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The CA Green Party spent decades building up to a 5% vote. Now they are in free fall due to the usual debacles plaguing these parties. Hippies just can’t manage to play the game. And I say that a a consummate Green hippie.
I doubt the need to further underscore the inherent failings of electoral politics in this forum. But I challenge that the anemic advance of the Green Party movement in the Western Hemisphere belies a deeper issue. Electoral politics is at least a flag for the more pithy praxis. That is, to use a somewhat distasteful example, every IRA needs their Sinn FĂ©in. It is why Bloque Quebecois works.
The collapse of the CA Greens indicates a terrifying truth about the state of green movements in general. If after the past years of climate emergency a worldwide Green movement can’t even plant a flag in Ottawa, we are in a very bad way. This election should have been a gimme for the CAGP. One can’t expect the antivax yokels at Fort Mac to choke on forest fires year after year and not shill for oil cartels. But what is BC’s excuse?
I hazard the realpolitik situation is that the Empire has won. Humans simply will not look squarely at the emergency even when the house is literally burning. In the words of a social media commonplace, “this is fine”.
But I am not laying this at the feet of “them”. This is an “us” problem. The environmental, conservation, climate, and permacultural fronts have all done a piss poor job of community building, never mind outreach. All the old foibles of the left are there, endemic fodder for agents of empire to abuse: narrow ideological dogmas, perpetual infighting, hairshirt Puritanism, strategic fecklessness, organizational idiocy… Greens have an immediate and palpable emergency at hand to point toward and say, “we need to change everything, yesterday”. And yet here we are, with the global political system in paralysis as the elites quiver between the threats of fascism, oligarchs, and ecological collapse. This state of affairs can’t exist without the ultimate problem being a total lack of spine across all social strata.
To wit: a vote for a Green Party is at least symbolic. It’s cheap. You can still drive an SUV all over town and punch that card for GP. And this is an easy sell, if one has the philosophical balls to say: it is now or never, we can’t afford the lame machinations of cynical liberal machines anymore. Evidently, the GP across North America have failed even that meagre argument. And the public largely aren’t buying it, even when hurricanes drown NYC each year.
A pox on all our houses? Maybe. But I wouldn’t bother outlining all this if I thought it were an inevitable state. The Thunberg effect was at least a moment of facile realization by both elites and masses that this state of affairs cannot endure much longer. And yet, as Cornel West might say, nearly all are “morally constipated”.
A lot of that has to do with the prone state of most people within empire. When laws, ordinances, conventions, quotidian fatigue, and the habits of situation all conspire to disallow a modicum of natural lifeway, people simply check out. I shall attest to how hard this is even for a hairshirt dropout. You can’t put solar panels on a rental house. Often you can’t even plant a garden. The avant garde Left love to poopoo consumer activism, but just what is left to the single mother of 2 working 3 jobs? She may or may not “believe in God”, but probably the only people around to render a sympathetic human face are her local church.
And that is the level at which green movements need to advance if we want to survive as a species. The church level. The community. (I mean real community, not the fey virtual simulacra of social media.) Yes, it’s a systemic issue and we are bonded in peonage to oiligarchs, &c. But ultimately if we do care about ecological collapse, we either put up or shut up. And by “we”, I mean more than us eccentrics and dropouts. Somehow, mother of 2 needs to have a route she can utilize toward sustainability in her apartment. Right now, she has bupkis.
The Canadian talking heads last night supposed that the Greens tanked partly because all the major parties have bowed toward the climate emergency long enough to stuff some nice words in their platforms. The carbon tax. The carbon tax will save us.
I know, it’s sobbingly, achingly ridiculous. But this is where mainstream society is at. Credits and taxes, and then we can just all go on like before. Just wait, I enjoined the radio, until we have lithium wars instead of oil wars.
Activists and hairshirts (hi) rail, and yet no one has sufficiently articulated that it is *good* to make a better world, that it is good to take the leap, to leap with a dram of faith when your house is on fire. The Greens have even failed to underscore that simple facts that we are facing more than an issue of atmospheric carbon. Carbon taxes are paper dolls before the total systemic collapse of ecosystems perpetrated by our ravenous maw for consumption and global lust for overpopulation. Few listen, and those who claim to care seldom do.
Heaven manifested a Biblical style prophet in Greta Thunberg and here we are with nothing. Heaven even sent a literal plague, an underlined opportunity for compunction if nothing else. Nope, just more jejune catharsis. Under such Zeitgeist, few can doubt COP Glasgow will come to little pith; although if it does naught, it emphatically means our collective goose.
What would palpable care take? What would it take for the professional classes, who at least have a modicum of socioeconomic wiggle room and political sway, to balk at our collective suicide in more pithy ways?
Maybe they can’t or won’t. Maybe they are paid off. Maybe it is up to us lumpenproles and déclassé derelicts. Heaven indeed help us, if so.
I’m typing by solar power. It does feel good. There’s no minimizing that, as small a comfort as it is. These panels, barring incident, may well due for my home’s electric needs for the rest of my life. I’m off that one opium of empire, at least, and a few others. Domestic comforts are the most worthy, especially when they are the heart’s comforts of moral impetus.
This tablet won’t last so long as my solar panels. I know this tablet was made by Foxconn indentured servants in Guangzhou from materials dug up by latter day African bondsmen. I suppose such understanding qualifies as “checking privilege”. How pathetic that social left ritual abasement is, how feckless. Virtue signalling is more harmful than an indulgence. It prevents focus on the needful. The needful would be a tablet which might last as long as my solar panels, made by free cooperatives who strive toward better extraction and production.
There’s nothing new in this, natch. We know the alchemy which might save us. What we lack is faith. Or if that word scares you, say philosophical balls. We lack courage so we can’t be vulnerable to self honesty. We lack the self honesty to be sincere. We lack the sincerity to see how we are all complicit. And we lack the guts to not throw our hands up at complexity, but rather do the needful.
The further off grid I go, the less I believe humans want to do the needful. All are punishéd.
Chomsky has been asked for decades the same single question. Somehow it doesn’t seem to drive him doolally. He always answers it patiently.
“Dr. Chomsky, I’m so honoured to talk to you. But all this is so haaaard. I don’t know what to doooo. What can normal people do about the state of the world?”
His answer is simple and true and leaves the audience typically deflated: “Organize”.
And by organization he doesn’t mean the fatuous catharsis of momentary movements. It doesn’t mean “mobilization”. Rather, the prescription entails long term, intergenerational institutions built upon organic community. Organization means traditions and rituals. Even secret ones, where totalitarian repression is hegemonic.
Infotech nor identity cannot replace the samizdat of hand-to-hand culture; our Googlized surveillance hellscapes should be proof of that.
Chomsky can be frank about how this question “what can I do” is a symptom of the socially engineered anomie endemic to the western imperial core. He has said several times he doesn’t get asked this in poor countries or areas where empire uses less carrot and more stick.
What this anomie indicates, to my mind, is the complicity we in the core share. I know people who reply to me in stress of our supine estate in the marginal and precariat. Just so. But whether by choice, inertia, enserfdom, or inertia, we are complicit. The individualist imperative, especially in the USA, masks the fact that collective actions exist predicated on collective responsibilities just as collective consequences exist. That the former are elided whilst the latter is bemoaned is proof of a habitual denial of collective complicity.
Anomie is what we get when we do what we know is wrong. The solution is to stop doing it. Learn what is good and do that. If it works, do it some more. If what is good doesn’t work, try a different way until it does. For such ways to spread generally, a demand must be made upon social contract, that there even *be* a social contract. Such is heresy to both Left and Right in the social media era. But such are the methods of social control effected through the internet, where affinity, verisimilitude, parasocial microfame, and ideology have replaced all measure of organic community.
And, ah, the ironies. I gave up believing any good could come of social media rants years ago. Yet here I am, posting a disposable rant on the internet along with the teeming millions. I’m not immune to the self indulgent hope of messages in bottles.
I suppose Pubnix Smolnet endears me because it is, if not always quite community, it is yet quite a demimonde. And demimondes are fertile. Demimondes revel in eccentricity. Demimondes can be slow enough for thought longer than a goldfish’s cognitive news cycle. Demimondes can risk questions without answers.
And as I counted the ridings down amongst the Canada GP, my question was this: if we can’t even do this, what hope for the bigger decisions? Canada is a country famously self-congratulatory for concern for the commonweal. If people high or low therein can’t even chuck a ballot for the GP, where is the pressure for it at Davos? At Zurich? At NYC? At DC?
Is the real proble that empire no longer allows for the buck to stop anywhere at all?
Of one perspective I daresay with resolve. There is communal complicity when there is no communal backbone. And there is no collective backbone when we are all so blithely complicit.
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