The genocide in Gaza is not a freakish anomaly. It is a harbinger of what awaits us as the ecosystem disintegrates and governments embrace climate fascism.

As the world breaks down, as the climate crisis drives millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of people north, in a desperate search for survival, the genocide in Gaza, which Israel is slow walking until it can resume its usual murderous pace, will replay itself over and over and over until the fragile social and environmental networks that hold the global community together disintegrate.

The refusal to extract ourselves from fossil fuels, the steady saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), ensures soaring temperatures in which most life, including human life, will eventually be unsustainable. The global average concentration of CO2 surged by 3.5 parts per million, from June 2023 to June 2024, to reach an average of 422.8 parts per million, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. The following twelve months saw an even further increase of 2.6 parts per million of CO2. Violent conflicts, already exacerbated by extreme weather and water scarcity, will erupt across the globe with volcanic fury.

There is no mystery as to why the genocide is funded and sustained by Israel’s Western allies. There is no mystery as to why these states flout the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice, the Arms Trade Treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and international humanitarian law. There is no mystery as to why the United States has given a staggering $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since Oct. 7, 2023 and has repeatedly blocked resolutions at the United Nations censoring Israel, in what the latest U.N report on Gaza calls an “internationally enabled crime.”

The U.S. accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s weapons imports. But it is not alone. The report names 63 countries that are complicit in “Israel’s genocidal machinery” in Gaza.

In the words of a report from the Quincy Institute and Costs of War project, published on Oct. 7 of this year, “[w]ithout U.S. money, weapons and political support, the Israeli military could not have committed such rapid, widespread destruction of human lives and infrastructure in Gaza, or escalated its warfare so easily to the regional level by bombing Syria, Lebanon, Qatar and Iran.”

There is no mystery as to why thousands of citizens from the U.S., Russia, France, Ukraine and the United Kingdom serve in the Israeli occupying forces and are not held accountable for their participation in genocide.

“Many States, primarily Western ones, have facilitated, legitimized and eventually normalized the genocidal campaign perpetrated by Israel”, the U.N. report, compiled by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, reads. “By portraying Palestinian civilians as ‘human shields’ and the broader onslaught in Gaza as a battle of civilization against barbarism, they have reproduced the Israeli distortions of international law and colonial tropes, seeking to justify their own complicity in genocide”.

According to the report, by September 2024, the U.S. had supplied Israel with “57,000 artillery shells, 36,000 rounds of cannon ammunition, 20,000 M4A1 rifles, 13,981 anti-tank missiles and 8,700 MK-82 500lb bombs. By April 2025, Israel had 751 active sales valued at $39.2 billion”.

We will see this again. The same mass killing. The same demonization of the poor and the vulnerable. The same tropes about saving Western civilization from barbarism. The same callous indifference to human life. The same lies. The same billions of dollars in profits extracted by the war industry that will be used to suffocate not only those outside our gates, but those within them.

How will the wealthiest nations react when their coastal cities flood, their crop yields plummet and drought and floods displace millions internally? How will they replace dwindling resources? How will they cope with hundreds of millions of climate refugees pounding at their gates? How will they respond to social upheaval, declining living standards, crumbling infrastructure and societal breakdown?

They will do what Israel does.

They will use disproportionate violence to keep the desperate at bay. They will steal the fertile land, the aquifers and the rivers and lakes. They will seize by force the rare earth minerals, natural gas fields and oil. And they will kill anyone who gets in the way. Damn the United Nations. Damn the international courts. Damn international humanitarian law. The industrial states are cementing into place, as Christian Parenti writes, a “climate fascism,” a politics “based on exclusion, segregation and repression.”

“What we are seeing in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future”, Colombian President Gustavo Petro argued at the COP28 U.N. Climate Change Conference in 2023.

The masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons deployed on our streets to terrorize undocumented workers will show up at our door. The concentration camps, now being built across the country, will have room for us. The law, twisted to persecute an array of fictional internal enemies, will criminalize dissent and freedom of expression. The billionaires and oligarchs will retreat into gated compounds, mini Versailles, where they will feed their insatiable lusts for power, greed and hedonism.

In the end, the ruling billionaire class too will become victims, although they may be able to hold out a little longer than the rest of us. Industrial nations will not be saved by their border walls, internal security, expulsion of migrants, missiles, fighter jets, navies, mechanized units, drones, mercenaries, artificial intelligence, mass surveillance or satellites.

Before this final extinction takes place, however, huge segments of the human species, along with other species, will be consumed in an orgy of fire and blood. Gaza, unless there is a rapid reversal in how our societies are configured and ruled, is a window into the future. It is not a freakish anomaly. War will be the common denominator of human existence. The strong will take from the weak.

The destruction of civil society in Gaza is the template. Chaos is the objective. Subject populations are controlled by arming proxy militias and criminal gangs, as Israel has done in Gaza, along with its arming of rogue Jewish militias in the West Bank. They are controlled — as Israel has done — by banning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East to block humanitarian aid. They are controlled — as Israel has also done — by destroying hospitals, clinics, bakeries, housing, wastewater treatment plants, food distribution sites, schools, cultural centersand universities, along with assassinating its educated elite including over 278 Palestinian journalists. When life is reduced to subsistence level, when disease and malnutrition is endemic, resistance can be broken.

Language in this emerging dystopia bears no correlation to reality. It is absurdist. Israel, for example, has violated the current ceasefire agreement from its inception, but the fiction of a “ceasefire” is maintained. Israel apparently “has a right to defend itself” although it is the occupier and perpetrator of apartheid and genocide and the Palestinian resistance poses no existential threat.

The “Trump Plan,” supposedly formulated to end the genocide, offers no route to Palestinian self-determination, no mechanism to hold Israel accountable and proposes to hand Gaza over to updated versions of imperial viceroys, with Israel controlling the borders.

The struggle for Palestine is our struggle. The denial of freedom for Palestinians is the first step in the loss of our freedom. The terror that defines life in Gaza will become our terror. The genocide will become our genocide.

We must fight these battles while we still have a chance. The openings for resistance are closing with alarming speed. We must, through civil disobedience, shut down the machine. We must remake the world. This means removing the ruling global class. It means demolishing a society constructed around the mania for capitalist expansion. It means ending our reliance on fossil fuels. It means enforcing international law and dismantling Israel’s settler colonial and genocidal rule. If we do not succeed, Palestinians will be the first victims. But they won’t be the last.

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First Published on The Chris Hedges Report.

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(And I’m Not Just Thinking About Donald Trump)

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Honestly, doesn’t it befuddle you?

I mean, don’t you think we humans are kinda mad? And worse yet, at some deep level, we simply can’t seem to stop. All too often, we just can’t curb our urge to destroy.

Looking back, the desire to make war and obliterate our “enemies” is a deeply ingrained and repetitive pattern in our history. Each individual example can, of course, be explained (away) in its own fashion, but the overall pattern? Hmmm…

I mean, you can certainly “understand” the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Depending on your politics, you can explain it in terms of the threatening expansion of NATO or of a country run by an autocrat willing to see countless numbers of his people die (no, I’m not even thinking about the tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians) in order to take more territory — whether in parts of Georgia (no, not that Georgia!), Ukraine, or god knows where else — and make himself ever more impressively (or do I mean depressively?) imperial. Phew! That was a long one, but explanations about war-making tend to be that way.

And yes, if you want, you also can undoubtedly explain the ongoing nightmare in Gaza, beginning with Hamas’s horrific October 7th attack on Israel and followed by the outrageous urge of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his disturbingly right-wing compatriots to slaughter the population of that strip of land right down to the smallest child. In some grim fashion, given our history, such acts seem all too sadly human.

You could also undoubtedly offer explanations for the endless — yes, that’s a reasonable word to use here! — not to speak of disastrous wars my own country has stomped into since World War II ended, first as the leader of the “free world” and then as the leader of who knows what. Those conflicts ranged from Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, in this century. And undoubtedly it’s even possible to explain (away) the nightmarish civil war still devastating Sudan that’s already displaced more than eight million people without being noticed by much of the rest of the world.

Something New in the Planetary Bloodstream.

In a sense, war is human history. It’s been the rare moment when we’ve proven capable of not making war on ourselves somewhere on this planet. It seems to be in the bloodstream, so to speak (as in the endless streams, even rivers, of blood eternally being spilled). And in a sense, war, the urge to take someone else’s territory or simply kill endless numbers of… well, us… has certainly been in that very same bloodstream at least since the first great literary work of the Western world, The Iliad, was written. In some sense, you could say that, 3,000 years later, we’re all still in Troy.

Oh, wait, that’s both true and not, because there is indeed something new in the planetary bloodstream. And I’m not even thinking about our endless ability to find ever “better” and more devastating ways to kill one another — from the spear to the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle (reputedly now owned by one of every 20 Americans), the bow and arrow to the AI-driven drone, the hand grenade to atomic weaponry. (And don’t forget that Vladimir Putin is already threatening to use “tactical” nuclear weapons in Ukraine — never mind that some of them are significantly more powerful than the bombs that, in August 1945, obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

No, what I have in mind is that other way we humans have found to potentially devastate our world: the burning of fossil fuels. Yes, it started with the massive consumption of coal during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it’s simply never ended. (China, in fact, now uses more coal than the rest of the world combined and continues to build coal power plants.) By now, with oil and natural gas added to the mix in staggering quantities, records are being set monthly as ever greater heat waves, increasingly violent storms, startling flooding, and devastating fires are becoming part of our everyday lives. Typical was Miami’s May heat index that recently hit an unheard-of 112 degrees Fahrenheit, 11 degrees higher than at any past date in May ever. That should hardly shock us, however, since, as that superb environmentalist Bill McKibben reports, “A new study out today shows that heat waves have tripled since the 1960s in this country, and that deaths from those hot spells are up 800%.” And, of course, far worse is predicted for the decades to come, as those burning fossil fuels continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at record rates.

Forget what we officially call wars (anything but easy to do these days if you happen to be Gazan, Sudanese, or Ukrainian) and consider this the increasingly devastating new way we have of warring on ourselves and our planet. While there’s still a lot to learn about global warming, also known as climate change (terms far too mild for what’s actually happening), we already know far too much not to consider it the ultimate danger — other than nuclear war, of course. In fact, the difference between nuclear war and global warming could be that, since August 1945 (except for nuclear tests), such weaponry has never been used again, while the distinctly apocalyptic “weaponry” of climate change is still ratcheting up in a staggering fashion.

A War Against the World as We’ve Known It.

Climate change is certainly something Americans should know about. After all, only the other week, Donald (“drill, baby, drill“) Trump sat down with a group of fossil-fuel CEOs and reportedly suggested that, for a billion dollars in campaign financing, a bribe of the first order, he would toss out all of Joe Biden’s attempts to rein in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries and encourage them instead to make further fortunes by turning this planet into a cinder. (In truth, that wasn’t really much of an offer, since he had already made it clear that he was planning to do just that anyway, starting on “day one” of his next term in office.)

Of course, who needs Donald Trump when, as the New York Times reported recently, despite President Biden’s distinct attempts to limit the use of fossil fuels during his tenure in the White House, “oil and gas production have set records under the Biden administration and the United States is the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. Even with the [administration’s] pause on permits for new [natural gas] export terminals, the United States is still on track to nearly double its export capacity by 2027 because of projects already permitted and under construction.” And mind you, we’re talking about the country that, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time… for the past six years in a row,” reaching — yes, indeed! — a new record in 2023.

And despite all of what I’ve just described, consider it an irony that the only true world war of the moment (think of it, in fact, as a slow-motion World War III) doesn’t normally get enough headlines (though there are, of course, exceptions) or the attention in the mainstream media that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine so regularly have. No matter that last year was the hottest in human history and that each of the last 11 months was the warmest of its kind on record. Still, if you want to follow what’s functionally our only true world war in the mainstream world, there’s one obvious place to go, the British Guardian, which regularly highlights reporting on the subject and even has an online “climate-crisis” section.

Here, for instance, are just a few of the things you could have learned from that paper’s reporting in the last month or so and tell me they shouldn’t have been headline news everywhere. Take the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman recently writing that “the largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred… The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO₂ levels over a 12-month period.” Or the staggering heat waves that struck across Asia this spring “causing deaths, water shortages, crop losses and widespread school closures,” as Damian Carrington, that paper’s environment editor, reported. And mind you, such searing temperatures were “made 45 times more likely in India” by the climate crisis.

Do you even remember when not passing 1.5 degrees Centigrade was the goal of the countries that put together the 2015 Paris climate accord? Well, if you don’t, no problem, since, as Carrington also recently reported, thanks to an exclusive Guardiansurvey, “Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet.” And almost half of them expect it to hit 3C! Now, try to imagine that future planet of, well, I’m not sure you can say “ours” anymore, or better yet, check out another recent Carrington piece on the kinds of horrors — and they would be horrors of an unprecedented sort — such scientists now think a 3C world might hold for us.

Oh, and as Milman wrote recently, a new report suggests that “the economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought.” That’s already! And we’ve also already crept close to that 1.5C mark. But let me not go on. You get the idea. And each of those stories should have been a blazing headline across a planet that’s already feeling the heat in every sense imaginable, even if, in our normal reckoning, what’s happening doesn’t yet count as a world war (or at least a war on the world as we’ve known it).

Don’t you find all of that breathtaking (given the nature of heat)? And isn’t it amazing that, despite what it means for our future, it’s so often hardly considered headline-making news?

And mind you, there’s so much we don’t yet even know: Is the fierce tornado season that’s recently stretched from Texas through Iowa and beyond another climate-change-induced phenomenon? It’s certainly possible. Will the coming hurricane season set a series of records from hell, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now warning us, thanks in part to the fact that the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean have heated to all-time-record levels? Again, we’ll have to wait (but not for long) to see what happens. And is that record rise in U.S. billion-dollar — yes, billion-dollar! — weather disasters recorded by NOAA in 2023, another climate-change-induced horror? It certainly seems likely.

We are, in other words, already in a mad new world of “war” (as well as the mad old version of the same). And given how possible it is that Donald Trump will become President Fossil Fuel again, we may be left to face an all too literally mad future (along with staggering new profits for the big fossil-fuel companies) in what, until recently, still passed, despite endless disastrous wars, for the greatest power on the face of the Earth. And in retrospect, in climate terms, I suspect that even Joe Biden will seem distinctly lacking and congressional Republicans mad beyond words.

Take, for instance, President Biden’s actions in relation to this planet’s other greenhouse-gas burning monster, China. (While the U.S. has historically been the greatest greenhouse gas emitter, China now tops the list.) Unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden does indeed take climate change seriously, but he’s also supported Israel in a war from hell that’s throwing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and, when it comes to China, his urge hasn’t truly been to cooperate. Instead, his focus has been on expanding the U.S. military presence throughout Asia, including puttingGreen Berets on an island just 10 kilometers off China’s coast. (Imagine how this country would react if — and it would hardly be comparable — China were to assign its version of special forces troops to Cuba!)  In other words, he’s been at work creating the conditions for a new, if not hot, then certainly all-too-warm war between the two greatest greenhouse-gas polluters on this ever-warming planet.

Brilliant! And the Chinese response? To pal it up with Vladimir Putin! (Equally brilliant!)

As mid-2024 approaches, the question remains: Can we humans stop making war on each other or preparing for yet more of the same and begin dealing with a planet heading to hell in a proverbial handbasket? Can we face the fact that the enemy is indeed us?

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

First published on TomDispatch.

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By  Matthew Carl Ives, Senior Researcher in Economics, University of Oxford; Belinda Wade, Industry Professor, School of Business, The University of Queensland, and Saphira Rekker, Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Finance, The University of Queensland

April 1, 2024

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Just 57 companies and nation states were responsible for generating 80% of the world’s CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and cement over the last seven years, according to a new report released by the thinktank InfluenceMap. This finding suggests that net zero targets set by the Paris climate change agreement in 2015 are yet to make a significant impact on fossil fuel production.

The report uses the Carbon Majors database, established in 2013 by Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute, to provide fossil fuel production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers.

The InfluenceMap report tells a sobering but informative story of the state of production in these high-emitting industries. Cement and fossil fuel production has reached unprecedented levels, with most of the emission growth traceable to a relatively small number of large companies.

The troubling reality is that the lack of progress of these large fossil fuel companies means the world will need to undertake ever more stringent and steep decarbonisation trajectories if countries are to meet the Paris agreement goal of keeping warming well below 2°C.

The Carbon Majors database highlights how critical it is for companies and countries to be held accountable for their lack of progress on emission reductions. Companies need to define exactly how best to align with the Paris goals, and then monitor and track their progress.

To address this need, our team of researchers from the Universities of Queensland, Oxford and Princeton developed a framework that outlines strict science-based requirements for tracking the progress of companies against Paris-aligned pathways.

By applying this framework to the Carbon Majors database in a follow-up study, our team mapped production budgets for 142 fossil fuel companies against several Paris-aligned global scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

We considered the “middle-of-the-road” future scenario whereby business carries on as usual – this is commonly used by investors to evaluate a company’s climate risks. With this scenario, we found that between 2014 and 2020, the coal, oil and gas companies produced 64%, 63% and 70% respectively more than their budgets allow. Further details can be found on the Are You Paris Compliant? website.

Transparency is crucial

Over the seven-year period covered by the InfluenceMap report, nation states and state-owned companies are responsible for most of this growth. It is not yet clear whether such government-run companies will move towards improved reporting against climate standards, but further interventions by governments will clearly be required to meet stated national emission-reduction goals.

Fortunately, more transparency will be available for investor-owned companies. In 2023, a non-profit that aims to standardise global accounting, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, released new climate-related disclosure standards. These should provide investors, politicians and the public with access to more transparent and consistent data, making it much easier for them to accurately judge companies’ climate performance – or lack thereof.

It will be interesting to read the climate reporting of the 57 companies identified by InfluenceMap in coming years. The release of the Carbon Majors data, along with the new climate-related disclosure standards, will hopefully make a huge difference. Companies being more accountable for their emissions should help reduce greenwashing in corporate sustainability reports.

Quantifying fossil fuel and cement production, and associated emissions, is a crucial step. But companies also need to act. Achieving net zero by reducing the emissions of a relatively small number of companies will be much easier than persuading 8 billion people to take collective action on climate.

Such drastic reductions in fossil fuel production must also be matched by investment in abundant and increasingly cheap sources of clean renewable energy. Without these steps, the Paris goals will be unachievable – and that’s very risky for all of us.

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First published on The Conversation.

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Fossil Capitalism: The Only System The New York Times Can Publicly Imagine

July 20, 2022
By Paul Street

It’s nice that two New York Times video-makers understand that top corporations are lying when they claim to meaningfully address the climate catastrophe. Too bad the underlying system that’s turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber and cancelling prospects for a decent human future is beyond serious scrutiny at the United States’ “paper of record.” Telling the whole truth about capitalism and its responsibility for the biggest issue of our or any time is not part of “all the news that’s fit to print.”

Corporate Fantasies on a Planet That’s Not Waiting Until 2040.

A recent Times opinion video [you have to be a subscriber to view] rightly takes down idealistic-sounding pledges recently made by CEOs of some of the world’s largest corporations at the World Economic Forum. Commanding heights business promises of “net zero” carbon emissions and a new “environmental capitalism” wherein “economic growth and global trade” continue without climate ruin amount to what Times video producer Agnes Walton and filmmaker Kristopher Knight call “corporate fantasies.”

In reality, Walton and Knight show, the pledges fall far short of net zero — the point at which companies and nations remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as they emit. They “might be worse than just empty promises,” the Times video argues: “they could obstruct efforts to stop climate change before it’s too late.”

The corporate net zero promises are set so far in the future as to be like a lung cancer victim promising to quit smoking in two decades. They kick the can so far down the road as to be meaningless given the extent and pace of the global warming calamity.

The promises leave out much if not most of big companies’ real-world carbon footprint. Exxon-Mobil’s net zero pledge absurdly refers only to its internal business operations, deleting the carbon emitted when other firms and people burn the massive amount of gas and oil it extracts and sells.

The promises rely on technology and methods that are nowhere near ready to meet the challenge they purport to address. Direct air capture technology is decades away from at-scale use. Tree planting on a level that could meaningfully counter current emissions is fanciful at best.

“TED Talks, endless panels and ovations, these glitzy events mask a terrifying truth: these corporations don’t yet know how to fulfill their science fiction net-zero pledges, and they’ve given themselves decades to figure it out. But outside the board room,” the Times video says, “one thing’s certain: the planet is in a full-blown meltdown, and it’s definitely not waiting for 2040.”

A Critical Deletion: Capitalism.

It’s a strong argument with something critical missing: revolution.

Perhaps it would be better to say there were two things missing. The first deletion is the capitalist system, bigger than the corporations the video calls out. Capitalism depends on perpetual quantitative expansion to sustain its rate of profit and to seem to escape its savage inequalities through “growth.” At the same time, it is fatally addicted to fossil fuels, in which it has massive sunk, fixed capital investments and around whose transport, settlement, and distribution patterns and imperatives “modern” (capitalist) society is structured.

As a world system of endless anarchic competition between capitals with a wild multiplicity of sovereign governments (195 by one recent count), moreover, capitalism is incapable of the global coordination required to chart and implement a sustainable environmental path for homo sapiens (The great iconoclast Bertrand Russell was on to more than he knew when his concerns over potential nuclear war led him to advocate a single world government).

As The New York Times Company (US$2.6 billion) will never acknowledge, the corporations justly criticized in the Times’ chilling video are both creations and agents of an eco-exterminist mode of production and of corresponding political and ideological superstructures that militate against a non-malignant relationship between humans and nature beyond humanity. As the late “last Marxist” Louis Proyect noted on CounterPunch in 2015, “Capitalism and capitalist politics have to be superseded if humanity …[is] to survive…The alternative to this is a descent into savagery, if not extinction.” (“The alternative” is already visible in ways pointing to real-world dystopia combining the menaces presaged by such novelists as Jack London, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Brunner [author of the environmental dystopia The Sheep Look Up], Ray Bradbury, Phillip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood – and as suggested in films like They Live, Escape From New York, Mad Max, Rollerball, Running Man, Idiocracy, Punishment Park, Equilibrium, Moon, Silent Running, Blade Runner, Strange Days, Waterworld, The Truman Show, Okja, World on a Wire [Fassbinder], The Trial, Wall-E, and Robocop.)

“Not Only Against Separate Conditions of Society”.

The second thing logically thereby missing from the Times video is the alternative to capitalism: radically greened (eco-socialist) dictatorships of the proletariat (please see my postscript on this “trigger” phrase below) that put humanity on the path to ending class rule while forging radically new social relations and a radically altered stance of homo sapiens towards Earth. That would be nothing less than revolution – a revolution that would need to be understood not simply in narrow, revisionist, workerist, and economistic terms of “what’s in it for me and other oppressed people?” but rather as a collective determination to fundamentally transform both social relations and humanity’s relationship with the broad “web of life.” As the communist environmentalists Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in their 1840s German Ideology critique of Ludwig Feurerbach’s vulgar materialism, “[The] material elements of a complete revolution [include]… the formation of a revolutionary mass, which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then, but against the very ‘production of life’ till then, the ‘total activity’ on which it [is] based.”

Understanding: Public v. Private.

A good friend who sent me the link to the Times video says that “the paper has no solution because the system that’s killing us is the only system The New York Times can imagine.”

The only system Times reporters and video-makers can publicly consider via the Times, for sure. Are Alton and Knight unaware that there no solutions under the profits system? They may well grasp this basic fact, actually. Who knows? I’ve never really liked this oft-quoted passage attributed the once famous US social democrat Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” I’ve known plenty of academic and other intellectual workers who understand far more than they let on in classrooms and more broadly in public. I’ve seen this holding back play out again and again on such topics as the abject criminality of the US invasion of Iraq, the cringing corporatism and imperialism of Barack Obama, and the rising menace of fascism in the United States. I know a celebrated left-liberal author who wrote a book on the need for socialism but chose to leave it unpublished so as not to endanger his elevated position in the literary market. I have myself on numerous prior occasions held back on what I understood to be the taproot cause of certain problems I’ve been assigned to write or teach about because of the calculation that revealing my full understanding would put my employment and/or fundraising (grant-writing) abilities at risk, thereby endangering the security and life chances of myself and family members.

Are You Experienced?

Another thought, hardly specific to the subject of this essay but worth mentioning nonetheless: the “formation of a revolutionary mass” is not just some abstract historical process in the minds of 19th Century intellectuals. It’s a shit-ton of hard work by dedicated organizers and sparkplug militants, most of whom go without mention in radical literature but whose contribution is if anything greater than those who wield the pen, the keyboard, and the speaking platform. Marx and Engels themselves spent endless hours trying to organize workers and others into socialist organizations, hardly waiting for inevitable laws of history to magically manifest. Lenin’s pamphlet What is to be Done? was a manual for organization, not a blueprint for life beyond capitalism and imperialism. Never forget his Jimi Hendrix-anticipating comment at the end to the November 30, 2017, postscript to The State and Revolution:

“This pamphlet was written in August and September 1917. I had already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh chapter, ‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917.’ Apart from the title, however, I had no time to write a single line of the chapter; I was ‘interrupted’ by a political crisis–the eve of the October revolution of 1917. Such an ‘interruption’ can only be welcomed; but the writing of the second part of this pamphlet (‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’) will probably have to be put off for a long time. It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it.”

Postscript: On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Trigger warning! (Apologies in advance for the length of some of the sentences in this postscript.). In my experience, this phrase sets off many on “the left,” especially those with “anarchist” inclinations. Sorry, not sorry. Marx applied his friend the German-American abolitionist and Union Army officer Joseph Weydemeyer’s phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat” to mean (consistent with Weydemeyer) (a) that class inequality, class politics, and class ideology – in a word, class – would not magically disappear overnight after a socialist revolution and (b) that a successful transition to a world beyond class rule and class states – to communism – depends on the suppression of capitalist counterrevolution. Revolution has always bred counterrevolution and always will. In a world of capitalist empire and nation states, of course, new and nationally bound socialist revolutions like the ones that occurred in Russia in 1917 and in China in 1949 face the problem of imperialist encirclement, invasion, and aggression. The restoration of capitalism in late 1970s China, including the massive marshalling of newly proletarianized Chinese labor power and other “cheap nature” to the parasitic depredations of Western and Japanese capital was intimately related to the vicious “neoliberal” turn of western and world capitalism and is surely one of the greatest social, political, economic, and ecological disasters in human history. Along with the final collapse of what was left of Soviet socialism, whose misleaders foolishly embraced both “peaceful co-existence” with US-led world capitalism and trade unionist reformism inside wealthy capitalist states (neither surrender was required in the course of repudiating Stalin’s pathologies, crimes, and errors) during the environmentally calamitous post-WWII “golden age of capitalism,” it contributed to the capitalogenic environmental crisis that is now poised to terminate the human experiment.

Some on “the left” (including many friends) seem incapable of engaging in real world people’s struggle thanks to childish workerist fantasies of revolution as a dreamy overnight transition to proletarian self-management – no socialist transition required. The magical thinking at the heart of this “vision” both reflects and informs their alienation from and dismissal of actual revolutionary and united front politics with all its imperfections and difficulties. Like hyper-woke identity politics, it translates into unwitting objective alliance with 21^stCentury neo-Weimar neoliberalism and fascism. The big bad scary state – including a global state formation – will be required not only to fight literally cancerous capitalist restoration, but to plan implement, and enforce environmental transformation and repair on a planetary scale.

It is worth remembering that bourgeois democracy (gravely menaced from the Republi-fascist right in the world’s leading capitalist state right now) was always in essence superstructural cover for a de facto capitalist class dictatorship. The “commoners” – the proletarianized majority of everyday people – don’t democratically call the shots under capitalism.  They never have and they never will. As the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in the introduction to his magisterial volume, The Age of Capital, “the global triumph of capitalism” meant “the triumph of a society” based on “buying everything (including labor) in the cheapest market and selling the dearest.” It was (and remains) a society where “participation in politics [on the part] of the common people” takes place only “within such limits as would guarantee the bourgeois social order and avoid the risk of its overthrow.” The outwardly democratic forms have always been considered expendable. They have been dispensed with many times in the history of supposedly democratic capitalism.

The cancellation of previously ruling class-normative bourgeois constitutional “democracy” and “rule of law” is a distinct possibility in contemporary Trump-Biden-ClintOnbama-Rittenhouse-Kavanaugh-Garland Amerika. It is something to which the US billionaire class will for the most part readily accede, consistent with the “stealth politics” it has long practiced. A considerable portion of the moneyed elite is down with fascitization and it’s not at all clear that those parts of the billionaire class who oppose the authoritarian drift could stop it even if they want to, particularly within the killing confines of an ancient constitutional order that was already heavily weighted toward the right (thanks to the malapportioned and powerful US Senate + the absurd Electoral College + rampant US House and state legislative gerrymandering + the extreme judicial review power of the Supreme Court + campaign finance laws that turn elections into “wealth primaries” + constitutionally protected corporate control of the media and other ideological institutions + the mass arming of the right wing resulting from the racist Second Amendment) even before the majority fascist takeover of the Court (completed just weeks before the 2020 presidential election courtesy of Barack Obama, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, the Federalist Society, Trump, and then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell among others) and the latest wave of right-wing voter suppression, vote dilution, and election cancellation measures concentrated in the red states. Only the people organized as a mighty force in the millions can stop the fascist drift in the world’s most powerful nation. Fearing the mob (the people) more than neofascist consolidation. The Democrats are playing their usual Weimar (fascism-appeasing) role of passive and hollow “resistance” and “inauthentic opposition” (Sheldon Wolin). Amerikaner fascitization is richly bipartisan.