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Title: Introduction to the Apocalypse
Author: Anonymous
Date: 2009
Language: en
Source: Retrieved on December 10, 2009 from http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/12/02/apocalypse_read.pdf
Notes: (Introduction to) the Apocalypse is made possible inpart by the Institute for Experimental Freedom and the faculties of its aesthetic war machine.  it-est-futurum.blogspot.com  nevertrustacop.org

Anonymous

Introduction to the Apocalypse

“The slogan ‘Revolution or Death!’ is no longer the lyrical expression

of consciousness in revolt: rather, it is the last word of the

scientific thought of our century. It applies to the perils facing the

species as to the inability of individuals to belong in a society where

it is wellknown that the suicide rate is on the increase. The experts

had to admit, reluctantly, that during May 1968 in France it fell to

almost nil. That spring also vouchsafed us a clear sky, and it did so

effortlessly, because a few cars were burnt and the shortage of petrol

prevented others from polluting the air. When it rains, where there are

clouds of smog over Paris, let us never forget that it is the

government’s fault. Alienated production makes the smog. Revolution

makes the sunshine.”

— Guy Debord, A Sick Planet (1971)

All of us secretly desire for this world to end. The future lasts

forever. Or at least, it used to. The grand illusion of Western

civilisation has always been the myth of progress, namely that the flow

of history would beneficently extend into an infinite future. To our

parents, civilisation offered houses in the suburbs, computers, and

automobiles. And civilisation delivered. To the children of these

workers, civilisation offered life on the moon, artificial intelligence,

endless peace. All of which have failed to emerge. While our parents

cling to the belief that someday the mortgage will be repaid and they

can retire in happiness, their lost children know this is a lie. This

world offers nothing to us: no meaningful work, no rest, no future —

only fear. Over and over again, we find ourselves conditioned like rats

by the images of not just our own death, but of total destruction. From

the collapse of the World Trade Centre to the alien invasion, from the

spectre of nuclear war to the hole in the ozone layer — and now the

melting glaciers — these images ingrain themselves in our very being.

These images are nothing more than modern projections of the deep-set

fantasy of all religions: the apocalypse.

Today, catastrophic climate change is the image of the apocalypse.

Nothing has escaped the touch of humanity, from the deepest oceans to

the atmosphere itself. There is little doubt that carbon emissions

caused by human activity may bring about the end of the world as we know

it. It’s just a matter of listening to the ticking of the doomsday clock

as it counts down to a climactic apocalypse. Never before in recorded

history has the question of the earth’s survival been so starkly posed,

and never before has such news been greeted with such indifference.

What is to be done in the face of a crisis so large it dwarfs the

imagination? We are left with nothing but a sense of impending doom, a

strange depression that keeps us oscillating between hysterical hedonism

and sad loneliness, and in the end both responses are merely the two

faces of the selfsame despair. Those self-appointed to “save” us from

this crisis — the governments, scientists, activists — seem incapable of

anything but sloganeering: clean development, carbon markets,

sustainable development, climate justice, ecological reparations, green

capitalism. We know in our heart of hearts that these fantasies give any

sensible person as much cold comfort as a stiff drink. Confronted with

the real possibility of the apocalypse, the world becomes inverted: to

continue as if everything is normal in the present moment is the most

refined act of nihilism.

This generalised delirium, formerly confined to only a handful of

activists, has spread over the last few years to the population at

large, and even the state seems a sincere believer in catastrophic

climate change. Observe the reaction of the nation-states who, while in

endless summits to “solve” the climate crisis, such as the COP15,

continue to build airport after airport, highway after highway, giving

industries the remit to emit ever-more carbon. The nation-states

continue to act as if everything is normal, while at the same time lying

through their gritted teeth that “we are solving the climate crisis.”

No-one today, even the children, believe them. Their summits and pledges

are mere fiddling while Rome burns. The absurd plots hatched by

scientists to avert this coming apocalypse, from putting mirrors into

space to pumping water from the bottom of the ocean, have only the

virtue of being at least mildly entertaining. There is a distinct air of

madness about our rulers, a madness that reminds us only too much of the

monarchs of the ancien regime shortly before their beheading. Yet, what

can a single person do? The despair felt when confronted by the reality

of climate change is an honest appraisal of a disaster where there is no

easy escape. Let us hold this despair close, let it nurture us. Honesty

is always the best policy for survival.

The Apocalypse is upon Us

“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to

write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and

beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem

like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.”

— Heinrich Heine, Lutetia; or, Paris (1842)

The apocalypse is above all a relationship that we have to our time. The

apocalypse is always a singular event in the future, so that while there

is a sense of impending doom, there is also strange relief in that

things can go on exactly as they are now, perhaps indefinitely. Two

minor variations exist: Either that this world will be replaced with a

new world, shiny and perfect, or that it will just end simpliciter, with

nothing at all to follow. Regardless, all apocalyptic thinking holds

that this present world will at some point be utterly destroyed. So

there is no reason to care for this world, to preserve it, to sustain

it.

There are two contradictory attitudes one can take to a world whose days

are numbered. The first is to continue a steady course towards the

apocalypse, to bring it on with a certain glee. In a world without a

future, one can abuse this planet without even a the slightest hint of

guilt. This vision of the apocalypse justifies the exploitation of

ever-more carbon by the oil barons and coal lords to maintain the

present form of life, and make a quick buck of profit in the process. It

is precisely this madness that throws the Christian apocalyptic cults

into bed with with these fossil-fuel magnates. The second attitude is to

do everything possible to delay the coming apocalypse. In this case, the

state is the only possible saviour that can prevent the apocalypse, if

not indefinitely, at least for a few more years. Just as any atrocity

would be justified by preventing the return of the Antichrist, so the

state must restructure the lives of its citizens in order to prevent the

apocalypse. Apocalyptic time then places any possibility of change far

into the distant future, taking all agency from our lives and giving it

to some supernatural or scientific event, so negating the possibility of

an all-too-human revolution in the present.

The apocalypse may be all too real. If science is the new religion, then

the present equivalent of prophets would be scientists, and climate

change is their secular apocalypse. It is tempting then to dismiss

climate change as mere rhetoric, some sort of collective delusion

perhaps propagated for nefarious purposes. Yet science has one supposed

crucial advantage over religion; science consists of hypotheses that may

be tested, proved true or false, so that science consists of an always

limited and yet constantly growing approximation of reality. Even in

this era where mysticism is far more popular than science (merely

compare the relative number of books on physics sold as compared to

those on astrology in any bookstore), there is a lurking suspicion that

science actually does matter. Its hypotheses have resulted in everything

from the cure to malaria to unmanned drones in Afghanistan. So there is

a cause for concern when scientists themselves begin to speak of the

apocalypse like mad prophets. The new hobby of science is predicting

like bean-counters how many years we have left: Fifty, twenty, ten,

five. And as long as the apocalypse is not happening right now, we smile

and shrug, and continue our daily lives.

All signs indicate that the apocalypse is underway right at this moment,

not an event in some distant future. The sudden reality of the

apocalypse is not to be doubted by anyone who has any protracted

connection to the planet, from gardeners to nomads. Only in the

cocoon-like and concrete metropolis, where any connection to the vast

array of nonhuman life has been sundered long ago, can anyone fail to

notice that the “natural” world is in a state of advanced destruction.

Our society claimed to be possessed of miraculous powers. These miracles

have become perverse. The fish have left the seas: soon the North Sea

will be devoid of cod, as the warming oceans devastate the plankton

which are their main food source. Fertile land becomes desert: the

emptying of the vast Ogallala aquifer, the tremendous heat waves in

France, the fires in Greece. To dream of milk and honey in this age is

absurd; the honey bees have disappeared, leaving their hives empty and

threatening the reproduction of even the flowers. Even our breast-milk

is full of toxins. Our ancestors would be shocked beyond belief that it

took so little time to make the world not only unbearable, but

uninhabitable.

For those who can remember that our planet lives not only in political

history but in geological time, a wave of massive extinction has

commenced, aptly named the “anthropocene” extinction event. Nearly half

of all species may be gone within the coming decades. Perhaps therein

lies the source of a vague feeling of guilt and an inability to even

appreciate other species except as cartoons or in cages? The only

comparable extinction event in fossil records is the Permian-Triassic

extinction event of nearly two-hundred and fifty million years ago, in

which nearly all sea life died and three-quarters of animals on land.

The cause of the earlier “Great Dying” of the Permian Triassic

extinction event is almost certainly global warming of between 5 and 6

degrees. Great volcanic eruptions in Siberia released huge amounts of

carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gases into the air, resulting in a

warming that led to the release of the even more dangerous methane

trapped in ice — a gas twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide.

This wiped out almost all life in the oceans and nearly all life on

land. There is perpetual fear that we will soon encounter positive

feedback cycles, events like the destruction of the Brazilian and

African rainforests that will cause an inexorable skyrocketing of carbon

emissions, making catastrophic climate change inevitable. Due to climate

change, already we are seeing evidence that the permafrost in Siberia is

melting in an area the size of France and Germany combined, and billions

of tons of methane may soon be released: a “tipping point” straight into

extinction.

There is without a doubt something religious to these convictions, with

reports on melting glaciers being the equivalent to fiery sermons and

carbon offsetting being nothing more than indulgences. The apocalypse is

at this historical moment a very real extinction event; it is a

particular biological extinction event conjoined with what can only be

termed a religious understanding of time, an apocalyptic vision that was

long held in check by the Enlightenment. To separate these two distinct

phenomena, we can call the real wave of extinctions caused by extreme

ecological degradation the “biocrisis”, while we should reserve the

“apocalypse” for the imagined possibility of the end of the world. The

biocrisis is the true in the moment of the apocalyptic false. With

science itself turned from the secular savior to the creator of the atom

bomb, the hope for a bright tomorrow is objectively insane. All we can

hope for is some definite “end” to the situation.

Everyone knows the task of our generation is the overthrow of the

existing order, yet like the early Christians describing the end of

feudalism in religious rather than political language, our generation is

unable to express the obvious necessity of revolution in any more than

the scientific language of catastrophic climate change. The closest

parallel to our era is then the Peasant Wars of the late middle ages,

where the peasant insurrectionists phrased what was fundamentally the

desire for a social revolution in religious terms. Perhaps then it is

not without a sense of irony that a “climate camp” to reduce carbon

emissions seized Blackheath, where centuries earlier Wat Tyler and an

insurrectionary army of peasants nearly overthrew the English monarchy:

the first of modern failed revolutions. As Engels noted, it would take

centuries for a revolutionary language to be created that could phrase

the struggle of beggar-kings and heretic priests like Thomas Muntzer for

“omnia est communia”, for everything to be held in common, to be phrased

in a way that could be understood without God. The first step in

overthrowing the present order is no different: to formulate a new

political language of insurrection from the scientific language of

catastrophic climate change.

Of Markets and Carbon Markets

“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing

deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late

capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”

— Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (1994)

The apocalypse is not happening in the future, it is happening now. It

is not the result of our personal sins and it is not the “collective

responsibility of humanity”. Climate change (or God, or whatever) will

not bring about the apocalypse. The apocalypse began with the advent of

our current form of life based on industrial production. It is easy to

assume that there is no alternative to this form of life, that the way

we live in this present moment is simply a reflection of the way things

are. Implicit in this common-sense is the not-so-hidden assumption that

the present will extend indefinitely into the future, which both

provides a measure of comfort as well as the feeling of imprisonment. In

times of crisis, a space of freedom returns, and the possibility of a

rupture with the present opens. History, long banished to dreary

scholastic books, returns to us fresh and alive. To push away that which

is closest to us, our very form of life, and see it objectively — this

might seem impossible. Yet it is not: the first step is to give our form

of life a name, to identify it as something finite in time and space, so

capable of ending. This perpetual present that has its only favor being

the certainty of its own destruction has a name: capitalism. Capitalism

is based on an equation so simple a child could understand it:

technology plus human labour plus natural resources creates commodities.

These commodities can be either more technology for production —

otherwise known as capital — or commodities for consumption. The iron

law of value states that everything may become a commodity to be

exchanged for some value, and value is incarnated as monetary price.

Commodities are exchanged not to fulfil human needs, but to accumulate

more value. The flow of commodities produces flows of carbon as a

trivial side-effect of industrial production, and hence the destruction

of our entire ecosystem is built into the logic of capitalism. The

constantly decreasing term in our equation is the finite “natural”

resources of our planet, which taken to their wild asymptotic end spells

the real possible extinction of the vast majority of currentlyexisting

forms of life.

Capitalism is a relationship based on force and class division. For

capitalism to continue the vast majority of humanity must sell our time

producing more wealth for the capitalist bourgeoisie. The vast majority

of humanity has no option but to sell its labour upon the market in

return for commodities to help them survive. The proletariat, the

“working-class” in its broadest sense, includes the vast amounts of

excluded and unemployed (who stand as a reserve army of labour) that are

not necessarily actually at work, and so consists of everyone who have

nothing except their time to sell. The bourgeoisie, also called

capitalists or owning classes, are those that own the capital.

Capitalism tends to go hand-in-hand with private property, as all of

these commodities, resources and capital are private property, owned by

an individual, corporation, or even the state. The inescapable logic of

capitalism is then to colonize every sphere of life, assigning that

which was held in common both a private owner and value. This double

operation must take place so that this newly valued commodity can be

exchanged on the market in order to produce more profit for its owner,

and hence, expand value and capitalism. As capitalism has now

encompassed the entire globe, it needs new kinds of commodities. Even

the most immaterial components of life — from our genes to our future

(via insurance) — can be given a price. There seems to be possibly

infinite commodities; these are so-called “immaterial” commodities in

the form of code, emotions, and knowledge itself. The inconvenient truth

is that even the most immaterial of commodities such as the Internet or

intellectual property rests upon a firmly material foundation, currently

the foundation of oil-based products such as food, plastic, computers.

Climate change is just symptomatic of capitalism reaching the limits of

its expansion in the world of natural resources that evolved before

capitalism. It is then fitting that a totalising crisis like climate

change accompanies a totalising system of production like capitalism.

Carbon emissions are the by-product of capitalism just as defecation is

the by-product of humans eating, as fossil-fuel intensive energies are

the primary source of cheap energy that capitalism harnesses for

production. Yet even stopping carbon emissions would not halt the

totalising biocrisis brought on by capitalism.

Carbon emissions and climate change are a mere symptom of the ecological

degradation caused by capitalism. Taken as an isolated issue

in-and-of-itself, climate change is ludicrous. Even if burning fossil

fuels didn’t cause climate change, it would still be cancerous to

humans, pollute the ocean and atmosphere, fueling death-dealing

automobiles and missiles, creating the raw materials of everything from

disposable plastic bags to useless toys. Just as cutting down the forest

reduces the planet’s ability to store carbon, it also destroys

uncountable species, ripping asunder indigenous forms of life and

evicting them from their homes, and destroying even the possibility of

the joy many humans get from being outside. While a “green” zero-carbon

capitalism may be possible, if implausible, even a zero-carbon

capitalism inexorably transforms living natural resources into dead

capital. If it’s not production of carbon, it will be the destruction of

water, of the soil, of lives of the poor, all sacrificed to the ravenous

appetite of capital for the production of commodities, even if it means

the end of the reproduction of life. Capitalism is the origin of the

biocrisis, the last and final crisis of capitalism.

The logic of crisis is the logic of capitalism, and capitalism has been

in a state of crisis for decades although it has only become

self-evident in the financial crisis of 2008. By far the most productive

social system the world has ever seen, capitalism over-produces, leading

to an over-accumulation of capital. In any social system shaped around

the survival of humanity and the world, this would be viewed as a

miracle: the hungry could be fed, the homeless housed, and the

creativity of humanity unfettered by mere material concerns. Yet by the

perverse logic of capital, this over-productivity is a crisis: it is

increasingly harder to make a profit when more and more commodities are

made cheaper and cheaper, and workers are paid less and less.

The only way out of crisis is through either a war that destroys capital

— the World Wars being the obvious solution to the Great Depression — or

by some act of black magic to invent a new market of commodities. As

total war is viewed as suicidal in the nuclear era, the giant lie of

debt and financial markets were created to save capital from crisis in

the 1970s and 1980s. With the labour movement destroyed by Thatcher and

Reagan — a process globalised through the IMF, the WTO, and the other

instruments of neoliberal capitalism — the social peace that followed

World War II was terminated. The Left reacted in moralistic horror, but

only stood mouth agape as the social solidarity of the worker’s world

was destroyed, replaced with precarity and the cult of self-interested

individualism. The replacement for the wage was debt — money one could

spend, but that had to paid back, literally binding the once-rebellious

poor to the infinite continuation of capitalism. Debt is the perfect

commodity, and the future itself became the new market; the financial

market was born, ushering in the era of postmodernism. It is into this

world that we are born, a world of skyscrapers and monstrous mega-malls,

whose towering glass exteriors show that this world was not built for

humans, but for the monstrous and inhuman subjectivity of capital. Even

with a map, it is impossible not to get lost in metropolis. And the

option of war has not been taken off the table. Far from it, the

postmodern world is a world of continual police operations. Instead of a

purely military war, a social war that encompasses all of daily life is

waged against the population: wars against drugs, against immigration,

against political dissent, against “terrorism.” Politicians can move

from the war on terrorism to the war against climate change without

skipping a beat.

As the space of the world was bound tighter to financial capital via the

spectacular technology of cybernetic networks, all sense of the past

evaporated into an ever-present now of instant satisfaction. As no-one

knows how to actually value debt, a wild cornucopia of highly profitable

measures arose: markets for risk, derivatives, collateralised debt

obligations, credit default swaps. The value of the financial system

grew to an astounding four times the real productivity of capital.

Furthermore, the very concept of debt has as its implicit promise that

the future must be an eternally frozen version of the present, as debt

is a claim on the materialisation of future profits. As it became

evident that the poor could never pay back such massive debts, the age

of financial capitalism and its secret religion of the free-market

ended. No-one believed in the banks and they collapsed, just as the

pagan temples of ancient Greece fell into ruins when no-one believed in

Zeus any longer. The banks themselves did not even know how much money

was worth, and no-one trusted the state to fix this crisis of value. The

British Chancellor said that it was “his word” that the savings of

people would be protected, but there were long lines outside the banks

nonetheless. How could anyone trust the government that had claimed

there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Only an event of nearly divine proportions can resurrect the belief in

capital and the state, and luckily there is a miracle: the advent of

catastrophic climate change. From Greenpeace to Obama, the solution

everyone touts to climate change is, unsurprisingly, the expansion of

capitalism into the very atmosphere via carbon trading. By government

decree at summits like the COP process of the United Nations, carbon is

assigned a monetary value, and then exchanging carbon on a market,

carbon emissions are supposed to decrease. However, this contradicts all

past experience and the axioms of capitalism itself. The creation of yet

another market will undoubtedly lead to more capitalist production, and

so accelerate ecological degradation. While capitalism has figured out

how to assign values to simple material necessities like shoes and coal,

the price of carbon will simply be made out of thin air. The

resemblances to the pricing of “risk” on financial markets to the

pricing of carbon on carbon markets are almost all-too-clear. Such

inability to assign adequate value is a recipe for a boom of rampant

fraud and speculation, followed by a resounding crash. A carbon market

is just like the financial market, as the failure of the European

Union’s Emission Trading System, later a part of the Kyoto Protocol, has

already demonstrated in spades. Carbon markets require more production,

and so more carbon, which in turn signs the collective death sentence of

the biocrisis. How does one assign a price for carbon? How can one give

the continued existence of human life as we know it a monetary value?

The market demands such questions be answered. To burn a car dealership

to the ground is more ecologically sustainable than carbon trading; it

is precisely the creation and flow of commodities that threatens the

future of life on this planet.

Sabotage the Carbon Flows

“For years, decades, we have pleaded and petitioned those in power,

those responsible for injustice, genocide and ecocide. This pleading has

gone unanswered. It is time to use actions that can not be ignored.”

— Jeff “Free” Luers, On Sabotage (2001)

Far into the horizon, the coal moves endlessly down the conveyor belt,

from open-cast coal mine to the smoke-stacks of the power plant. In

Glentaggart suddenly there is a break, a rupture, something almost

unheard of: sabotage. The belt has been cut; the coal tumbles to the

ground. Sabotage is the elementary form of resistance to capitalism. And

so, sabotage is simultaneously the elementary form of preventing

catastrophic climate change.

Sabotage is a generalised phenomenon. Everyone is doing it. Who doesn’t

hate their job? As capitalism tries to squeeze ever more productivity

out of people, workers themselves attempt to self-manage, perhaps by

reading “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” or other self-help books,

blaming themselves for their persistent depression. More often workers

go insane, and if wealthy will end up in psychiatrist offices... and if

not, homeless on the street. No one can work all the time unless they

somehow self-manage themselves into becoming part and parcel of capital

itself. In response to the frantic pace of capitalism, there is the

proliferation of everyday resistance to capitalist productivity. This

can take two forms: First, that of individual ‘acts’ of resistance or

survival, taking sick days from work, sleeping in, stealing, fake

benefit claims, the sabotage of equipment. The second form, that of

collective action through strikes or occupations is more dangerous to

capitalisms maintenance. As such the state and the capitalist owning

class have developed tactics to deal with such threats. These can take

forms ranging from the police club to the scab union official.

A limited and controlled amount of sabotage is the grease behind the

wheels of the capitalist machine. A small amount of stolen time for

“tobacco breaks” is tolerated, as is the use of computers for checking

personal e-mail and playing video games in offices. These activities are

not clamped down either because they are not noticed, or because truly

wise managers realise this small amount of sabotage is necessary to

prevent the working-class from going insane at work. To give the worker

at least some minor level of autonomy is necessary for the smooth

operation of the entire machine. To off-load coal from a train to the

power-plant on a conveyor belt, the worker must actively involve himself

in making certain that the coal is off-loaded at a uniform speed, to

personally deal with any disruptions and irregularities in a way that a

mere robot would be incapable of doing. If for some reason the train is

late, the worker can wait patiently. If the conveyor belt stops, the

worker can also stop and investigate the reason. However, this autonomy

can always be used against capitalist production itself. From this

potential is the long tradition of worker sabotage that has always been

the scourge of capitalism. For example, workers in the USA once put

empty beer cans inside the hollow spaces of automobile doors, so that as

soon as they hit the highway the cars made noises, forcing the recall of

thousands of vehicles and a tremendous loss of profit. This is what a

small act at the heart of production can do. Imagine what small acts at

the sensitive heart of the carbon-emitting infrastructure could do.

Sabotage is any act that destroys the reproduction of capitalism. The

individual as worker is the basic unit of the reproduction of capitalism

and this worker can mutate out of the confines of capitalism, into

something entirely new, a potential saboteur, a Luddite for the

twenty-first century. One can even consider dropping out of school or a

career — and therefore wasting the considerable “investment” made in a

person by society — to be a form of life-sabotage. Even generalised

depression will lead to sabotage, as one becomes a “bad” employee or

simply fails to turn up to work. The problem is not the lack of small

acts of sabotage. The problem is to increase their intensity and

organisation to a point where the flows of commodities — and so carbon —

are blocked. This will require a new kind of mass sabotage, a new kind

of strike: the human strike.

There is a constant tension between protest and sabotage that goes under

the term “direct action.” The thesis of the protest is always that if

“the masses” were only told by placard-waving activists about the

disastrous state of the world, then they would rise up and force things

to change. However, people outside “activism” already realise the dire

state of affairs. Most people find it easier to push it out of their

minds rather than march in endless circles with signs, correctly

realising that protest is an ineffective tactic. Protest merely asks the

powers that be of capital and the state to politely stop. Millions tried

this to stop the Iraq War in 2003, to no effect.

The difference between protest and sabotage comes down to the following

maxim: The point is not to ask for something to stop, but to make it

stop. In this vein, a movement towards “direct action” emerges. This

motto of “direct action” in terms of climate change has mostly been

taken up by the Climate Camp movement originating from the United

Kingdom. The climate camps, while effective at raising awareness of

different forms of life, have proved to be ineffective themselves at

actually halting carbon-intensive infrastructure via direct action. This

is not to say that their spectacular influence via the media has not had

an effect, for surely it has been one of the factors that prevented a

third runway at Heathrow airport from being built, or a new coal-burning

power plant at Kingsnorth not to be constructed. To be clear, the

climate camps have failed at the task of stopping the flows of carbon

via direct action without mediation. At best, the workers themselves

shut down the infrastructure for the announced day of action. Shutting

down a coal-burning plant here, stopping an airport expansion there,

halting some carbon emissions for a day: these are all concessions the

state will more than happily give as long as overall the flows of carbon

and commodities are not threatened. Eventually, any strategy based on

media manipulation will reach its limits. To shut down every

coal-burning power-plant, while necessary to halt catastrophic climate

change, would be a catastrophe for the economy. The failures of mass

direct action by the climate camps have a silver lining, for a truly

successful direct action on carbon-intensive infrastructure like the

Heathrow airport in London or the Kingsnorth coal-burning power plant in

Kent would bring down an iron fist of repression far greater than any

yet seen by protest. The state finds that an attempt to shut down

infrastructure critical to the maintenance of global capitalism, like

power-plants and airports, is of far more danger to capitalism than

street parties and summit mobilizations. The irony of the situation is

that despite the fact that the protests against catastrophic climate

change are primarily symbolic, to halt climate change is far from

symbolic.

The question is not what to do, but how. While these camps and mass

protests are useful as educational battle-grounds, they can not in

general succeed in halting the flows of carbon directly. As the police

raid on the Kingsnorth camp showed, the territory of the climate camps

almost always puts direct action at a disadvantage. It is just difficult

to mount a successful mass direct action in a field, isolated in the

middle of nowhere, surrounded by police and cameras, with only a few

rather obvious targets nearby. The climate camps suffered from

“picturethinking.” Being unable to grasp the totality of capitalism as

the source of climate change, climate camps resort to only concrete

targets that are obviously emitting carbon, leading to the likely

re-cuperation of these direct actions by green capitalism. Creativity

should be called for, as coal-burning factories with large smoke stacks

and airplanes with huge combustion engines are not the only source of

carbon emissions. Carbon emissions are the by-product of the very flows

of global capital itself and the infrastructure of the state that

maintains it, and these flows can be blockaded, stopped, and shut down.

To stop pollution in an era in which the entire world has become a

factory, all one has to do is to choose a date and a target, where the

situation is to the advantage.

The choice of targets often comes down to what resonates and what one

can get away with. The actual methods include anything considered

suitable, and violence never need be employed; both blockades and

sabotage of industrial production are strangely non-violent. Whilst any

attempts to actually storm the coal-burning power-plants of Kingsnorth

and Drax to “shut them down” failed, a train-line holding coal was

blocked by an act of civil disobedience in 2008. If the protesters in

the UK could learn from the decades-old movement of the anti-Castor

autonomen in Germany, then they would realise the multitudes of ways to

paralyse a train full of coal that does not even involve arrests. The

most successful sabotages do not only directly and without mediation

halt production, but chose targets that provoke popular sympathy. These

targets need no communique: by their very nature, they are impossible to

ignore. The sabotage of coal transfer lines in Glentaggart carried out

at the Scottish Climate Camp serves as a prime example. For years, the

devastated mining community of Douglas had been fighting the creation of

another strip-mine. Climate “activists” set up a tree-sit in order to

prevent the expansion of strip-mining, and were given food and support

by the locals. Even the police were sympathetic. When it was realised

that kilometres upon kilometres of convey belts transporting coal across

Scotland could be easily destroyed with a single cut, they were. Where

decades of protest had failed, a single act of sabotage had succeeded,

albeit momentarily.

To block the flows, sabotage must move from moments to sustained

duration. Sabotage at the heart of production with the complicity of the

workers themselves could return. Look at the widespread strikes,

bossnappings, and threatened explosions by workers in France today,

where they do not want to return to work, to be a worker, but want

immediate abolition of their own role within capital, which they

concretely see as possible via large pay-offs. On the other hand, watch

how the antiglobalisation and radical ecological movements have

transformed into a movement to stop climate change. Imagine if these two

tendencies combined, as they came close to at the Vestas occupation. Who

else knows how to halt the flows better than the workers themselves? A

million people in the streets could not halt the Iraq War, but the

dockworkers could easily halt arm shipments.

The spread of sabotage as an offensive in the generalised social war is

the most promising terrain of struggle against capitalism. The vast

majority of people may not show up to a demonstration, but it does not

mean that they are insensible to the dizzying social and economic

disintegration of capital; their cynicism only proves only they are

better tacticians than the self-described activists. Yet in a future of

declining natural resources and crisis, increasingly large swathes of

the population will want a way out. Without a doubt, those who fight

today will be the children of the last generation to truly believe in

capitalism. For the youth today have no hope. If a few dying old men

want to bring apocalypse, their children must bring on the insurrection.

Perhaps their children will meet at night covered in black masks. Or

perhaps these new-born saboteurs will operate in broad daylight, flight

attendants and construction workers, students and baristas, junior

accountants and even...the police. The question is no longer one of

theory, but of practice: How to blockade the flows of capitalism as to

halt ecological degradation and human exploitation? It may end with

generalised social war, but it begins with groups of friends. Hand in

hand, bands of friends can co-ordinate to halt the flow of commodities

and carbon. Flexing their muscles, perhaps just first for an hour. Then

a day. Then a month. The goal: forever.

After the coal-line is sabotaged in Glentaggart, the locals from the

town of Douglas who have been resisting the open-cast coal mine visited

the Scottish Climate Camp. The villagers wanted to express their

concern. The coal is now moved on trucks through their village

illegally. Yet since when has capitalism ever cared for legality when

profit is at stake? The villagers were worried that the media would

paint them all as saboteurs and so put back their struggle against the

open-cast coal mine. Perhaps the sabotage went too far. The reality of

the matter is obvious. The sabotage did not go far enough.

The Spectacle of Green Capitalism

“As long as there is Man and Environment, the police will be there

between them.”

— Anonymous, The Coming Insurrection (2006)

It must be an almost religious force then that keeps people enthralled

to capitalism. Debord calls this force the “spectacle” — the

advertisements, television, blogs, web-sites, video-games — that is

nothing more than the collection of images that serve as the revealed

religion of capital. Sarte remarked that he had never seen perfection

until he had seen a movie. The world of advertisements is to us as

central as the world of Christ and his angels was to our medieval

ancestors. The spectacle is when the relationships between humans become

mediated not just through commodities, but images produced by capital.

As capital over-accumulates to ever more absurd heights, in the search

for more markets, capital colonises the very social life of humans.

Capitalism is to colonise the totality of our social life precisely to

the extent it is able to capitalise any other form of life. One step of

this colonisation was depriving the multitude of their traditional form

of life in order to put them to work in factories. Yet somehow, after

work, workers rejoiced and, shedding their work-day clothes, became

human again: playing music in the bar, dreaming in the park, laying in

each other’s arms. In order to extract perpetually more profit, there

became ever-longer hours and evermore perfected assembly lines, with a

global division of labour that undermines traditional factory

organizing. However, eventually a limit is reached in classical

capitalism.

To continue the production of endless commodities, capitalism must

colonise all of human time and culture. A new and terrible prison of the

imagination is imposed upon people via the perfect image of the

commodity, transmitted electrically around the world via the mass media.

These images of commodities direct our collective human activity, so

that our relationships become commodities themselves, the sickening

appearance of social capital. This global collection of disjointed

images of commodities and super-stars then becomes the abstract unity

that binds the fragmented humanity together, masking the very real

divisions of power and wealth.

For decades, capitalism produced only the spectacle of its own

perfectibility in the form of sexy young people consuming shiny new

things eternally, but always leaving out the images of its own waste.

All the obvious causes and results of capitalism were artfully hidden,

from the millions of pounds of plastic in the oceans to the endless

acres of forests reduced to stumps. As the process of natural resource

extraction can not continue infinitely on a finite planet without some

physical side-effects that will eventually wake even the most hypnotized

of workers from their spectacular slumber, the spectacle can no longer

present itself as images of heaven on earth. The happiness promised by

commodities is transformed into terror. The dream of capital becomes its

nightmare: the image of the apocalypse.

In the era of the apocalypse, the spectacle must invert itself. In the

analysis of Debord, the spectacle as a collection of images was the

summit of industrial capitalism, the symbol of its total power. As a new

and very material reconfiguration of capitalism is in order, the first

step is the transformation of the images of the spectacle. Images of the

apocalypse are endlessly repeated in movies starring Al Gore, in the

pleas of scientists, and the last of polar bears hanging desperately

onto the final melting iceberg. When produced by capitalism, these

images are not innocent reflections of reality, but instead signal a

conscious manipulation of our inner lives in order to make us willing

slaves to the transformation of late capitalism into green capitalism,

even if due to the biocrisis some measure of alarmism is justified.

Green capitalism is merely a spectacular form of capitalism that denies

its own role in the consumption of natural resources. The image of green

capitalism as a latter-day technological messiah that must rescue a

powerless humanity from the apocalypse produces again only an unreal

unity that masks the real divisions between those who benefit and the

vast majority of the world that suffers from ecological degradation.

A Greenpeace ad in the New York Times said, “It wasn’t the Exxon Valdez

captain’s driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.” Any

desire for a genuinely social revolution is transferred to the ascetic

self-management of the individual, the care of the self. Remember that

self-management is still nothing more than management, with a tinge of

self-righteous puritanism. Only the righteous will be saved, and your

individual carbon emissions are a perfect way of measuring your sins.

Google has even commenced the production of devices to allow

self-management of personal electricity consumption and, no doubt soon,

carbon emissions. True salvation is now being “carbon neutral” or more

“realistically” a 50% carbon reduction, a 65% reduction, an 85%

reduction. These goals employ all the fanaticism of fad diets and

flagellation. Of course, this perfectly alienated solution to climate

change ignores the obvious contradiction that a single individual

reducing their personal carbon emissions has little to no effect. For

example, unplugging your phone charger only reduces your personal energy

consumption by one-hundredth of one percent at most. A more sinister

agenda is at work. The world’s population is so vast, so huge, that it

is even inconceivable to imagine policing this multitude, to coerce them

into green capitalism. The new slaves must enter into green capitalism

willingly, and must police themselves, cleansing themselves of all

impure thoughts of communism and violence; these thoughts are taken to

be the result of some neurochemical disorder, or childhood trauma.

Green capitalism must refuse to admit, under all circumstances, that our

mode of production is responsible for carbon emissions, since from that

terrible hypothesis would come the obvious conclusion that such an

edifice must be overthrown, and that those who benefit from it, the

planetary bourgeoisie, are those who have truly caused the catastrophe

of climate change. They try to escape by placing the blame on a

‘collective’ humanity who have harnessed industrial production for their

‘common’ needs at the expense of the environment, ignoring the

historical reality that climate change is being precipitated not by

humanity as a whole, the vast majority of which was dragged kicking and

screaming into the factories and sweat-shops, but by capitalism, married

as it is to industrial production. Indeed, carbon emissions and climate

change more than clearly reveal what can only be called a class divide:

the carbon emissions of a jet-setting businessman from either Britain or

Qatar outstrip those of the thousands of unemployed, from the United

States to Guatemala, that have been excluded from the planetary

bourgeoisie, or those workers enslaved by the self-same planetary

bourgeoisie in the vast factories in China and Brazil. Whilst the social

peace of the last fifty years in Europe and the United States seemed to

make the division between classes disappear, so that the working-class

thought itself a part of the bourgeoisie (for example, by partaking in

the financial markets) and the bourgeoisie simply pretended it did not

exist, in an era of declining natural resources it would be surprising

not to see a return of class hatred. Unless, of course, green capitalism

can via the image of the apocalypse convince everyone that “we’re all in

it together”.

Never is capitalist production itself to be questioned; far from it, a

whole new market of green commodities is produced for a profit.

Everything from electric cars to “fair trade and carbon-neutral” lattes,

whose production only worsens the real crisis of natural resources

whilst stroking the egos of a new green bourgeoisie who can afford such

precious green products as the rest of the world descends into food

riots. Green restaurants, green airports, green banks, soon enough there

will be lead-free green bullets and green torture chambers. Climate

change only produces a whole new round of profit for everyone from

professional activists from Greenpeace, climate change scientists,

green-washing advertising companies, and now the very state itself. With

every prophesy of the coming apocalypse, there is a ring at the cash

apocalypse rather than escaping it. Those who would call to the state to

find a solution, solutions which would include further taxation on the

working class and poor in the form of carbon credits and other measures

of green austerity, will only lead to increased state control over our

everyday lives. These calls will only be used to consolidate state power

and secure the profitability of capital whether the technologies it

employs are ‘green’ or not. It is ridiculous to beg for the ‘capitalist

management’ of a crisis that capitalism itself created.

The solutions of green capitalism, when inspected under the light of

science, are science fiction. Sustainable energy just doesn’t add up. To

give the standard of living of the planetary bourgeoisie to the rest of

the world is mathematically impossible on “sustainable energy,” as

anyone with a basic knowledge of arithmetic can determine. Even if all

of Africa was covered in biofuel-producing plants like jatropha, we

would only cover a third of our current oil consumption. This is even

without considering that biofuels transform desperately needed land for

growing food into land for producing biofuels. Wind, geothermal, tidal

energy, even if exploited to their maximum via currently non-existent

global facilities, can not even cover a third of current consumption. To

reduce carbon emissions by planting trees would require nation-state

sized tree plantations — which are impossible given population

constraints. The bottom-line is clear: sustainable energy requires both

massive solar farms in other people’s deserts and, even then, it would

require the restarting of nuclear power. The obvious motor of any

“carbon-free” economy will be uranium.

Or just keep mining and burning coal. Luckily for those afraid of

strikes, mines for coal can be re-opened, yet without workers.

Mountaintop removal — destroying mountains older than humanity by sheer

explosives that leave only a lunar landscape behind in order to retrieve

coal — is accelerating, replacing the traditional mining communities,

and their world. Complete fabrications like “carbon capture” (otherwise

known as the eminently paradoxical “clean coal”) will be the green

herrings dangled in front of the population as the use of fossil-fuels

accelerates. Carbon capture requires a considerable amount of energy

produced, to power the technology to capture the carbon; where is that

energy supposed to come from? We emit carbon so we eventually emit less.

We destroy the planet in order to save it. The reign of the green

spectacle turns this paradox into gospel.

Green capitalism is green colonialism, albeit more confused as the

distinctions between the Global North and the Global South dissolve as

what the colonial British called the “coloured empires” of India and

China today compete directly with the traditional colonial West for

natural resources. China is buying tremendous swathes of Africa and the

United States creating military bases near every bastion of oil, whilst

plans have started for massive solar panel farms in Northern Africa to

ship electricity straight to Europe. Green capitalism is nothing but a

strangely postmodern ‘green’ colonialism. The reason for this game is

not just a lack of energy sources, as there is no shortage of coal and

the ever increasing prospects of oil shortage. The reason is much more

deadly, for climate change is expected to lead to a sharp decline in

food production as the world population grows to nearly nine billion.

Follow the money: the large investments of green capitalism are to

construct new border fortifications — the present day of equivalent of

Hadrian’s Wall — to stop the flow of climate refugees, whose numbers are

sure to mount. We don’t need a climatologist to tell us which way the

wind is blowing.

This new era of capitalism will not be heralded by a military war, but

by a generalised low-intensity conflict that encompasses the totality of

life: the global social war. Increased police violence, constant

surveillance, RFID chips, and biometric identity cards are tactical

operations in a war of capital against “the enemy within,” ever so

easily exemplified by anarchists, unemployed youth, and immigrants. As

this social war becomes ever more mundane, climate change will force

wartime measures upon every citizen. Carbon emissions limits and trading

will be excuses for new austerity measures to inflict upon the poor.

Green technology will maintain the bourgeoisie form of life even inside

the most privileged of countries, whilst the rest of the world must be

left to starve to death. Every metropolis will be divided into a “Green

Zone” for the planetary eco-bourgeoisie and vast swathes of exclusion

for the new proletariat. The contrast between the cafes outside Notre

Dame and the excluded banlieus is not the exception, this contrast is

the foundation for the model city of the future, and in this regard, the

riots in Paris in 2005 are the most normal of responses to this new

urbanism. These riots were only a sneak preview of the future, for the

first effects of catastrophic climate change will be food riots and mass

migrations as the waters rise and the deserts creep irreversibly into

arable land. Only the most massive of psychological and spectacular

operations, green capitalism, can save capitalism from this crisis of

its own making. If you don’t want to assist in the spectacle of the end

of the world, you must work toward ending the world of the spectacle.

“How true that the most ‘practical’ people are often the most naïve

utopians!”

— Enrico Malatesta, The anarchists in the present time (1930)

In order For The machinery of this envisioned green capitalism to work,

it is vital that everyone actively participate in generalised

self-management in order to “stop carbon emissions”. Who should we blame

for carbon emissions? The corporation that makes them? The nation that

the corporation is in? A mode of transport between countries? Its

consumers? It’s obvious: in spite of the spectacle of green capitalism,

the totality of the circuit of consumption and production must be halted

to stop climate change. Utopian plans that sketch in detail precisely

how a carbon market can result in a low-carbon world, from Kyoto2 to

“Contraction and Convergence”, never confront the self-evident truth

that their plans only require more than ever an all-powerful state. A

state we can believe in. The state uses the rhetoric of “democracy” to

justify its existence, for democracy denies the very real class tensions

— tensions that will be exasperated by climate changed — induced food

riots.

Activists who call for a more “democratic” mechanism for constraining

carbon emissions serve merely as the vanguard of capitalism itself.

Whilst in the era of neo-liberalism the call for democracy may have been

the most radical of gestures, in the era of climate change the demand

for democratic self-management is the new ideology of capital, as

capitalism realises the only way to prevent an increasingly obvious

class conflict is to have everyone believe that “we are all in it

together.”

How old-fashioned the demands of the alter-globalisation movement appear

in this new era, just as the red flag itself appeared hopelessly out of

date in 1999. “Less coal, more democracy!” these most conservative of

revolutionaries beg. If only the indigenous people were represented! The

women! The poor! Let us pretend that everyone could “have their voices

heard” in the most massive of summits. With no material force to compel

an actual change in our form of life, even the most well- intentioned

will find themselves accomplices to the next round of green capitalist

restructuring.

Do not forget that the institutions of neoliberal capitalism were more

than happy to give the NGOs and “developing world” a seat at the table

of the World Bank. This is precisely how the radical democrats of the

alter-globalisation movement were defeated. The G8 is dead, long live

the G20! A few more people of colour at the table aren’t going to halt

the march towards green capitalism, let alone halt the biocrisis. Barack

Obama, Gordon Brown, Bono, Bill Gates and all the rest would be more

than happy to sit down and have a latte with the representatives of the

“Global South” as long as they can get a good photo-shoot and be quoted

in the newspaper as saying “I feel your pain”.

During a food crisis, one does not sit at the table and beg for the

crumbs from the plates of the rich. Demand nothing. Instead, occupy

everything and blockade the flows! Forget the NGOs who “represent” the

Global South, they are basically in a jet-setting elite of professional

“representatives” that exist to balm the soul of capitalism, and so to

soften the very real colonisation of the Global South. A far better

representative would be the people from Papua New Guinea, who when

delivered medical supplies by British activists, asked instead for guns.

To declare oneself to be against democracy is akin to declaring oneself

fit for a mental asylum even in the most “radical” of social circles,

despite the fact that the primary obstacle to a social revolution

against capitalism is representative democracy itself. Historically,

social revolution is ignited via the gathered intensity of a minority

that takes action into their own hands, not waiting for a vote or

consensus. From the Paris Commune to St. Petersburg, almost every

revolution has only had one out of a hundred people on the streets, with

Tehran in 1979 having one in ten people in the streets. One does not

wait for permission to act. One acts, with those who are willing, and

then if the act is taken at the right time, the action may then

generalise. Historically, waiting for a vote has been the enemy of

revolution: DeGaulle defeated the unrest in May 1968 by calling for an

election.

It is not by accident that democracy and capitalism have since their

historical inception been joined at the hip, declared by Fukuyama to be

the best of all possible flavors of governance. While it certain that

capitalism can continue under many possible governmental forms, Chinese

authoritarianism and the faded remnants of European social democracy

leap to mind, this is not to deny there is a certain attachment of

capitalism to representative democracy. Capitalism and democracy mirror

within each other the same abstract law of value: democracy is the great

equaliser of politics in which every individual is the same, just as the

market is the great equaliser on which every commodity is the same. Just

as every absurd thing from plastic baubles to carbon can be bought and

sold on the market, every possible mundane issue can be voted for and

ratified, from the placement of traffic signals to what proportion of

carbon states will be allowed to emit. Would a vote on the collective

destruction of vast swathes of humanity somehow justify it? Capitalism

reduces all things — even imaginary and invisible things — to the same

abstract form of the commodity, with an owner and a price. Democracy

does the exact same operation on the political sphere, as it reduces all

of us to abstract individuals with the ability to express our “opinion”

through voting. Even consensus can devolve from the creation of new

collective thoughts in common into mere process, an extreme form of

democratic voting where everyone is compelled to agree. Capitalism and

democracy pretend to separate the sphere of politics from that of

economy — and both those spheres from the rest of life. So, what should

one expect of endless meetings, plenums, summits, protocols, voting?

Nothing. One cannot expect a democratic vote, even in the midst of the

most democratic and inclusive of summits, to end climate change. One

might as well believe in fairy tales: Which is after all, all democracy

is.

Calls for “climate justice” ignores the root of the problem if its

demands are made in terms of ‘rights’ granted to individuals via the

state. The concept of climate justice advocated by NGOs and activists

has little to do with the irreversible historical tragedy visited upon

vast swathes of the world by Western colonisalism, which no “technology

transfer” (the forcing of giant centralised energy production) or

“ecological reparations” (pretending the cost of colonialism can be

given a monetary price) can possibly redeem. On its current terrain,

“just transition” concerns itself solely with ensuring that proletarians

remain proletarians, swapping the carbon factory floor of the present

for the windmill farm of the future. By failing to address by whose

agency a meaningful “just transition” will be achieved, “just

transition” activists only help to maintain the management of work and

production. Moreover it postpones the inevitable conclusion; namely that

we are all fucked by ecological degradation at this very moment and

there’s no room anymore for such pleasant illusions as justice, just as

there is no room for bourgeoisie comfort. The reality of the situation

is that vast swathes of working-class Americans and Western Europeans

will have to make do with the same material resources of Africans. The

state makes empty promises of “clean development” and even “climate

justice” knowing true and well the reality of the nightmarish politics

of scarce resources the world is entering. What is needed is not the

mystification of social justice, but a realisation of our position

within the global social war. Not the question of justice, but of

vengeance.

A million tricks — anything and everything except the abolishment of

capitalism and the state — will be played to delay the inevitable

insurrection. What if the workers could decide democratically what to

produce, and what to consume, adhering to the most strict of

carbon-setting principles? This paradise of the radical democrats, who

so loved Argentina, would not solve anything. One needs only to look at

the network of “ecological co-operatives” that are now just soulless

corporate enterprises. As witnessed by co-operatives like Mondragon, the

co-operative today is the most advanced form of self-manged enslavement,

as the worker is supposed to identify with the co-operative more than

with the rest of the working-class. When everyone becomes a little bit

of a manager, how can one not have some sympathy for the boss, who is

just another worker in the same co-operative? “How could you go on

strike? Don’t unionise, don’t rebel. If you have any problems you can

just talk to me. After all, I’m not really the boss, I’m just another

human being.” One cannot expect capitalism, even co-operatively managed,

to produce anything other than ecological devastation, as the

accumulation of dead capital from the living world is built into its

dynamics. In a world of ever-rising unemployment where it is production

itself that is causing ecological degradation, it is is the concept of

work that is itself superfluous.

The best we can hope for is another sentimental education. Even the most

radical democrats must see their hopes dashed, as capitalism betrays

them again and again. Defeated protest after defeated protest, useless

treaty after useless treaty, perhaps at some point even activists will

surrender hope that capitalism and the state can “cure” catastrophic

climate change. The poor, the working-class, the indigenous and others

know the illusion of development, sustainable or otherwise, is gone. The

only option — as pioneered by the workers in Bangladesh who burnt down

their factories to the youth in France who burnt down their libraries —

is the destruction of their identity as workers under capitalism. To

want absolutely nothing from capital and the state except its abolition

by our own hands. A zero-carbon world is possible, but not an

authoritarian nightmare imposed from above by “democratic” capitalism,

but one created and self-organized from below. We do not have forty

years for this sentimental education, for as a species we are running

out of time to halt the biocrisis. If possible, this sentimental

education must be accelerated. The managers and architects of the

movement, the NGOs and all of civil society, the moralistic social

democrats masquerading as anarchists, are only the experimental ground

for the state to perfect its methods of governance. The point is not to

perfect the State. The point is to destroy it.

Ecological Fascism

“We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify

ourselves to exist in this new environment.”

— Norbert Wiener, the Human Use of Human Beings (1954)

Other worlds are possible, it’s just that some are worse. Fascism in the

logical escape route of capitalism in crisis: the perfection of the

state. The cycle of crisis leading to fascism is as follows: the

internal dynamics of capitalism, based on selfish interest and profit,

cannot lead to an overcoming of the crisis of over-accumulation; only a

massive revolution in the mode of production and social relationships

points a way out. The very same conditions that could breed a social

revolution against capitalism is also the breeding ground of fascism.

Fascism is the modernizing saviour of capitalism when it enters crisis.

Do not forget that it was Hitler who built the highways, the factories,

and even normalised the alphabet when the late-forming German

nation-state was lagging behind the rest of Europe in terms of

modernisation. Fascism did what the bourgeoisie, left to their own

devices, were incapable of doing, namely to dominate the most resistant

forms of society and organise them into a new unity. Like politicians

today, fascists cynically promise everything to everyone, even if it

entails contradictions: and so actually resonate with people, but direct

them in the long-term interests of capitalism. In response to climate

change, a new kind of eco-fascism is almost sure to arise, either as

capitalism fails to reform itself into green capitalism or when the

distinction between fascism and capitalism disappear. Right-wing zealots

have a moment of truth when they declare that they don’t like the new

“green” government that will prevent them from burning fires in their

own backyard. Given that carbon markets are only going to increase

carbon emissions, the purported solution to climate change in the form

of strict carbon emission reductions would require nothing less than an

authoritarian state with control over every facet of life. In the name

of “saving the planet,” we will submit ourselves to join the new

collectivity of the state in the form of eco-fascism.

Eco-fascism is only the possibility of a movement to come, so we can

only offer a sketch of its seeds in the present rather than a perfect

description. Still, the signs are hard to ignore. George Monbiot, an

influential British journalist, told his devoted fans that to stop

global warming, we must riot for austerity. Never has the new form of

ecofascism been more clear. Fascism is the copying of revolutionary

organisation to the counter-revolution and eco-fascism will be no

exception. The transformation of fascism to national socialism was an

ideological operation. The national socialists adopted the techniques of

revolutionary communism such as the mass meetings, the street fighting,

and a desire for collectivity. The methodology of communism was

perverted away from its goals of a new Internationale into the service

of the “people” — the Volk — and the Land. There is no reason to believe

that eco-fascism will be any different, although the sources of its new

form of organisation will be anarchism, not communism. For a superficial

example, notice that in Germany and Bulgaria, the fascists have adopted

the dress and even the tactics of the anarchist Black Bloc. However, a

less superficial example is more important: anarchist sub-cultures have

been the vanguard of taking full responsibility of personal consumption,

of “punishing” themselves for drinking Cola, eating meat, using the

“wrong” words. It is then no wonder that some of the anarchist

sub-cultures were the first to fall victim to the spectacle of

self-management in the name of “saving the environment.” The

individualist moralism of anarchism can easily be transformed to

eco-fascism. These methods of self-control, now strictly enforced as

austerity measures, will become the first phase of eco-fascism, and this

moralism will justify any repression against social revolution. The

marking of those who consume products not expensive enough to be

certified as sustainable, those who don’t truly believe, those who

overspend carbon credits, those who defy forced austerity measures,

combined with spying on neighbours, militarised borders, camps for

climate refugees...this is the nightmare of the beginnings of

eco-fascism. Monbiot and the rest of the planetary bourgeoisie in their

pleasant eco-villages should give each other a toast — over organic wine

grown in Cornwall — as none of this will disturb their ever-so-perfect

green zone. Their recuperation of anarchism is almost too perfect.

Capitalism fragments our lives into a million little pieces, and fascism

offers to re-assemble them into a new kind of collectivity. Fascism

offers to let us abolish ourselves as individuals in order for the

supposed greater good of the species, the group, the nation...yet in

reality, it only enslaves us to the domination of a small clique, a

leader, a prophet. Given the widespread fear that any crisis causes,

fascism takes advantage of people’s desire to survive by offering to

dominate them to assure their survival. How is that we desire our own

domination? Fear and the attraction to power. There is something

strangely comforting, and even erotic, in the submission of one’s self

to a collectivity. Unlike anarchism, instead of creating collectivities

based on free association and mutual aid that begin with the

relationships between individuals, fascism creates this new collective

form of life based on the abstract domination of a single individual,

thus the propensity of fascism for figures like Hitler and Mussolini.

Unwilling to change the fundamental social relationships of domination,

fascism blames concrete groups of individuals. So the fascists personify

capitalism in particular individuals or ethnic groups, with the

conspiracy theory of the Jewish bankers being the ideal template, and

eco-fascists will apply this personification against those who that

violate austerity measures. Unfortunately, with the total collapse of

our social life at the hands of the spectacle, this “picture-thinking”

is all-too-easy to understand. In this new era of dwindling natural

resources, immigrants are likely to be the first to suffer.

To the surprise of many, the beating heart of fascism has always been

ecology. The dream of a green and fecund agrarian world, a dream

foolishly thrown out by communism and kept alive by anarchism, is given

as the connection between blood and soil. It fulfils the need for an

ahistorical and transcendental essence upon which the abstract unity of

eco-fascism can be built; namely the relationship between people and the

land. Ecology as a science was defined by its founder, the biologist

Ernst Haeckel, as “the total science of the connections of the organism

to the surrounding external world.” In a misinterpretation of Darwin,

Haeckel believed that the same “laws” of Social Darwinism prevailed

throughout both the natural world and social life, only the strongest —

be they individuals or nations — would survive, and so he became a

proponent of racial purity, joining the Thule Society. From the doctrine

of the Thule Society, Hitler formulated the foundation of an ideology

for national socialism, so that Nazism was to be a “politically applied

biology” to return humanity into harmony with the environment. By

opposing a pure ecological ideal to the metropolitan anomie of capital,

classically fascists were the first who effectively merged ecology and

politics. The relationship between the People and the Land must be

cleansed and renewed, and in this context cleansing means the murder of

those outside the fascist collectivity. This would fit all-too-easily

into the border regimes being put in place across the world. Yet even

more disturbing future scenarios are being dreamt up today by those like

Kaarlo Linkola — who, speaking against free-market capitalism and

unlimited growth in his award-winning book “Can Life Prevail?” believes

that to survive the biocrisis, humanity must be forced from the city and

into agricultural production. Trees must be planted, all airplanes

grounded, construction stopped. While these may not seem to be such

terrible demands, Linkola adds that children who are deemed unfit should

be killed.

Fascism is the technophiliac ideology of the apocalypse. The visions of

a green and harmonious future that serve as the kernel of fascism are to

be realised in the distant and never-quite-arriving future. All the

power of technology developed under capitalism should be harnessed now

at whatever the cost in death. Eco-fascism is apocalyptic insofar as it

must destroy the current world in the here-and-now in order to restore

it to its perfect condition in some infinitely deferred future. This

explains the seeming schizophrenia of fascism, the contrast between the

smokestacks of the concentration camps and dictates of Nazi Germany to

commence nation-wide organic farming. Indeed, an underlying logic

connects the perfectionist ecology of the National Socialists with their

attempt to eliminate, like any productive farmer, what they considered

to be unproductive. As the apocalypse is in the future, all manner of

techniques can be deployed today to bring about the thousand-year reign

of the new heaven on the new earth. Unlike those purists for which the

ends and means must be compatible, ecofascists are more than happy to

employ a mass-based movement and high technology to realise their state

of primordial green virtue. In the era of global climate change, this

combination will be even more tempting, as eco-fascists will also play

to the technophilia of capitalism, since eco-fascism will be more than

willing to use whatever technology can be used to preserve survival of

the land and people. More than traditional capitalism, eco-fascists will

be able to put forward an alternative to capitalism that connects

personal survival to the promise of a restored ecosystem due to

technology.

The coming fascism will not be on that we necessarily recognise and will

not even necessarily be nationalist. There is a common misunderstanding

of fascism, namely that somehow fascism is only about the purification

of races and nations. The murder of the “foreign element” of the

unintegrated Roma fits the mold of classical racism all too well, but

something more happened with the destruction even of the completely

integrated six million European Jews in the Holocaust. Fascism as an

extreme case of racism or nationalism is a myth, and the reality is much

more complicated. The selection of Jews and Roma for extermination was

only the beginning. Including the selection of communists, anarchists,

queers, the disabled and prisoners of war, the victims of the Holocaust

more than double. The true nature of fascism is then revealed by the

final law — the Gemeinschaftsfremdengesetz — that Hitler passed on the

1^(st) of January of 1945, but never implemented. In this law, the

selection begun by the Holocaust was never to end. Next the weak, the

morally dissolute, those insufficiently part of the fascist society ...

all were to be killed. This selection would include anyone whose

behaviour was less than perfectly aligned with the envisioned perfect

fascist society, and this selection was to take place infinitely and

ever more stringently into the future. Those “foreign to the community”

were those who “have been unable to show personality and lifestyle,

especially because of an exceptional defect of reason or character, that

meet with the minimum requirements of the national community”, including

those who “from idleness or debauchery lead a worthless, uneconomical,

or disorderly life, and thus another of the public burden or risk...or

have an inclination to beg, to loafing, thefts, frauds or other

non-serious offences” and especially those who “from intolerance or

belligerence persistently disturb the peace of the public.” In other

words, the Holocaust merely spreads, and anyone who doesn’t fit in to

the ecological fantasy must be eliminated. The parallel to the fate of

the excluded under a regime of climate politics could not be more

obvious.

The first step of the fascist programme is to record everything. That

which the state cannot locate, cannot join its perfect community — or

must be killed for being outside of it. The origin of this peculiar

madness may lie in the idea of the Book of Judgement, in which the sins

of every person are recorded to determine their destiny after the

apocalypse. When this vision materialized as the aptly-named Domesday

book in medieval England, it is no wonder that the peasantry believed

that its completion would herald the doomsday itself. The latter-day

descendants of the Domesday book are the vast computerized databases of

today, and it is forgotten that the Nazi dictatorship started the

stocktaking of individuals to be eliminated with the construction giant

files. That the state should soon be able to measure the ecological

virtue of its citizens may only be a step towards the dark side of a

regime of genrealised self-management, in which everyone is expected to

either become a pure and model citizen or die trying. For those with

long memories, it is not without a sense of disturbance that one hears

the green capitalists talking about increasingly punishing those who

emit more carbon than is allowed. The logic of fascism is the logic of

the “perfection” of the human in a “harmonious and ecological”

community. The coming eco-fascism will represent the completion of the

project that the fascists failed to complete with the

Gemeinschaftsfremdengesetz: the rebuilding of the human in the interests

of capital by the unholy marriage of ecology and cybernetics.

Communisation

“The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything

there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be

in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep

in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we

will wear there. Everything will be as it is now just, just a little

different.”

— Walter Benjamin

The coming of a new form of life is imagined to be an apocalyptic event

to those who desire the continuation of capitalism. It is the image of

the apocalypse that holds us back from the obvious: the only way to

overcome climate change is not zero-carbon towns, not green technology,

not sustainable development, not carbon trading, not eco-fascism, but

another form of life. A social revolution is precisely the reverse of

the apocalypse, for in the creation of a new form of life is the

possibility of the survival in the most adverse of conditions.

A ‘form of life’ is the totality of how life relates to the world, the

uncountable concrete adaptations to a world that allow a form of life to

reproduce. Evolutionary pressures — natural selection — force changes in

forms of life, as some particular adaptations allow successful

reproduction, while others cause extinction. The adaptations that allow

reproduction to continue in the selfsame manner for a period of time are

evolutionary stable strategies. Capitalism was once a successful

evolutionary strategy for at least some portion of humanity, but as as

climate change abolishes the very conditions that capitalism was created

under, namely an unending New World of infinite natural resources,

something has to break. The possibility of a crisis that forces a change

in a form of life is not unique to humanity. Even rabbits face

extinction when they consume all the edible food in their habitats. Nor

is an extinction-level crisis unique to this moment in history, as the

destruction of forests by humans on Easter Island led to an inability to

grow food and build canoes needed to fish. By the verdict of evolution,

creating a world that is unfit for the survival of your own children —

your own genes — is insane. An adult lion does not go out onto the

savannah and murder all the gazelles for food, and so leave nothing but

bones for its cubs. This is precisely what capitalism is in the process

of doing: climate change is making the world uninhabitable for children.

Life can not be reduced to facts, to a simple set of permanent and

essential “human” characteristics. The primary evolutionary advantage of

humanity is that the social relationships that provide the food,

clothing, and shelter necessary for reproduction can be reconfigured

endlessly and changed immediately, rather than held hostage to the slow

march of natural selection. This is especially important as climate

change threatens to radically alter our planet in decades, rather than

millennia. Self-described capitalists misinterpret evolution as a

endless war of individuals against individuals, with the fittest — or

wealthiest — surviving. Fascists further misinterpret evolution as the

war of groups against groups, with the culling of the weak being somehow

for the good of the group or even species. However, evolution is blind,

without any moral bias for either individuals or groups: the only

criteria for evolutionary success is genetic reproduction. The anarchist

hypothesis that can then be put forward is that a new strategy for

organizing our social relationships is necessary, a strategy based on

co-operation. This is not as far-fetched as it seems, for this is the

very strategy employed successfully by the cells that collectively

create our body. From the flying of birds in flocks to the co-operation

of plants with the fungus that helps them absorb nutrients from the

soil, Kropotkin was right: co-operation can mean survival as easily as

competition. In a world of scarce resources, this is precisely the form

of life that we will likely flourish. Communisation is the process of

this new form of life coming to be.

Communisation means the end of capitalist production, the end of private

property and monetary exchange, and the destruction of separate spheres

of work and politics from life. However, communisation does not mean the

apocalyptic destruction of capital. While self-declared “primitivists”

moralistically decry that all technology must be destroyed, it would be

a mistake to want to return to nuts and berries: especially as the Earth

is so damaged by capitalism at this point that it’s hard to believe

there’s enough nuts and berries left to go around. A return to the

“primitive” that would happen as a result of an industrial collapse is

nothing but a particularly juvenile longing for the apocalypse, one that

does not take the possibility of eco-fascism seriously. Capital

in-and-of-itself — the technology, the engines, the silicon chips, the

conveyor-belts — is by itself harmless, although one would find it hard

to imagine a form of life so dreary that it would create the machinery

of an industrial factory besides capitalism. What makes machines

“capital” is their use for producing profit in the circuit of capitalist

production and consumption. The same goes for a worker; a worker is not

a worker when she is at home from the factory, the office, the fast-food

joint. When not at work, when the worker is a mother, a friend, a

comrade, a jokester, a lover. It is only when the potential of humans is

aimed at the accumulation of profit (which can be done as easily by

watching television as working in the factory), that they become human

capital, as put bluntly by latter-day economists. The question is then

not how to destroy things, but to dispel a certain way of viewing the

world.

What if we did not view revolution as the end of things in an moment of

total destruction? What if instead, we viewed revolution as a little

shift, as a change in viewing the world without the logic of capitalism?

Instead of waiting for the end of the world, this little shift could

happen literally overnight, and everything would remain the same, but a

little different. While it is impossible to positively predict without

falling into utopian daydreams, we can imagine the negation of this

world. The day after the revolution, we would wake up in our same

clothing, our same shoes, in the arms of our same lovers. Yet, something

would be different. Humans would see the walls of separation between

them dispel. Under capitalism, people relate to commodities like people

and treat their relationships to people like commodities. Once this

little shift had passed, our relationships would become immediately

social, and we would be free to pursue whatever our relationships

demanded of us. Objects would no longer be stripped of their history and

context in order to be given some market value, but understood as

embedded in the no-longer-hidden social relationships, existing to be

absolutely shared between friends. The same offices and factories would

still be there, but no one would have to go to work in the morning. The

technology therein would no longer be alien to human needs, but could be

resurrected in new and more creative ways to serve human survival and

new forms of life. This world created by human labour would appear to us

again as beautiful. From each according to their ability, to each

according to their need.

Communisation would end climate change from the bottom-up rather then

being directed by the state and capital, who would only cynically

manipulate the issue of catastrophic climate change to restructure

labour and thus continue their domination. In direct contrast to the

implausible carbon markets and technological fantasies: communisation

ends catastrophic climate change by the most direct of methods: the end

of the economy. The only countries that fulfilled their Kyoto limits on

carbon emissions were precisely those countries whose economies

collapsed: Romania and Ukraine. The key difference is that communisation

collapses the capitalist economy on purpose by humanity itself, a

controlled demolition that maximises the survival of those excluded by

capitalism and the manifold non-human forms of life. What appears to be

a only a little shift would be the difference between the survival of

our world and the certainty of its destruction by excessive work.

Capitalism is only the latest incarnation of more fundamental framing of

the world that far pre-dates capitalism. The alienation of humanity from

the commodities we create is only symptomatic of the larger alienation

of humanity from our planet. It is this very separation that allows us

to conceive of our planet as an “environment” full of “natural

resources,” with other species that can be destroyed on a whim. This

framing of the world must be obliterated, so that future generations can

be carefully attuned to the flows not only of carbon, but of the world

of life outside humanity and our plastic toys. It is exactly this

sensibility that our world needs, the sort of sensibility many Europeans

imagine the indigenous tribes of the rest of the world as possessing,

although remember that the barbarians of Europe were at one point

indigenous before becoming “Europeans”. Able to prognosticate from

movement of clouds and slight shifts in temperature the coming weather,

able to determine the health of the soil by feeling for worms: all of

this incalculable knowledge that has nearly been oblierated by capital

must be re-learned. Techniques like permaculture and biomediation,

pioneered only for the planetary bourgeoisie, could be applied for the

good of all. Contra the all-too-easy solutions posed by green

capitalism, this new form of life would present a new evolutionarily

stable strategy able to not only cope, but flourish, in the world as

altered by catastrophic climate change. As has been said, more than our

holiday habits must change to sustain the world to come.

The apocalypse is not unique to capitalism or Christianity: Marx in his

most dreary moments gave us only a secular language for the apocalypse,

holding off “the revolution” until the time is right. There was always

something of a prophet about Marx, and his beard does not help to dispel

the suspicions. The communism of Marx was always infinitely deferred,

justifying the horrors of the Gulag, the bloodstained Chinese factories,

and the ruins of Eastern Europe, and so the possibility of a new form of

life became itself thought of as impossible, a mere sociopathic

ideology. We are against communism as political ideology, and for for

the immediacy of communisation in our lives at this moment.

Far from a distant future apocalyptic revolution, communisation begins

whenever humans socialise material conditions. This goes beyond such

consciously explicit anti-capitalist projects like temporary autonomous

zones, but into much of everyday life. When you give of yourself

selflessly, share food with friends, nurture a child, lose yourself in a

lover, face the risk of arrest or death in defence of your home, and

even present all of yourself to another in conversation: without a

doubt, the majority of human life is real-existing communisation. It is

precisely this everyday solidarity that allows the poor to survive on as

little as a dollar a day, a task that would appear logically impossible

if the survival of the poor were not so empirically self-evident.

Communisation takes this material solidarity and propels it as a new

evolutionary strategy for the planet, based on the demand for the

release of the possibilities to form collectivities based on our common

desire to survive. Far from the forced collectivisations of the Soviet

Union or even the social factory of capitalism (where we are forced to

circulate constantly from job to job and to work with all sorts of

people with whom we would never otherwise associate), communisation is

based on ancient anarchist principles of free association and mutual

aid. Therefore, communisation would also be the right to withdraw from

this circulation depending on your mood and circumstance, while there

simultaneously being at any time the possibility to increase your

intensity by combining with others. By brushing aside the mediation of

capital and the state, self-organized forms of life can emerge that are

attuned to their world and so can solve its actual evolutionary

problems.

Even if communisation begins in everyday life on the margins of capital,

to succeed communisation must become an explicitly international

revolutionary project within and against the totality of capital. That

this should happen immediately is our evolutionary imperative, for with

every passing moment, further irrevocable damage is done by capital that

will make the task of future generations even more difficult. It would

be a tragedy on the level of the species if we began to communise, but

the process started too late to halt a “tipping point” in catastrophic

climate change. We must tolerate no feeble half-measures; unless

communisation causes an explicit revolution, communisation itself

reaches a limit and loses its revolutionary momentum, fossilising into

some sort of social democracy or eco-fascism after a momentary breaking

out of revolutionary fever, which would have the same deadly result as

the the continuation of the capitalist present. Thus the paradox is that

communisation must begin now under the most local of conditions with

none other than our own activity, and yet it can only succeed ultimately

by forcing the totality of capitalism to crumble, so that the tremendous

task of a revolution in our social relationships takes place not on the

level of spectacular illusion, but in material reality. Only a social

revolution will successfully steer us through an era where we must

confront a species-level crisis on a global scale. We as a species now

have our back against the wall due to catastrophic climate change.

Compared to ecofascism and green capitalism, communisation is the least

bloody of paths to bring an end to this situation.

Despite the anthropological evidence that humans lived for millenia

without capital or even states, some would say the project of

communisation is unrealistic and fantastical. Perhaps. The only

philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is

the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves

from the standpoint of revolution. Communisation is the antidote to the

apocalypse.

The Art of Insurrection

“The social revolution .. will not .... put up its sword before it has

destroyed every state .... across the whole civilised world.”

— Michael Bakunin, The Program of the Brotherhood (1865)

In order to prevent catastrophic climate change, the evolutionary

imperative of our era is to destroy the state. The lie of capitalism,

green or otherwise, has in the last determining instance the sheer

material force — the army, the police, the belief of the people — of the

state. Nearly forgotten and long forbidden questions return unbidden to

the table of history: the question of insurrection, the art of the

destruction of the state. Insurrection is always an open question rather

than a plan. When the question is answered, it is answered not in theory

but in the practice of those that take a self-conscious stand against

the state itself. Insurrection is the answer to the anarchist hypothesis

that we can live without the state.

It was fashionable during the height of the neo-liberal era to say that

the state was irrelevant, yet today to speak of destroying capitalism

without the destruction of the state is to speak only of fascism. During

the financial crisis, the state’s ability to create untold sums of money

from nothingness has proved that, far from irrelevant, the State is the

final guarantor of capitalism, the grand magician behind the curtain of

value. While revolutionaries have endless pages of analysis of

capitalism, on the more topical subject of the destruction of the state

we barely know more than a few slogans. As was witnessed by the

monstrosities of “real existing socialism” given by Lenin and Stalin,

Marx fails completely to provide a theory of the destruction of the

state. The central question of anarchism has never been answered

satisfactorily: How to destroy the state? It is none other than this

generation that must elaborate an answer if a new form of life is to

arise that no longer needs a state.

This is not an easy question to answer. The state seeks above all to

preserve itself, even as forms of life like capitalism come and go.

There is without a doubt something timeless about the state: the statues

of Greek gods, the Latin engravings, the imperious towers. All

nation-states, from the United States to Denmark, act as if they were

new images of Rome, and their décor reveals their terrible continuity.

Therein lies the key to the mystique of the state; if the key to capital

is the flow of commodities, the key to the state is the flow of belief.

The state is a massive machine based on the belief of its own necessity,

the greatest of hypnotist in whose presence almost all fail to act in

their own self-interest. Take, for example, policemen. While the

politicians are usually incredibly wealthy individuals who move from a

role within the corporation to the state with ease, are not policemen

often children of the poor, acting against their own class interest?

What massive ideological brain-washing goes on that makes the police,

the secret services, the bureaucrats, and every other human appendage of

the state machine operate against their own interests and even the

survival of the planet? Even revolutionaries will rally around the state

in a period of crisis. To take an example that is only superficially

different from that of the police, Monbiot and a million other activists

and NGOs plea for us to return to the waiting arms of the state,

claiming that only the state can save us from catastrophic climate

change. The same tin-man which upholds the entire social order that

created climate change will have a change of heart. It’s more sad than

returning to an abusive lover.

Monbiot and other liberals ask us to ignore the obvious: the conditions

for a new era of insurrection have never been better; the planet

resembles nothing more than a globalised version of early 19^(th)

century capitalism, with a massive unorganised working-class being

uprooted from their previous pre-capitalist forms of life, but the key

difference being this time it is the end of capitalism rather than the

beginning. With the almost complete elimination of the anarchist

movement in the 1930s and the disaster of Stalin destroying the

ultra-left communist movement in its very infancy, those who stand

against the capitalist form of life find themselves starting from

literally almost nothing. Thus the revival of conspiracies, secret

societies, bands of friends, gangs, and the tender shoots of new

internationals. Before the attempted insurrection of the Paris Commune,

over six-hundred secret societies flourished in the belly of the beast.

How many gangs today exist in the heart of every metropolis?

One does not need guns and violence for insurrection to begin, although

one would be foolish to believe that any insurrection will happen

without violence. A certain comfort with violence is necessary. Still,

the state is far more than a capitol or an army. The path of militarism

is a game in which it is manifestly impossible to beat the state. A

revival of the armed struggle must be avoided at all costs, as a direct

attack on institutions like the state is no longer necessary. In a world

in which power has become decentralised, it is merely necessary to block

the flows indirectly. While the Bank of England or even the headquarters

of Exxon can be guarded like the Winter Palace, the diffuse tentacles of

production and consumption are everywhere. The state is ultimately just

another institution, albeit one that is far more ancient, wily, and

dangerous than the others; yet its flows can also be blocked. The

primary flow that maintains the state is the belief in the state itself.

One blocks the belief in the state by showing that life without a state

is possible, and then via the immediacy of communism showing that such

life is better than life within capitalism and the state. Or, at least,

that such a life is more likely to lead to the survival of your

children. As the state and capital enter into irreversible ecological

crisis, the spaces for such a social revolution bloom a thousandfold.

Whilst throughout history the state has been destroyed by marauding

barbarian hordes, within recent history the state has been destroyed by

an insurrection of its own people. The example par excellence of this

was the Paris Commune, where ordinary workers overthrew the government.

After only seventy-two days, the king re-gathered his army in Versailles

and then massacred the Commune. The Paris Commune showed that a new form

of life was possible if the state was destroyed, but it lacked the means

to defend itself. The question then that faced revolutionaries was how

to survive the inevitable counter-revolution and to this end the

Bolsheviks built their Party, which not only seized power but held off

the counter-revolutionary armies of all of Europe. However, the

“revolutionary” Party erected only a new state, rather than destroying

the state itself, and eventually turned its weapons against the most

committed of revolutionaries at Kronstadt, and then countless others.

Only an academic would wonder why no-one believes the communist

hypothesis today. The lesson of the Russian Revolution is all too clear.

What is needed is not only the destruction of the State, but a

revolution in our social relationships. Previous theorists assumed this

happened after the revolutionary destruction of the state apparatus.

Glimpses of this new form of life return again and again, from Paris in

1968 to Oaxaca in 2006, from Italy in 1977 to Greece in 2008. The

question of insurrection becomes double: Not only how to destroy the

state, but how to prevent its return?

The answer to this question is to create the new social relationships at

the same time as the insurrection, via the concrete practice of

communisation: this is our position within social war. While this

position begins as little shift, it must mature into a practice for the

survival and self-defense of the working-class and the excluded. The

question of survival develops as the intensities of the blockades grow

and capital and the state enter into further crisis. After all, to shut

down the flow of carbon at this stage would mean to halt electricity for

the world, and so would doom many to premature death. With every flow

blocked by insurrection, in order for the victory not be used for the

counter-revolution, the space that opens must be immediately communized

or destroyed. To block the flows to the extent that enables the creation

of a new form of life in the spaces opened. And we do not need to plan

these new forms of life down to the most of absurd of details: Any grand

plan like ecological economics and participatory economics are just the

modern-day idiotic brethren of Fourier and St. Simon. The theories of

any self-professed expert always trails behind the living movement of

ordinary people, since the new form of life arises in the course of

concrete insurrection. The word “communism” and “communisation” both

come from the Paris Commune, where the ordinary workers and unemployed

showed that they could, against the bets of revolutionary astrologists

like Marx, begin a new form of life: turning churches into universities,

seizing food, arming themselves, organising assemblies. What is the

equivalent today? From the communal kitchens to squats and even

self-organised hospitals, we can catch glimpses of communisation in

contemporary anarchist projects. However, we can learn more about the

possibilities and sheer scale of communisation if we look outside of

self-identified anarchists to the wider world of the working-class and

excluded. Everywhere, even in the most inhospitable climates, people

have managed to find or grow food successfully. From massive shanty

towns to so-called failed states (and when is a state a success?), the

poor of the world have a million examples if only we open our eyes.

The riot of the Black Bloc is the perfect example of the dialectic

between communisation and insurrection in action. In the moment of

insurrection, things that were given a market value are immediately

re-appropriated and used; the food in the shopping market becomes free,

the glass that separates us from commodities we desire is broken. All

that which was once considered foreign and alien, the debris of

construction and dumpsters suddenly come back to life as barricades,

appropriated to fulfil the very real need for self-defence. No-one is

afraid except the cops and perhaps stand-byers who fail to join or

understand. Ideally, everything that is attacked is precisely those

institutions that no-one needs: banks and finance capital, corporate

high-street shops full of overpriced clothing and jewelery, fast-food

joints selling poison masquerading as food. The world is better off with

these institutions in ashes. The act of expropriation is present in the

moment of insurrection: Everything that we cannot steal we will burn.

After we have burned everything we could not steal, we are free to

pursue the survival of our species, with all of the immense knowledge,

technology, and power of humanity at our collective disposal to ensure

our survival. Without a doubt one of the first acts would be the

planting of gardens, the soil enriched not by petrochemicals but by the

ashes of all the things we do not need.

For an insurrection to generalise, it must be open so that anyone can

join in, from the youth dressed in black to the elderly and children.

Otherwise, the insurrection will reach a limit and fail. The

insurrection should also make sense, with telling examples being the

defence of the autonomous spaces like Ungdomhuset in 2006 in Denmark or

the fight back against police violence in Greece in 2008. Some will say

that insurrection brings violence, and this will terrify exactly those

who are needed to participate. Yet is not the world today overflowing

with violence? Just ask anyone whose family was killed by an unmanned

drone in Afghanistan, or who lost a friend to the police, or to rape

within their own homes. People know the world is violent. The

revolutionary question is how to halt this violence that is inflicted

upon the world by state and capital. As opposed to the armed struggle,

an insurrection is based on actions that everyone with a modicum of

fitness feels that they could do, as long as their courage holds:

storming offices, throwing tear gas canister back at police, mass

seizures of food and other supplies from capitalism, building

barricades. Outside of the defense of autonomous space there are endless

roles for all sorts, from care and healing, to learning and preserving

the knowledge needed, keeping the autonomous space alive. At some point,

the limit of the insurrection is reached where the state feels like it

must stop the insurrection. The army will be called out to shoot their

own people. Let us not pretend this would not have happened in France in

1968 or Greece in 2008 had the insurrection generalised and the

infrastructure of production had been destroyed and seized. When the

army refuse to shoot upon their own families and friends, when they

mutiny and join the insurrection, the material force of the state

collapses like the house of cards it always was. While some of the

material conditions of insurrection have changed since the turn of the

century, we should not blind ourselves that revolutions in the street

either win or fail due to the insurrection spreading into the army

itself.

The question of insurrection transforms from a question of the

destruction of the state into the question of building a new world

without capital and the state. How to sustain the insurrection? The

answer is exquisitely simple: ask the people themselves. Ask nuclear

power plant workers how to shut down the plant. Ask nurses how the

hospitals can continue to run in a situation of scarcity of

pharmaceuticals. Ask the immigrants employed as slave labour by large

farms how they would run their farms communally. Ask the army how they

could have an insurrection against their officers. The knowledge needed

for communisation is already in everyone’s heads. The only task then is

to put the question of insurrection on everyone’s lips. Asking the

question of how to survive without the state, and then opening the space

through insurrection so that people can put their answers into practice,

this is the abstract methodology of blocking the flows of belief in the

state. The task of revolutionaries is to make it obvious that the belief

in any state is unnecessary. That instead, people can believe in

themselves. From this, action follows, the abstract methodology of the

insurrectionary inquiry becomes real, and the social war is won by life

rather than capital.

The insurrection and the apocalypse are of different orders, and nowhere

is this contrast more apparent than in the central defining moment of

the religious imagination: the crucifixion. Jesus Christ, the son of

God, was the original prophet of the apocalypse. Believing that the

apocalypse would come to pass in his lifetime, as he was crucified he

cried that his God had abandoned him, that the apocalypse had not yet

come to pass. There was another lesser-known Jesus, Jesus Barrabas.

Barabbas, not the son of God but the son of a mortal father, was none

other than an imprisoned insurrectionist. Unlike Jesus Christ, Jesus

Barabbas did not wait vainly for the destruction of this world, but

instead desired to give this world a renewed lease on life through

revolution. When Pontius Pilate gave the people a choice of who to free

from death, the people did not chose the apocalypse, but instead chose

insurrection. “Give us Barabbas!” Perhaps it is not surprising today

that the contemporary English version of the Bible calls Barrabas a

terrorist. Never forget that when given the choice between apocalypse

and insurrection, the people chose insurrection.

Revelations

The cities of Europe are littered with the ruins of aqueducts and Roman

triumphs, and in the future our children will look upon the ruins of our

highways and skyscrapers with a similar mixture of awe and disdain.

Every empire has always believed that it could last forever, and from

the thousand-year Reich to the self-described “end of history” of

liberal democracy and global capitalism, always the result has been the

same. In the era of globalisation, the Zapatistas took centre stage for

a world of dignity and humanity and against neoliberalism. They invited

thousands to participate in their world — La Realidad — in the outskirts

of the jungle. There is no doubt that that revolutionaries of the world

gained far more from their experiments in international solidarity and

self-organisation than the Zapatistas did from those faraway

revolutionaries. Times change. And the question of democracy and rights

brought up in the era of globalisation can only be used against those

who fight for genuine revolution. And just as the Romans by virtue of

over-intensive farming turned the breadbasket of North Africa into a

desert, the new Romans return to make a new kind of farm from the

desert. A million acres of solar panels across the Sahara is needed in

order to feed the hunger of Europe for electricity. Every ounce of

uranium beneath the Sahara must be mined, even if there is not enough

uranium in all of the world to fuel the new nuclear stations that are

planned to be built. There is only one glitch in their master plan: the

desert is not empty. The desert is full of life.

People live — flourish — in the desert. If the Zapatistas were the

conceptual figures of resistance in the era of globalisation, resistance

to this era is best embodied by the Tuareg. These nomads, proud Africans

that are impossibly elegant draped in their blue robes, live their lives

criss-crossing the desert. When Qaddafi tried to turn them into a mere

military appendage of Libya, giving them training in arms and his little

Green book, all the Tuareg took away was jazz. Although it becomes

increasingly difficult for their children to continue to live their

lives without fleeing to refuge, some still live in the desert, as they

have for millennia. The Tuareg know that their final conflict is on the

horizon. The Sahara desert itself must be colonised by the Empire that

wishes to harness the power of the sun and the poisonous uranium that

lies far beneath their desert home. Again, it is Empire versus the

nomads. The attitude of the Tuareg that should be held up as an example

to revolutionaries in this new era that is strangely like the old: we do

not need solidarity, charity-work of activism. All empires fall, and

this empire is no exception. And we shall remain.

There is no coming apocalypse to be caused by climate change. We are

living in the midst of the apocalypse today. Extinction is not in the

future. We live in the midst of the greatest era of mass extinction

since the Permian-Triassic extinction event, an extinction event caused

by capitalism. Apocalyptic thinking itself is the direct result of our

own alienation from time under capitalism, for it strips away other

possible relationships to time and reduces them to the linear time of

the Fordist factory. Other forms of relating to time exist of course;

merely look at the cycles of the moon, the society of the seasons, the

movements of the stars. Trapped within the conceptual prison-house of

the apocalypse, you can’t say at any moment you want something

completely different. Yet every moment in history yearns to be

insurrectionary. However, making the insurrection generalise and succeed

is a question not only of our subjective desire to overthrow capital and

the state, but also of objective conditions in which such an overthrow

of the existing order makes sense to people in terms of their survival

and the survival of their children. With catastrophic climate change,

the objective conditions have never been better.

This is the dialectic of the present moment: Climate change is

simultaneously both the best and worst thing that has ever happened to

humanity. For all the endless chatter of crisis, there is little

comprehension of what a true crisis on the level of the planet looks

like. To both the capitalists and anti-capitalists, a crisis is a crisis

in the market, a war, a plague. These are all relatively minor crises

compared to catastrophic climate change, a biocrisis that may threaten

the continued existence of most life on the planet under current

conditions. The global social war of life versus dead capital has

commenced, and there is no neutrality. One must take a position, to

either side with the continued existence of capitalism and the

state...or to be unified in the necessity of its destruction. The

apocalypse is only the religious grasping of the very real possibility

of social revolution in a world that has lost the very language to

express revolution, a genuine if contorted reflection of the

evolutionary necessity for insurrection.

There is a secret meaning to the apocalypse. It is not the end of time,

but the end of this particular time. Not the end of the world, but the

end of this particular world. In other words, the end of capital and the

state. By projecting the apocalypse into the future, all human agency in

the present becomes frozen and lost. Yet this entire understanding of

time as a coming apocalypse is a mere fantastic invention. With a little

shift, agency returns to the present. History is redeemed. The peasant

revolts, the Paris Commune, the Spanish Civil War, Kronstadt, the

Seminoles, the Panthers, autonomia, the antiglobalisation movement,

suddenly transform from a litany of failures to past moments that were

building precisely to this present moment. The future transforms from a

bleak nothingness to one rich in possibility, where any moment can open

the door to insurrection. In the present, every breathe is infused with

a new kind of intensity. A certain quickening of the blood that was long

thought disappeared from humanity returns, a clarity of purpose that is

available only to those whose life is given not to waiting for the

apocalypse, but to the survival of life. Far more important than the

theoretical possibility of revolution, revolutionaries appear, as does a

kind of redemption that lies not in the future, but in the here-and-now.

Take One. The President of the United States, hand in hand with the

Premier of China, walk out onto the stage to announce the crafting of a

new carbon market that will save humanity. The tears are literally

streaming from the Prime Minister of Britain’s face, ruining his make-up

for the cameras. “We did it! We did it!” he yells, the jowls around his

neck convulsing, his eyes fiery with what could only appear to be divine

fervour. On cue, the lights cut to the audience. A perfectly selected

and photogenic crowd, carefully mixed to include people of all races

(ideally in somewhat kitschy yet exquisitely tailored “ethnic”

clothing), rise up and begin applauding, just as the teleprompter in

front of them tells them to. The stock-market goes up.

Take two.The stage seems strangely empty with the telling absence of the

most powerful men in the world. Only the Prime Minister of Britain

remains, and dourly rising to the podium, wiping what can only be tear

from his eye, his voice quavers, yet retains a certain sense of moral

certitude. “Today, while we have no binding treaty, we have agreed on

important milestones, and we must not shirk our historical

responsibilities despite what appear to be insurmountable

difficulties...” The camera flips to pictures of what’s outside,

protesters in black masks destroying things in what appears to be at

random, people in colourful clothing blockading delegates, and quickly

the pundits begin blaming these trouble-makers for the failure of the

summit. The stock-market goes up.

Outside the conference centre, nothing has changed. The same clothing

lies upon our bare mattress and our child still sleeps soundly nearby.

We put on the same shoes that we put on yesterday. And yet, something

has irrevocably shifted. It’s like any other morning, except the police

line the streets. No-one even bothers to watch the Prime Minister run

through his scripts, since everyone knows one of us will be shot today.

This morning, coffee isn’t even necessary. As we open our door, our

neighbours have already assembled. The sun shines.

Social War Not Climate Chaos