of medicine
from big pharma who religiously guard their secrets.
More and more civilians will join the general insurrection as the
existential threat of the climate crisis draws ever nearer and they
experience profound loss or dread from it's effects. Everybody wants to
imagine radical ecological praxis as this thing that died with the ELF,
and ever since iraq/afghanistan environmentalism was a failure so the
only solution to the climate crisis is doubling down on leftism. They
want to see them and their organisation be the ones guiding the masses,
directly taking matters into their own hands during or after "the
revolution". It involves a slow progressivism and organisation-building
which can certainly result in good mutual aid networks and the like but
won't grow fast enough to outpace collapse.
Industrial civilisation is collapsing whether we like it or not, fossil
fuels are running out, but all too slowly. Production & use of them is
growing in capitalism's mad drive to maintain the status quoa, and the
resource wars will make alternative forms of energy hard to get even
before we get into criticisms of how "green" tech like solar panels are
environmentally destructive. You have two options, you can help speed up
this process by cutting the flows of energy to capital today, or you can
sit back and let the situation get exponentially worse while using the
disabled as an excuse to get into petty discourse. The former option
will result in a bit of short-medium term instability as the backbone of
the capitalist economy is attacked, the latter will make the overflowing
of hospitals during covid-19 waves look like a joke as an apocalyptic
scale set of disasters unfolds and causes chain reactions of mass death
and suffering. It's your choice.