by DGR News Service | Jul 1, 2022 | ANALYSIS, Mining & Drilling
Editor’s note: The shock doctrine is a concept proposed by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein and is outlined in her book, The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published in 2007. Its central proposition is that the capitalist markets take advantage of moments of tragedy or disaster, such as the pandemic, to propose or impose policies that benefit them. People’s inability to react at these times favors this strategy.
But the shock doctrine is part of a continuum. Civilization has been doing the same thing now that it has been doing for 10,000 years. Civilization traumatizes individuals, communities and cultures, then takes advantage of that trauma to grow and expand. Modern capitalism is civilization attempting to continue to function and sustain itself, while everything (eco-systems and social structures) collapse around it. People do not willingly hand over their personal power and autonomy and that of their community unless they have first been broken as a human being and built up again as a citizen. The shock will continue until we do something about the problem at the core, civilization itself. Or until civilization reaches its inevitable suicidal endgame.
By Jen Moore/Counterpunch.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
— Arundhati Roy, April 2020
Just over two years ago when lockdowns were being declared like dominoes around the world, there was a brief moment when the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to hold the potential for much-needed reflection. Could it lead to a reversal away from the profit-driven ecological and socio-economic dead end we’ve been propelling toward?
Arundhati Roy’s call to critical reflection was published in early April 2020. At the time, she was observing the early evidence, on one hand, of the devastating toll of the pandemic as a result of extraordinary inequality, the privatized health care system, and the rule of big business in the U.S., which continued to play out along lines of class and race.
She was also writing with horror at how the Modi government in India was enacting an untenable lockdown on a population of over a billion people without notice or planning, in a context of overlapping economic and political crises. While the rich and middle class could safely retreat to work from home, millions of migrant workers were forced out of work into a brutal, repressive, and even fatal long march back to their villages. And that was just the beginning.
The jarring “rupture” with normality that Roy wrote about two years ago has reinforced many “prevailing prejudices”, as she anticipated. Whether we’re talking about Amazon, the pharmaceutical industry, or mining companies, big business managed to have itself declared “essential” and profit handsomely. Meanwhile, poor and racialized people have paid the highest costs and experienced the greatest losses in the U.S., India, and many other countries around the world.
But we have also seen how people have fought back hard showing tremendous resilience in the face of greater adversity.
This is very much the case in mining-affected communities around the world, many of whom were already in David and Goliath battles before the pandemic to protect their land and water from the harms of mineral extraction. They have found no reprieve since the pandemic began.
While taking measures to protect themselves from COVID-19, these movements have refused to let their guard down as governments and corporations have taken advantage of greater social constraints to advance the mining industry.
A Pandemic Made to Fit the Mining Industry

Land defenders block mine-related traffic in Casillas, Guatemala, 2019. (Photo: NISGUA, via EarthWorks Flickr)
Since April 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies(IPS) Global Economy Project has been participating in the Coalition Against the Mining Pandemic, which came together to help document what was happening in the mining sector during the pandemic. The coalition is made up of environmental justice organizations, networks, and initiatives from North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America that work in solidarity with mining-affected communities.
The group observed early evidence that mining companies would be among the worst pandemic profiteers. In the past, after all, these corporations have sought to benefit from floods, coups, dictatorships, and other disasters to rewrite laws and push projects through while local populations are busy dealing with catastrophe and living under the gun.
In addition, the coalition especially wanted to understand what the pandemic meant for the struggles of Indigenous peoples and other mining-affected communities on the frontlines with whom we work in solidarity.
This collaborative research effort has involved local partners in 23 countries to document what it’s been like trying to protect community health from the ravages of the pandemic — while also fighting against the threat of losing their water and territory from the long-term impacts of gold, iron-ore, copper, nickel, coal, and lithium mining.
The 23 countries where we looked at cases have recorded 29 percent of the world’s known COVID cases, 43 percent of recorded COVID-related deaths, and include two of the top ten countries for the highest mortality rates (calculated by dividing the number of recorded COVID cases by the number of COVID related deaths). In order, these are Peru and Mexico. (Ecuador, where we looked at another case study, now ranks 11th.)
As expected, our recently released Latin America report No Reprieve demonstrates how COVID-19 restrictions seem to have been made to fit the mining industry. As Price Waterhouse Cooper observed in its 2021 Great Expectations report on the global mining industry, “by any important measure, mining is one of the few industries that emerged from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic economic crisis in excellent financial and operational shape.”
Precious metal prices rose in the context of the uncertainty created by the pandemic, leading to historic profits for some companies despite lower production in 2020. Prices for base metals, such as copper, soon followed as markets opened up. This was much earlier than the lifting of social constraints, putting affected communities at an even greater disadvantage than before the pandemic in their struggles for water, land, and survival.
No Reprieve for Mining Affected Communities
The lengthy lockdowns and other public health measures that were put in place not only spelled greater socio-economic crisis than before for these communities. They also meant greater difficulty or outright bans on meeting together to discuss concerns about environmental contamination, hardship, mining projects, and the greater difficulty of dealing with government offices responsible for permitting and inspections.
Online meetings were often inadequate or unavailable. When there was no other option but to get together to protest, the risks were greater than ever.
In Brazil, as in many other countries in Latin America, mining has continued pretty much without interruption since the start of the pandemic. For over a year, the community of Aurizona in the state of Maranhão has been living without an adequate supply of drinking water since the rupture of a tailings dam at the Aurizona gold mine owned by Mineração Aurizona S.A. (MASA), a subsidiary of the Canadian firm Equinox Gold.
On March 25, 2021, at the height of the pandemic in this part of northwestern Brazil, the Lagoa do Pirocaua tailings dam overflowed, contaminating the water supplies of this community of 4,000 people. Despite company promises, the community continues to lack adequate water supplies. Meanwhile, the company obtained a legal ruling that prohibits street blockades and filed a lawsuit against five movement leaders to try to deter their organizing.
In Colombia, Indigenous Wayúu and Afro-descendant communities in the La Guajira region experienced heightened risks from the continued operation of the Cerrejón mining complex, the largest open-pit thermal coal mine in Latin America. This mine is now owned exclusively by Swiss commodities giant Glencore, which consolidated its control over the mine in January 2022 when it purchased the shareholdings of Anglo American and BHP Billiton.
This mine has already operated for over three decades and displaced dozens of communities. In September 2020, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, David Boyd, asked the Colombian government to at least temporarily suspend Cerrejón’s operations, pointing out that the contamination, health impacts, and lack of water the communities already faced increased the risk of death from COVID-19.
Instead, the mine continued and even accelerated operations, while communities suffered serious physical and emotional impacts from greater social confinement and loss of subsistence economic activities. The company donated food and safety equipment to improve its image, but this generated divisions and disagreements among communities that were difficult to resolve given the restrictions on meetings.
Making this situation worse, the government and companies have refused to respect a 2017 Constitutional Court decision that recognized violations of community rights to water, food, sovereignty, and health in authorizing the diversion of the Bruno Creek’s natural course to expand coal extraction. Instead, since mid 2021, Glencore and Anglo American have been suing the Colombian government under the terms of bilateral international investment agreements with Switzerland and the United Kingdom for not letting them expand the mine.
Militarized Mining
Not only did the spaces for community organizing shrink, disappear, or just get a lot harder, violence got worse in many places. In many cases, there was heavy-handed repression, heightened militarization, and ongoing legal persecution of land and environment defenders.
In Honduras, the Tocoa Municipal Committee for the Defense of the Natural and Public Commons spent nearly the entire first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic fighting for the freedom of eight water defenders who were arbitrarily detained for their peaceful opposition to an iron ore project owned by the Honduran company Los Pinares Investments.
They were only freed in February 2022, after the narcodictatorship of former President Juan Orlando Hernández lost power to the country’s first female president, Xiomara Castro. Meanwhile the company, which has ties to U.S. steel company Nucor, managed to start operations in mid 2021 without obtaining the required environmental permit, immediately putting in danger the future of the San Pedro river on which downstream communities depend.
In Mexico, a special group of public armed forces called the Mining Police was inaugurated in 2020, aimed at protecting mining facilities from mineral theft. The recruitment of troops was announced for the first time in July of that year, during an online event entitled “The reactivation of mining in the face of the new normality.” By the end of September 2020, the first 118 federal officers with military training had graduated and were deployed to guard the La Herradura gold mine owned by the Mexican company Fresnillo plc, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange and owned by Industrias Peñoles.
In contrast, no measures have been taken to lower the levels of subjugation, extortion, forced displacement, and violence against the communities that inhabit these same areas — such as the community of El Bajío, which neighbors the La Herradura mine, where the Penmont company from the same business group operated illegally until 2013.
Members of the community of El Bajío have faced violence since this time, despite receiving 67 favorable rulings declaring the land occupation agreements of the community members affected by the Mexican company Penmont (a subsidiary of Fresnillo plc) null and void. These rulings have yet to be executed and the risks for the community have intensified.
Two members of this community were brutally assassinated in April 2021. Beside their bodies a piece of cardboard was found on which 13 names of other community members involved in the resistance to the mine were written, a clear threat. The state has not provided any protection to family members either — although there are constant patrols by state police, the National Guard, and the army to intimidate the population.
Mining for Supposed Economic Recovery
At the same time, administrative processes for companies to get new permits got easier and projects moved forward. The justification was that mineral extraction would supposedly contribute to post-pandemic economic reactivation, but it’s well known that mining tends to divert attention from more sustainable economic sectors at a national level and impoverish local communities.
In Panama and Ecuador — both countries with few industrial mines in operation due to widespread rejection by the affected populations — there have also been attempts to accelerate mining expansion in the name of economic reactivation.
In Ecuador, there is widespread opposition to mining in the country due to its impacts on water, the country’s exceptional biodiversity, and the well-being of small farmer and Indigenous communities.
During his election campaign, current President Guillermo Lasso promoted “human rights and the rights of nature… and the protection of the environment with a sustainable agenda.” However, once he took office in May 2021, he showed his willingness to serve transnational mining interests.
On August 5, he issued Executive Decree No. 151, an “Action Plan for the Ecuadorian Mining Sector,” which seeks to accelerate mining in fragile ecosystems such as the Amazon and high-altitude wetlands (páramos). It gives legal certainty to mining companies by providing a favorable environment for investors, indicating explicit respect for international agreements that favor corporate interests. It likewise proposes the acceleration of environmental permits for mining projects without taking into account the socio-environmental impacts.
Similarly, on May 19, 2021, the Panamanian government presented its strategic plan to base its post-pandemic economic recovery on mining. Given the prevalence of corruption and the constant violations of environmental regulations and the Constitution by mining companies in Panama, citizens see this mining stimulus plan as the government aiming to enrich itself and its cronies.
Faced with the fallacy of national economic recovery through mining, a national campaign platform arose called the Panama Worth More Without Mining Movement (MPVMSM). This broad based movement of environmental organizations, teachers, workers, youth, small farmers, and Indigenous communities opposes mining and the renegotiation of the contract over the only operating mine in Panama, Cobre Panama owned by First Quantum Minerals, which they consider unconstitutional and argue should be canceled.
Despite evidence that upwards of 60 percent of Panamanians support this movement’s aims, the government insists on continuing to promote initiatives aimed at making way for mining expansion in the country.
Truly Essential Resilience and Resistance
Despite the conditions for peoples’ struggles having gotten harder over the last two years, the resilience and resistance of people fighting from the margins for their land, their water and their community health has persisted, often with women, Indigenous peoples, and small-scale farmers at the forefront.
From Mexico to Argentina, the communities and organizations who shared their experiences for this report have found ways to continue fighting for respect for their self-determination, community health, and their own visions of their future. While some projects moved ahead, others have not been able to overcome tireless community resistance.
Whether communities are fighting to address mining harms or standing in the way of these unwanted projects, their struggles are potent examples of the sort of reimagining and digging in for fundamental change that Arundhati Roy urged at the start of this pandemic.
Through their resistance, mutual care, traditional knowledge, and efforts toward greater food sovereignty and collective wellbeing, these communities and movements demonstrate the urgent need to shift away from a destructive model of economic development that has been forced on people around the world, based on endless extraction to serve international markets with primary materials that are turned into products for mass consumption.
They point out the vital need for a serious reckoning to address the harms that have taken place and to pull back the reins on such militarized mass destruction in order to prioritize peoples’ self-determination and more sustainable ways of living. This is what is truly essential if we hope to ensure collective health and wellbeing now and for future generations.
by DGR News Service | Jun 25, 2022 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization
Editor’s note: Marxism and Collapse is a new organization formed “for information and debate on the scientific sources surrounding the existential problems facing humanity in the short term (ecological crisis, energy collapse, overpopulation, resource depletion, pandemics, atomic war) and the need for a new strategic programmatic framework in the face of an inevitable nearby process of civilisational collapse and human extinction.” They reached out to Deep Green Resistance member Max Wilbert recently and invited him to participate in this written debate with Noam Chomsky and Miguel Fuentes. His comments are published here for the first time.
A few notes. First, while it is impossible to work for social change without contending with Marx and his legacy, Deep Green Resistance is not a Marxist organization. Although several of our organizers do consider themselves Marxists, others reject Marxism. Nonetheless, we see great value in dialogue with Marxist organizations and communities, just as we value in dialogue with Conservative or Libertarian organizations. Open dialogue, debate, and discussion is essential, and we are glad to see some strains of Marxism beginning to seriously contend with the unfolding ecological crisis.
Second, this debate includes comments from Guy McPherson, a man who Deep Green Resistance cut ties with after allegations surfaced of sexual misconduct. We would have preferred to remove McPherson’s comments, but left them here at the insistence of Marxism and Collapse. Be wary of this man.
This is part 1 of a 2 part written debate.
Introduction
The following is the first part of the interview-debate “Climate Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” between the linguist and social scientist Noam Chomsky, one of the most important intellectuals of the last century, the Chilean social researcher and referent of the Marxist-Collapsist theoretical current Miguel Fuentes, and the American scientist Guy McPherson, a specialist in the topics of the ecological crisis and climate change. One of the most remarkable elements of this debate is the presentation of three perspectives which, although complementary in many respects, offer three different theoretical and political-programmatic approaches to the same problem: the imminence of a super-catastrophic climate change horizon and the possibility of a near civilisational collapse. Another noteworthy element of this debate is the series of interpretative challenges to which Chomsky’s positions are exposed and that give this discussion the character of a true “ideological contest” between certain worldviews which, although as said before common in many respects, are presented as ultimately opposed to each other. In a certain sense, this debate takes us back, from the field of reflection on the ecological catastrophe, to the old debates of the 20th century around the dilemma between “reform or revolution”, something that is undoubtedly necessary in the sphere of contemporary discussions of political ecology.
Question 1:
Marxism and Collapse: In a recent discussion between ecosocialist stances and collapsist approaches represented by Michael Lowy (France), Miguel Fuentes (Chile) and Antonio Turiel (Spain), Lowy constantly denied the possibility of a self-induced capitalist collapse and criticized the idea of the impossibility of stopping climate change before it reaches the catastrophic level of 1.5 centigrade degrees of global warming. Do you think that the current historical course is heading to a social global downfall comparable, for example, to previous processes of civilization collapse or maybe to something even worse than those seen in ancient Rome or other ancient civilizations? Is a catastrophic climate change nowadays unavoidable? Is a near process of human extinction as a result of the overlapping of the current climate, energetic, economic, social and political crisis and the suicidal path of capitalist destruction, conceivable? (1) (Marxism and Collapse)
Noam Chomsky:
The situation is ominous, but I think Michael Lowy is correct. There are feasible means to reach the IPPC goals and avert catastrophe, and also moving on to a better world. There are careful studies showing persuasively that these goals can be attained at a cost of 2-3% of global GDP, a substantial sum but well within reach – a tiny fraction of what was spent during World War II, and serious as the stakes were in that global struggle, what we face today is more significant by orders of magnitude. At stake is the question whether the human experiment will survive in any recognizable form.
The most extensive and detailed work I know on how to reach these goals is by economist Robert Pollin. He presents a general review in our joint book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal. His ideas are currently being implemented in a number of places, including some of the most difficult ones, where economies are still reliant on coal. Other eco-economists, using somewhat different models, have reached similar conclusions. Just recently IRENA, —the International Renewable Energy Agency, part of the UN– came out with the same estimate of clean energy investments to reach the IPCC goals.
There is not much time to implement these proposals. The real question is not so much feasibility as will. There is little doubt that it will be a major struggle. Powerful entrenched interests will work relentlessly to preserve short-term profit at the cost of incalculable disaster. Current scientific work conjectures that failure to reach the goal of net zero Carbon emissions by 2050 will set irreversible processes in motion that are likely to lead to a “hothouse earth,” reaching unthinkable temperatures 4-5º Celsius above pre-industrial levels, likely to result in an end to any form of organized human society.
Miguel Fuentes:
Noam Chomsky highlights the possibility of a global warming that exceeds 4-5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels within this century in his previous response, which according to him could mean, literally, the end of all forms of organised human society. Chomsky endorses what many other researchers and scientists around the world are saying. A recent report by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, for example, points to 2050 as the most likely date for the onset of widespread civilisational collapse. The central idea would be that, due to a sharp worsening of the current climate situation, and the possible transformation by the middle of this century of a large part of our planet into uninhabitable, a point of no return would then be reached in which the fracture and collapse of nation states and the world order would be inevitable . At the same time, he states that the needed goals to avert this catastrophe which will lay the foundations for a transition to “clean energy”, and a more just society, would still be perfectly achievable. Specifically, Chomsky says that this would only require an investment of around 2-3% of world GDP, the latter within the framework of a plan of “environmental reforms” described in the so-called “Green New Deal” of which he is one of its main advocates.
Let’s reflect for a moment on the above. On the one hand, Chomsky accepts the possibility of a planetary civilisational collapse in the course of this century. On the other hand, he reduces the solution to this threat to nothing more than the application of a “green tax”. Literally the greatest historical, economic, social, cultural and even geological challenge that the human species and civilisation has faced since its origins reduced, roughly speaking, to a problem of “international financial fundraising” consisting of allocating approximately 3% of world GDP to the promotion of “clean energies”. Let’s think about this again. A danger that, as Chomsky puts it, would be even greater than the Second World War and could turn the Earth into a kind of uninhabitable rock, should be solved either by “international tax collection” or by a plan of limited “eco-reforms” of the capitalist economic model (known as the “Green New Deal”).
But how is it possible that Chomsky, one of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century, is able to make this “interpretive leap” between accepting the possibility of the “end of all organised human society” within this century and reducing the solution to that threat to what would appear to be no more than a (rather timid) cosmetic restructuring of international capitalist finance? Who knows! What is certain, however, is that Chomsky’s response to the climate threat lags far behind not only those advocated by the ecosocialist camp and even traditional Marxism to deal with the latter, based on posing the link between the problem of the root causes of the ecological crisis and the need for a politics that defends the abolition of private ownership of the means of production as a necessary step in confronting it. Moreover, Chomsky’s treatment of the ecological crisis seems to be inferior to that which characterises all those theoretical tendencies which, such as the theory of degrowth or a series of collapsist currents, advocate the imposition of drastic plans of economic degrowth and a substantial decrease in industrial activity and global consumption levels. The latter by promoting a process of “eco-social transition” which would not be reduced to a mere change in the energy matrix and the promotion of renewable energies, but would imply, on the contrary, the transition from one type of civilisation (modern and industrial) to another, better able to adapt to the new planetary scenarios that the ecological crisis, energy decline and global resource scarcity will bring with them.
But reducing the solution of the climate catastrophe to the need for a “green tax” on the capitalist market economy is not the only error in Chomsky’s response. In my view, the main problem of the arguments he uses to defend the possibility of a successful “energy transition” from fossil fuels to so-called “clean energy” would be that they are built on mud. First, because it is false to say that so-called “clean energies” are indeed “clean” if we consider the kind of resources and technological efforts required in the implementation of the energy systems based on them. Solar or wind energy, for example, depend not only on huge amounts of raw materials associated for their construction with high polluting extractive processes (e.g., the large quantities of steel required for the construction of wind turbines is just one illustration of this), but also on the use of extensive volumes of coal, natural gas or even oil. The construction of a single solar panel requires, for instance, enormous quantities of coal. Another striking example can be seen in the dependence of hydrogen plants (specially the “grey” or “blue” types) on vast quantities of natural gas for their operations. All this without it ever being clear that the reduction in the use of fossil fuels that should result from the implementation of these “clean” technologies will be capable of effectively offsetting a possible exponential increase in its “ecological footprint” in the context of a supposedly successful energy transition .
Secondly, it is false to assume that an energy matrix based on renewable energies could satisfy the energy contribution of fossil fuels to the world economy in the short or medium term, at least, if a replication of current (ecologically unviable) patterns of economic growth is sought. Examples of this include the virtual inability of so-called “green hydrogen” power plants to become profitable systems in the long term, as well as the enormous challenges that some power sources such as solar or wind energy (highly unstable) would face in meeting sustained levels of energy demand over time. All this without even considering the significant maintenance costs of renewable energy systems, which are also associated (as said) with the use of highly polluting raw materials and a series of supplies whose manufacture also depend on the use of fossil fuels .
But the argumentative problems in Chomsky’s response are not limited to the above. More importantly is that the danger of the climate crisis and the possibility of a planetary collapse can no longer be confined to a purely financial issue (solvable by a hypothetical allocation of 3% of world GDP) or a strictly technical-engineering challenge (solvable by the advancement of a successful energy transition). This is because the magnitude of this problem has gone beyond the area of competence of economic and technological systems, and has moved to the sphere of the geological and biophysical relations of the planet itself, calling the very techno-scientific (and economic-financial) capacities of contemporary civilisation into question. In other words, the problem represented by the current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or those related to the unprecedented advances in marine acidification, Arctic melting, or permafrost decomposition rates, would today constitute challenges whose solution would be largely beyond any of our scientific developments and technological capabilities. Let’s just say that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (already close to 420 ppm) have not been seen for millions of years on Earth. On other occasions I have defined this situation as the development of a growing “terminal technological insufficiency” of our civilisation to face the challenges of the present planetary crisis .
In the case of current atmospheric CO2 concentrations, for example, there are not and will not be for a long time (possibly many decades or centuries), any kind of technology capable of achieving a substantial decrease of those concentrations. This at least not before such concentrations continue to skyrocket to levels that could soon guarantee that a large part of our planet will become completely uninhabitable in the short to medium term. In the case of CO2 capture facilities, for instance, they have not yet been able to remove even a small (insignificant) fraction of the more than 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted each year by industrial society . Something similar would be the situation of other ecological problems such as the aforementioned increase in marine acidification levels, the rise in ocean levels or even the increasingly unmanageable proliferation of space debris and the consequent danger it represents for the (immediate) maintenance of contemporary telecommunication systems. In other words, again, increasing threatening problems for which humanity has no effective technologies to cope, at least not over the few remaining decades before these problems reach proportions that will soon call into question our very survival as a species.
Unsolvable problems, as unsolvable as those that would confront anyone seeking to “restore” a clay pot or a glass bottle to its original state after it has been shattered into a thousand fragments by smashing it against a concrete wall! To restore a glass of the finest crystal after it has been smashed to pieces? Not even with the investment of ten, a hundred world GDPs would it be possible! This is what we have done with the world, the most beautiful of the planetary crystals of our solar system, blown into a thousand pieces by ecocidal industrialism! To restore? To resolve? Bollocks! We have already destroyed it all! We have already finished it all! And no “financial investment” or “technological solution” can prevent what is coming: death! To die then! To die… and to fight to preserve what can be preserved! To die and to hope for the worst, to conquer socialism however we can, on whatever planet we have, and to take the future out of the hands of the devil himself if necessary! That is the task of socialist revolution in the 21st century! That is the duty of Marxist revolutionaries in the new epoch of darkness that is rising before us! That is the mission of Marxism-Collapsist!
Max Wilbert:
Throughout history, all civilizations undermine their own ecological foundations, face disease, war, political instability, and the breakdown of basic supply chains, and eventually collapse.
Modern technology and scientific knowledge does not make us immune from this pattern. On the contrary, as our global civilization has harnessed more energy, expanded, and grown a larger population than ever before in history, the fall is certain to be correspondingly worse. What goes up must come down. This is a law of nature. The only question is, when?
Professor Chomsky’s argument that collapse of civilization can be averted at a relatively minor cost by diverting 2-3% of global GDP to transition to renewable energy and fund a *Global Green New Deal* does not contend with the physical constraints civilization faces today. The global energy system, which powers the entire economy, is the largest machine in existence and was built over more than a century during a period of abundant fossil fuels and easy-to-access minerals and raw materials. It was powered by the *last remnants of ancient sunlight*, fossil fuels condensed into an extremely dense form of energy that is fungible and easily transportable.
That era is over. Accessible reserves of minerals, oil, and gas are gone, and we are long since into the era of extreme energy extraction (fracking, deepwater drilling, arctic drilling, tar sands, etc.). Simply replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind energy and phasing out all liquid and solid fuel (which still makes up roughly 80% of energy use) in favor of electrification of transportation, heating, etc. is not a simple task in an era of declining energy availability, increasing costs, extreme weather, political and financial instability, and resource scarcity. And these so-called “renewable” technologies still have major environmental impacts (for example, see solar impacts on desert tortoise, wind energy impacts on bat populations, and lithium mining impacts on sage-grouse), even if they do reduce carbon emissions—which is not yet proven outside of models.
In practice, renewable energy technologies seem to be largely serving as a profitable investment for the wealthy, a way to funnel public money into private hands, and a distraction from the scale of the ecological problems we face (of which global warming is far from the worst) and the scale of solutions which are needed. This is, as Miguel Fuentes points out, a rather timid cosmetic restructuring of the dominant political and economic order.
In our book *Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It*, my co-authors and I call this “solving for the wrong variable.” We write: “Our way of life [industrial modernity] doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life… we are not saving civilization; we are trying to save the world.” Scientists like Tim Garrett at the University of Utah model civilization as a “heat engine,” a simple thermodynamic model that will consume energy and materials until it can no longer do so, then collapse. Joseph Tainter, the scholar of collapse, writes that “in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.” This is our reality.
Whether sanity prevails and we succeed in building a new politics and new societies organized around rapidly scaling down the human enterprise to sustainable levels, or we continue down the business-as-usual path we are on, the future looks either grim or far more dire. Global warming will continue to worsen for decades even if, by some miracle, we are able to dismantle the fossil fuel industry and restore the ecology of this planet. The 6th mass extinction event and ecological collapse aren’t a distant future. We are in the depths of these events, and they’ve been getting worse for centuries. The question is not “can we avoid catastrophe?” It’s too late for that. The question is, “how much of the world will be destroyed?” Will elephants survive? Coral reefs? Tigers? The Amazon Rainforest? Will humans? What will we leave behind?
I want to leave behind as much biodiversity and ecological integrity as possible. Human extinction seems unlikely, at least in coming decades, unless runaway global warming accelerates faster than predicted. “Unlikely” is not “impossible,” but there are 8 billion of us, and we are profoundly adaptable. I am far less worried about human extinction than about the extinction of countless other species—100 per day. I am far more worried about the collapse of insect populations or phytoplankton populations (which provide 40% of all oxygen on the planet and are the base of the oceanic food web). The fabric of life itself is fraying, and we are condemning unborn human generations to a hellish future and countless non-humans to the extinction. Extinction will come for humans, at some point. But at this point, I am not concerned for our species, but rather for the lives of my nephews and their children, and the salmon on the brink of extermination, and the last remaining old-growth forests.
Guy McPherson:
There is no escape from the mass extinction event underway. Only human arrogance could suggest otherwise. Our situation is definitely terminal. I cannot imagine that there will be a habitat for Homo sapiens beyond a few years in the future. Soon after we lose our habitat, all individuals of our species will die out. Global warming has already passed two degrees Celsius above the 1750 baseline, as noted by the renowned Professor Andrew Glikson in his October 2020 book “The Event Horizon”. He wrote on page 31 of that book: “During the Anthropocene, greenhouse gas forcing increased by more than 2.0 W/m2, equivalent to more than > 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, which is an abrupt (climate change) event taking place over a period not much longer than a generation”.
So yes. We have definitely passed the point of no return in the climate crisis. Even the incredibly conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already admitted the irreversibility of climate change in its 24 September 2019 “Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”. A quick look around the globe will also reveal unprecedented events such as forest fires, floods and mega-droughts. The ongoing pandemic is just one of many events that are beginning to overwhelm human systems and our ability to respond positively.
All species are going extinct, including more than half a dozen species of the genus Homo that have already disappeared. According to the scientific paper by Quintero and Wiens published in Ecology Letters on 26 June 2013, the projected rate of environmental change is 10.000 times faster than vertebrates can adapt to. Mammals also cannot keep up with these levels of change, as Davis and colleagues’ paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 30 October 2018 points out. The fact that our species is a vertebrate mammal suggests that we will join more than 99% of the species that have existed on Earth that have already gone extinct. The only question in doubt is when. In fact, human extinction could have been triggered several years ago when the Earth’s average global temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 1750 baseline. According to a comprehensive overview of this situation published by the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System in April 2019, a “1.5 degree increase is the maximum the planet can tolerate; (…) in a worst-case scenario, [such a temperature increase above the 1750 baseline will result in] the extinction of humanity altogether”.
All species need habitat to survive. As Hall and colleagues reported in the Spring 1997 issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin: “We therefore define habitat ‘as the resources and conditions present in an area that produce occupancy, including survival and reproduction, of a given organism. Habitat is organism-specific; it relates the presence of a species, population or individual (…) to the physical and biological characteristics of an area. Habitat implies more than vegetation or the structure of that vegetation; it is the sum of the specific resources needed by organisms. Whenever an organism is provided with resources that allow it to survive, that is its habitat’”. Even tardigrades are not immune to extinction. Rather, they are sensitive to high temperatures, as reported in the 9 January 2020 issue of Scientific Reports. Ricardo Cardoso Neves and collaborators point out there that all life on Earth is threatened with extinction with an increase of 5-6 degrees Celsius in the global average temperature. As Strona and Corey state in another article in Scientific Reports (November 13, 2018) raising the issue of co-extinctions as a determinant of the loss of all life on Earth: “In a simplified view, the idea of co-extinction boils down to the obvious conclusion that a consumer cannot survive without its resources”.
From the incredibly conservative Wikipedia entry entitled “Climate change” comes this supporting information: “Climate change includes both human-induced global warming and its large-scale impacts on weather patterns. There have been previous periods of climate change, but the current changes are more rapid than any known event in Earth’s history.” The Wikipedia entry further cites the 8 August 2019 report “Climate Change and Soils”, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is among the most conservative scientific bodies in history. Yet it concluded in 2019 that the Earth is in the midst of the most rapid environmental change seen in planetary history, citing scientific literature that concludes: “These rates of human-driven global change far exceed the rates of change driven by geophysical or biospheric forces that have altered the trajectory of the Earth System in the past (Summerhayes 2015; Foster et al. 2017); nor do even abrupt geophysical events approach current rates of human-driven change”.
The Wikipedia entry also points out the consequences of the kind of abrupt climate change currently underway, including desert expansion, heat waves and wildfires becoming increasingly common, melting permafrost, glacier retreat, loss of sea ice, increased intensity of storms and other extreme environmental events, along with widespread species extinctions. Another relevant issue is the fact that the World Health Organisation has already defined climate change as the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. The Wikipedia entry continues: “Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations collectively agreed to keep warming ‘well below 2.0 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) through mitigation efforts’”. But Professor Andrew Glikson already pointed out as we said in his aforementioned book The Event Horizon that the 2 degrees C mark is already behind us. Furthermore, as we already indicated, the IPCC also admitted the irreversibility of climate change in its “Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”. Therefore, 2019 was an exceptional year for the IPCC, as it concluded that climate change is abrupt and irreversible.
How conservative is the IPCC? Even the conservative and renowned journal BioScience includes an article in its March 2019 issue entitled “Statistical language supports conservatism in climate change assessments”. The paper by Herrando-Perez and colleagues includes this information: “We find that the tone of the IPCC’s probabilistic language is remarkably conservative (…) emanating from the IPCC’s own recommendations, the complexity of climate research and exposure to politically motivated debates. Harnessing the communication of uncertainty with an overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change should be one element of a broader reform, whereby the creation of an IPCC outreach working group could improve the transmission of climate science to the panel’s audiences”. Contrary to the conclusion of Herrando-Perez and colleagues, I cannot imagine that the IPCC is really interested in conveying accurate climate science to its audiences. After all, as Professor Michael Oppenheimer noted in 2007, the US government during the Reagan administration “saw the creation of the IPCC as a way to prevent the activism stimulated by my colleagues and me from controlling the political agenda”.
Question 2:
Marxism and Collapse: Have the human species become a plague for the planet? If so, how can we still conciliate the survival of life on Earth with the promotion of traditional modern values associated with the defence of human and social rights (which require the use of vast amounts of planetary resources) in a context of a potential increase of world’s population that could reach over twelve billion people this century? The latter in a context in which (according to several studies) the maximum number of humans that Earth could have sustained without a catastrophic alteration of ecosystems should have never exceeded the billion. Can the modern concept of liberal (or even socialist) democracy and its supposedly related principles of individual, identity, gender, or cultural freedom survive our apparent terminal geological situation, or it will be necessary to find new models of social organization, for example, in those present in several indigenous or native societies? Can the rights of survival of living species on Earth, human rights, and the concept of modern individual freedom be harmoniously conciliated in the context of an impending global ecosocial disaster?
Noam Chomsky:
Let’s begin with population growth. There is a humane and feasible method to constrain that: education of women. That has a major effect on fertility in both rich regions and poor, and should be expedited anyway. The effects are quite substantial leading to sharp population decline by now in parts of the developed world. The point generalizes. Measures to fend off “global ecosocial disaster” can and should proceed in parallel with social and institutional change to promote values of justice, freedom, mutual aid, collective responsibility, democratic control of institutions, concern for other species, harmony with nature –values that are commonly upheld by indigenous societies and that have deep roots in popular struggles in what are called the “developed societies” –where, unfortunately, material and moral development are all too often uncorrelated.
Miguel Fuentes:
Chomsky’s allusions to the promotion of women’s education and the social values of justice, freedom, mutual aid, and harmony with nature, as “moral values” disconnected from a broader critique of the industrial system, capitalism, and the class society within which threats such as global warming have been generated and aggravated, become mere phrases of good intentions. On the contrary, the realization of these principles must be thought within a context of a large-scale world social transformation. The latter if those principles are to be effective in combatting the challenges facing humanity today and the kind of civilisational crisis that is beginning to unfold as a product of the multiple eco-social (ecological, energy and resource) crises that are advancing globally. In other words, a process of historical transformation that can envisage the abolition of the current ecocidal industrial economic system, and its replacement by one in which production, exchange and distribution can be planned in accordance with social needs.
But even a traditional socialist approach to these problems, such as the one above, also falls short of accounting for the kind of planetary threats we face. Let’s put it this way, the discussion around the ecological crisis and the rest of the existential dangers hanging over the fate of our civilisation today really only begins, not ends, by giving it a proper Marxist contextualisation. One of the underlying reasons for this is that the traditional socialist project itself, in all its variants (including its more recent ecosocialist versions), would also already be completely insufficient to respond to the dangers we are facing as a species. That is, the kind of dangers and interpretative problems that none of the Marxists theoreticians of social revolution over the last centuries had ever imagined possible, from Marx and Engels to some of the present-day exponents of ecosocialism such as John Bellamy Foster or Michael Lowy .
One of these new types of problems that revolutionary theories are facing today is that of the current uncontrolled demographic growth rates of humanity. A problem that would already confer on us, amongst other things, the condition of one of the worst biological (or, in our case, “biosocial”) plagues existing to this day. This if we consider the absolutely devastating role that our species has been exerting on the biosphere in the last centuries. A plague that would be even comparable in its destructive power to that represented by the cyanobacteria that triggered the first mass extinction event on Earth some 2.4 billion years ago, although in our case at an even more accelerated and “efficient” pace than the latter. Is this statement too brutal? Maybe, from a purely humanist point of view, alien to the kind of problems we face today, but not from an eminently scientific perspective. Or can there be any doubt about our condition as a “planetary plague” for any ecologist studying the current patterns of behaviour, resource consumption and habitat destruction associated with our species? Too brutal a statement? Tell it to the more than 10.000 natural species that become extinct every year as a result of the role of a single species on the planet: ours! Tell it to the billions of animals killed in the great fires of Australia or the Amazon a few years ago! Tell it to the polar bears, koalas, pikas, tigers, lions, elephants, who succumb every year as a product of what we have done to the Earth! Very well, we are then a “plague”, although this term would only serve to classify us as a “biological species”, being therefore too “limited” a definition and lacking any social and historical perspective. Right?
Not really. The fact that we possess social and cultural systems that differentiate us from other complex mammals does not mean that our current status as a “plague of the world” should be confined to the biological realm alone. On the contrary, this just means that this status could also have a certain correlation in the social and cultural dimension; that is, in the sphere of the social and cultural systems particular to modern society. To put it in another way, even though our current condition of “plague of the world” has been acquired by our species within the framework of a specific type of society, mode of production and framework of particular historical relations, characteristic of industrial modernity, this does not mean that this condition should be understood as a merely historical product. That is, excluding its biological and ecological dimension. In fact, beyond the differentiated position and role of the various social sectors that make up the productive structure and the socio-economic systems of the industrial society (for example, the exploiting and exploited social classes), it is indeed humanity as a whole: rich and poor, entrepreneurs and workers, men and women, who share (all of us) the same responsibility as a species (although admittedly in a differentiated way) for the current planetary disaster. An example of the above. Mostly everything produced today by the big multinationals, down to the last grain of rice or the last piece of plastic, is consumed by someone, whether in Paris, London, Chisinau or La Paz. And we should also remember that even biological plagues (such as locusts) may have different consumption patterns at the level of their populations, with certain sectors being able to consume more and others consuming less. However, just because one sector of a given biological plague consumes less (or even much less), this sector should not necessarily be considered as not belonging to that plague in question.
Another similar example: it is often claimed in Marxist circles (sometimes the numbers vary according to each study) that 20% of humanity consumes 80% of the planetary resources. This means that approximately 1.600.000.000.000 people (assuming a total population of 8 billion) would be the consumers of that 80% of planetary resources; that is, a number roughly equivalent to three times the current European population. In other words, what this sentence really tells us is that a much larger segment of the world’s population than the capitalist elites (or their political servants) would also bear a direct, even grotesque, responsibility for the unsustainable consumption patterns that have been aggravating the current planetary crisis. Or, to put it in more “Marxist” terms, that a large percentage (or even the totality) of the working classes and popular sectors in Europe, the United States, and a significant part of those in Latin America and other regions of the so-called “developing countries”, would also be “directly complicit”, at least in regards of the reproduction of the current ecocidal modern urban lifestyle, in the destruction of our planet.
But let us extend the discussion to the remaining 80% of humanity; that is, to the approximately 6.400.000.000.000 people who consume 20% of the planetary resources used in a year. To begin with, let us say that 20% of global resources is not a negligible percentage, representing in fact a fifth of them and whose production would be associated with substantial and sustained levels of environmental destruction. The latter in the context of an ever-growing world population that possibly should never have exceeded one billion inhabitants, so that we would have been in a position today to stop or slow down the disastrous impact we are having on ecosystems. Let us not forget that the number of people included in this 80% of the world’s population is more than four times higher than the entire human population at the beginning of the 20th century, which means that the number of basic resources necessary for the survival of this sector is an inevitable pressure on the earth’s natural systems, even if consumption levels are kept to a minimum.
In short, there is therefore no doubt that humanity has indeed become one of the worst planetary plagues in the history of terrestrial life, constituting this a (fundamental) problem in itself for contemporary revolutionary thought and, more generally, for the human and social sciences as a whole. In other words, a problem that today would not be solved by a mere change in the mode of production, the class structure, or the socio-political system, but would be associated with the very “genetics” of the development of industrial society. That is to say, a society based on a particularly destructive (voracious) form of human-nature relationships, which would be at the same time the “structural basis” of all possible and conceivable models of it (capitalists, socialists or any other type). Whether in the framework of a neo-liberal market economy or a socialist and/or collectivist planned economy, it is the industrial system and modern mass society in all its variants, whether capitalist or socialist, its mega-cities, its productive levels, its consumption patterns and lifestyles, its “anthropocentric spirit”, structurally associated with certain demographic patterns in which the Earth is conceived as a mere space for human consumption and reproduction… that is the main problem.
Is it possible to reconcile current levels of overpopulation with the survival requirements of our species? No. We have become a planetary plague and will remain a planetary plague until such time as, by hook or by crook (almost certainly by crook) our numbers are substantially reduced and remain at the minimum possible levels, for at least a few centuries or millennia. Is it possible to solve the problem of overpopulation and at the same time defend the legitimacy of traditional modern values associated with the promotion of human and social rights, at least as these values have been understood in recent centuries? No. Modernity has failed. Modernity is dead. We are going to have to rethink every single one of our values, including the most basic ones, all of them. We are going to have to rethink who we are, where we are going and where we come from. The existence of almost 8 billion people on our planet today, and moreover the likely increase of this number to one that reaches 10 or even 12 billion is not only incompatible with the realisation of the very ideals and values of modern democracy in all its variants (capitalists or socialists), but also with the very survival of our species as a whole and, possibly, of all complex life on Earth. This simply because there will be nowhere near enough resources to ensure the realization of these values (or even our own subsistence) in such a demographic context (there simply won’t be enough food and water). Our situation is terminal. Modernity is dead. Democracy is dead. Socialism is dead. And if we want these concepts -democracy or socialism- to really have any value in the face of the approaching catastrophe, then we will have to rethink them a little more humbly than we have done so far.
Modern civilisation has borne some of the best fruits of humanity’s social development, but also some of the worst. We are in some ways like the younger brother of a large family whose early successes made him conceited, stupid and who, thinking of himself as “master of the world”, began to lose everything. We are that young man. We should therefore shut up, put our ideologies (capitalists and socialists) in our pockets, and start learning a little more from our more modest, slower and more balanced “big brothers”; for example, each of the traditional or indigenous societies which have been able to ensure their subsistence for centuries and in some cases even millennia. The latter while industrial society would not even have completed three centuries before endangering its own existence and that of all other cultures on the planet. In a few words, start learning from all those traditional societies that have subsisted in the context of the development of social systems that are often much more respectful of ecological and ecosystemic balances. Those “ecosocial balances” which are, in the end, in the long view of the evolution of species, the real basis for the development of any society… because without species (be they animal or plant), any human culture is impossible. Scientific and technological progress? Excellent idea! But perhaps we could take the long route, think things through a bit more, and achieve the same as we have achieved today in two centuries, but perhaps taking a bit longer, say ten, twenty or even a hundred centuries? Who’s in a hurry? Let us learn from the tortoise which, perhaps because it is slow, has survived on Earth for more than 220 million years, until we (who as Homo sapiens are no more than 250.000 years old) came along and endangered it.
Max Wilbert:
Human population is a hockey-stick graph that corresponds almost exactly with rising energy use. Most of the nitrogen in our diet comes from fossil fuel-based fertilizers. Norman Borlaug, the plant breeder who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Green Revolution, said in his acceptance speech that “we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction… There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.”
Ideally, this situation could be dealt with humanely by education and making family planning and women’s health services available. The best example of this actually comes from Iran, where under a religious theocracy in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war, birth rates were reduced from around 7 children per woman to less than replacement in little more than a decade (the policy was since reversed, and Iran’s land and water is paying the price). Technically, it’s quite easy to solve overpopulation humanely; reduce birth rates to less than replacement levels, then wait. Politically, it’s much harder. As we’ve seen with the recent fall of abortion rights in the US, the political battle for control of women’s reproduction is alive and well, and basic ecology is anathema to many political leaders and populations.
Unless we take action to reduce our population willingly, it will happen unwillingly as the planet’s ecology fails to be able to support us. That will be harsh. Any species that exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment it lives in will experience a population crash, usually due to starvation, disease, and predation. That’s our choice. Either we make the right decisions, or we pay the price.
The difference between our situation today and the Indus Valley civilization or the Roman Empire is that today civilization is globalized. The collapse of global industrial civilization, as I wrote above, is coming. I don’t believe it can be stopped at this point; in fact, I believe it is already in progress. But collapse is also not simply an overnight chaotic breakdown of all social order. We can define collapse as a rapid simplification of a complex society characterized by breakdown of political and social institutions, a return to localized, low energy ways of life, and usually a significant reduction in population (which is a nice way of saying, a lot of people die).
Collapse should be looked at as having good and bad elements. Good elements, from my perspective, include reducing consumption and energy use, localizing our lives, and having certain destructive institutions (for example, the fossil fuel industry) fade away. Bad elements might include breakdown of basic safety and rising violence, mass starvation, disease, and, for example, the destruction of local forests for firewood if electricity is no longer available for heating. Some aspects of collapse have elements of both. For example, the collapse of industrial agriculture would be incredibly beneficial for the planet but would lead to mass human die offs.
If collapse is coming regardless of what we want, it’s our moral and ecological responsibility to make the best of the situation by assisting and accelerating the positive aspects of collapse (for example, by working to reduce consumption and dismantle oil infrastructure) and help prevent or mitigate the negative aspects (for example, by working to reduce population growth and build localized sustainable food systems).
As I write this, I am looking into a meadow between 80-year-old oak trees. A deer and her fawn are walking through the grass. Birds are singing in the trees. A passenger jet roars overhead, and the hum of traffic floats over the hills. There is a fundamental contradiction between industrial civilization and ecology, and the organic tensions created by this contradiction are rising. These are dire and revolutionary times, and it is our responsibility to navigate them.
Guy McPherson:
As ecologists have been pointing out for decades, environmental impacts are the result of human population size and human consumption levels. The Earth can support many more hunter-gatherers than capitalists seeking more material possessions. Unfortunately, we are stuck with the latter rather than the former. Ecologists and environmentalists have been proposing changes in human behaviour since at least the early 20th century. These recommendations have fallen on deaf ears. However, even if it is possible to achieve substantial changes in human behaviour, and if they result in an effective slowing down or stopping of industrial activity, it is questionable whether this is a useful means of ensuring our continued survival. One reason for this lies in the knowledge of what the effect of “aerosol masking” could mean for the climate crisis.
The “climate masking” effect of aerosols has been discussed in the scientific literature since at least 1929, and consists of the following: at the same time as industrial activity produces greenhouse gases that trap part of the heat resulting from sunlight reaching the Earth, it also produces small particles that prevent this sunlight from even touching the surface of the planet. These particles, called “aerosols”, thus act as a kind of umbrella that prevents some of the sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface (hence this phenomenon has also been referred to as “global dimming”) . In other words, these particles (aerosols) prevent part of the sun’s rays from penetrating the atmosphere and thus inhibit further global warming. This means, then, that the current levels of global warming would in fact be much lower than those that should be associated with the volumes of greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere today (hence the designation of this phenomenon as “climate masking”). To put it in a simpler way, the global warming situation today would actually be far more serious than is indicated not only by the very high current global temperatures, but also by the (already catastrophic) projections of rising global temperatures over the coming decades. This is especially important if we consider the (overly optimistic) possibility of a future reduction in the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere as a result of a potential decrease in greenhouse gas emissions over the next few years, which should paradoxically lead, therefore, to a dramatic increase in global temperatures.
Global temperatures should then not only be much higher than they are today, but the expected rise in global temperatures will necessarily be more intense than most climate models suggest. According to the father of climate science, James Hansen, it takes about five days for aerosols to fall from the atmosphere to the surface. More than two dozen peer-reviewed papers have been published on this subject and the latest of these indicates that the Earth would warm by an additional 55% if the “masking” effect of aerosols were lost, which should happen, as we said, as a result of a marked decrease or modification of industrial activity leading to a considerable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. This study suggests that this could potentially lead to an additional (sudden) increase in the earth’s surface temperature by about 133% at the continental level. This article was published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications on 15 June 2021. In conclusion, the loss or substantial decrease of aerosols in the atmosphere could therefore lead to a potential increase of more than 3 degrees Celsius of global warming above the 1750 baseline very quickly. I find it very difficult to imagine many natural species (including our own) being able to withstand this rapid pace of environmental change.
In reality, a mass extinction event has been underway since at least 1992. This was reported by Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, the so-called “father of biodiversity”, in his 1992 and 2002 books The Diversity of Life and The Future of Life, respectively. The United Nations Environment Programme also reported in August 2010 that every day we are leading to the extinction of 150 to 200 species. This would thus be at least the eighth mass extinction event on Earth. The scientific literature finally acknowledged the ongoing mass extinction event on 2 March 2011 in Nature. Further research along these lines was published on 19 June 2015 in Science Advances by conservation biologist Gerardo Ceballos and colleagues entitled “Accelerated human-induced losses of modern species: entering the sixth mass extinction”. Coinciding with the publication of this article, lead author Ceballos stated that “life would take many millions of years to recover and that our species would probably soon disappear”. This conclusion is supported by subsequent work indicating that terrestrial life did not recover from previous mass extinction events for millions of years. It is true, however, that indigenous perspectives can help us understand ongoing events. However, I am convinced that rationalism is key to a positive response to these events.
Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. He adheres to the ideas of libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism. He advocates a New Green Deal policy as one of the ways of dealing with the ecological crisis.
Miguel Fuentes is a Chilean social researcher in the fields of history, archaeology, and social sciences. International coordinator of the platform Marxism and Collapse and exponent of the new Marxist-Collapsist ideology. He proposes the need for a strategic-programmatic updating of revolutionary Marxism in the face of the new challenges of the Anthropocene and the VI mass extinction.
Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide. He has been part of grassroots political work for 20 years. He is the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, which was released in 2021. He is the co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass and part of Deep Green Resistance.
Guy McPherson is an American scientist, professor emeritus of natural resources, ecology, and evolutionary biology. He adheres to anarchism and argues the inevitability of human extinction and the need to address it from a perspective that emphasises acceptance, the pursuit of love and the value of excellence.
The final version of this document has been edited by Dutch archaeologist Sven Ransijn.
Notes
The debate between Michael Lowy, Miguel Fuentes, and Antonio Turiel (which also included critical comments by Spanish Marxist ecologist Jaime Vindel, Argentinean left-wing leader Jorge Altamira and Chilean journalist Paul Walder) can be reviewed in full in the debate section of the Marxism and Collapse website at the following link: www.marxismoycolapso.com/debates.
by DGR News Service | Jun 17, 2022 | ANALYSIS
Editor’s note: As the climate catastrophe worsens, chaos and contradiction reigns. Grassroots people’s resistance to the fossil fuel industry is growing, but so is government repression, and investment in coal, oil, and gas continues to grow (last year, more than 83% of global energy was supplied by fossil fuels). Meanwhile, governments are censoring the true depths of the crisis and a rush of big-businesses are seeking to capitalize on global warming, seeing a massive “shock doctrine” opportunity for profiting off the crisis.
Today we bring you an excerpt from the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, a book which Chris Hedges says “asks the questions most refuse to ask, and in that questioning, that seeking, uncovers profound truths we ignore at our peril.”
This excerpt uses Naomi Klein’s concept of the “Shock Doctrine” to analyze how big business has co-opted the environmental movement into a de-facto lobbying arm for the so-called “green” technology industry, and in the process has turned away from the fundamental values of the environmentalism.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the values of the environmental movement have degraded so much in the last 30 years.
Now more than ever, people are immersed in technology instead of the real world. As one report states, “The average young American now spends practically every minute—except for time in school—using a smart- phone, computer, television or electronic device.” A recent poll in Britain found that the average 18-to-25-year-old rated an internet connection as more important than daylight.
We’ve come a long way from the naturalists we were born to be; from inhabiting a living world flush with kin to serving a society in thrall to machines.
It’s no wonder, then, that so many people believe in nonsensical technological solutions. Technology does it for them and the real world doesn’t.
And so, the absurd becomes normal. We hear that green technology will stop global warming. We hear that cutting down forests and burning them is good for the planet. We hear that damming rivers is good for the planet. We hear that destroying the desert to put in solar panels is good for the planet. We hear that industrial recycling will save the world. We hear that commodifying nature is somehow significantly different than business as usual. We hear that we can invest our way to sustainable capitalism. We hear that capitalism can be sustainable.
A global growth rate of 3 percent, which is considered the mini- mum for capitalism to function, means the world economy doubles every 24 years. This is, of course, madness. If we can’t even name capitalism as a problem, how are we to have any chance of saving the planet?
There’s no doubt that global warming is apocalyptic. I (Max) have stood on thawing permafrost above the Arctic Circle and seen entire forests collapsing as soils lose integrity under their roots. This culture is changing the composition of the planet’s climate. But this is not the only crisis the world is facing, and to pretend otherwise ignores the true roots of the problem.
The Sierra Club has a campaign called “Ready for 100.” The campaign’s goal is to “convince 50 college campuses, a dozen key cities and half a dozen key states to go 100 percent renewable.’” The executive director of the Sierra Club, Michael Brune, explains,
“There are a few reasons why Ready for 100 is working—why it’s such a powerful idea. People have agency, for one. People who are outraged, alarmed, depressed, filled with despair about climate change—they want to make a difference in ways they can see, so they’re turning to their backyards. Turning to their city, their state, their university. And, it’s exciting—it’s a way to address this not just through dread, but with something that sparks your imagination.”
There are a lot of problems with that statement. First, is Ready for 100 really “working,” like Brune says? That depends on the unspoken part of that statement: working to achieve what? He may mean that the campaign is working to mobilize a larger main- stream climate movement. He may mean that Ready for 100 is working in the sense that more “renewable” infrastructure is being built, in great measure because more subsidies are being given to the industry.
If he means Ready for 100 is working to reduce the burning of coal, oil, and gas—which is, in fact, what he means—he’s dead wrong, as “fossil fuels continue to absolutely dominate global energy consumption.”
There’s more about Brune’s quote that’s bothersome. He’s explicitly turning people’s “outrage, alarm, depression, and despair” into means that serve the ends of capital; through causing people to use these very real feelings to lobby for specific sectors of the industrial economy.
If a plan won’t work, it doesn’t matter if people have “agency.” The ongoing destruction of the planet, and the continued dominance of coal, oil, and gas, seems to be less important than diverting people’s rage—which, if left unchecked, might actually explode into something that would stop capitalism and industrialism from murdering the planet—into corporate-friendly ends.
Led by 350.org, the Fossil Free campaign aims to remove financial support for the coal, oil, and gas industries by pressuring institutions such as churches, cities, and universities to divest. It’s modeled on the three-pronged boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) resistance to South African apartheid (a model used today against Israel). The Fossil Free campaign has thus far pressured 800 institutions and 58,000 individuals to divest $6 trillion. Some of these are partial divestments, such as withdrawing from tar sands but continuing to fund fracking.
Still, sounds great, right? Anyone fighting to stop coal, oil, and gas is doing a very good thing.
But given how little time we have, and how badly we’re losing the fight for the planet, we have to ask if divestment is an effective strategy.
The answer, unfortunately, is not really. Jay Taber of Intercontinental Cry points out that “All this divestment does is make once publicly held shares available on Wall Street, which allows trading houses like Goldman Sachs to further consolidate their control of the industry. BDS, when applied against apartheid states by other states and international institutions, includes cut- ting off access to finance, as well as penalties for crimes against humanity.” He states quite bluntly that divestment acts to “redirect activism away from effective work.”
Bill Gates—not usually someone we’d listen to—seems to agree. “If you think divestment alone is a solution,” Gates writes, “I worry you’re taking whatever desire people have to solve this problem and kind of using up their idealism and energy on something that won’t emit less carbon—because only a few people in society are the owners of the equity of coal or oil companies.”
If it occurs on a wide enough scale, divestment makes previously held stocks, bonds, and other investment products available for purchase. This glut drops prices, making it easier for less ethical investors to buy. This not only consolidates the industry, but it also makes fossil fuel stocks more profitable for those who snatch them up. As journalist Christian Parenti writes, “So how will dumping Exxon stock hurt its income, that is, its bottom line? It might, in fact, improve the company’s price to earnings ratio thus making the stock more attractive to immoral buyers. Or it could allow the firm to more easily buy back stock (which it has been doing at a massive scale for the last five years) and thus retain more of its earnings for use to develop more oil fields.”
It’s unlikely any divestment campaigner believes divestment alone will stop global warming. The Fossil Free website recognizes this, writing: “The campaign began in an effort to stigmatize the Fossil Fuel industry—the financial impact was secondary to the socio-political impact.” But as the amount of money being divested continues to grow, reinvestment is becoming a more central part of the fossil fuel divestment campaign. The website continues: “We have a responsibility and an opportunity to ask ourselves how moving the money itself … can help us usher forth our vision.”
Great! So, they’re suggesting these organizations take their money out of oil industry stocks, and use that money to set aside land as wilderness, for wild nature, right?
Well, no. They want the money to be used to fund “renewable energy.” And they’ve slipped a premise past us: the idea that divestment and reinvestment can work to create a better world. It’s an extraordinary claim, and not supported by evidence. As Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project writes, “Can the very markets that have led us to the brink of the abyss now provide our parachute? … Under this system, those with the money have all the power. Then why are we trying to reform this system? Why are we not transforming it?”
Activist Keith Brunner writes, “Yes, the fossil fuel corporations are the big bad wolf, but just as problematic is the system of investment and returns which necessitates a growth economy (it’s called capitalism).” His conclusion: “We aren’t going to invest our way to a livable planet.”
Is it better to fight for “achievable, realistic” goals through reform, or address the fundamental issues at their root? Usually, we’re in favor of both. If we wait for the great and glorious revolution and don’t do any reform work (which we could also call defensive work), by the time the revolution comes, the world will have been consumed by this culture. And if we only do defensive work and don’t address the causes of the problems, this culture will consume the world until there’s nothing left.
But it’s pretty clear that the real goal of the bright greens isn’t defending the planet: Everyone from Lester Brown to Kumi Naidoo has been explicit about this. The real goal is to get money into so-called green technology. A recent article notes, “Climate solutions need cold, hard cash … about a trillion a year.”
One of Naomi Klein’s biggest contributions to discourse is her articulation of the “shock doctrine,” which she defines as “how America’s ‘free market’ policies have come to dominate the world—through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.” In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein explains—brilliantly—how the same principles used to disorient and extract concessions from victims of torture can be leveraged to extract political concessions from entire nations in the wake of major disasters. She gives many examples, including the wave of austerity and privatization in Chile following the Pinochet coup in 1973, the massive expansion of industrialism and silencing of dissidents following the Tienanmen Square massacre in China in 1989, and the dismantling of low-income housing and replacement of public education with for-profit schools in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The shock doctrine also perfectly describes the entire bright green movement: Because of a terrible and very real disaster (in this case, climate change), you need to hand over huge subsidies to a sector of the industrial economy, and you need to let us destroy far more of the natural world, from Baotou to the Mojave Desert to the bottom of the ocean. If you don’t give us lots of money and let us destroy far more of the natural world, you will lose the luxuries that are evidently more important to you than life on the planet.
Once you start looking for this trend, it’s really clear. There’s a 2016 article in Renewable Energy World magazine about the Desert Renewable Energy and Conservation Plan. The plan allows major solar energy harvesting facilities to be built in some areas of the California desert, but not other areas. Shannon Eddy, head of the Large-Scale Solar Association, considers protecting parts of the desert “a blow.” She says, “The world is on fire—CO2 levels just breached the 400-ppm threshold. We need to do everything we can right now to reduce emissions by getting renewable projects online.”
Everything including destroying the desert. This is reminiscent of a phrase from the Vietnam War era, which originated in 1968 with AP correspondent Peter Arnett: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a United States major said today.”

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can order the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It to your local bookstore or anywhere you find books. It’s also available in audiobook format on Audible and other platforms.
We also invite readers to get involved in people’s movements against greenwashing and for degrowth, resistance to industrial civilization, humane population reduction, and for the land. You can learn more about an active struggle over these issues at Protect Thacker Pass.
by DGR News Service | Jun 3, 2022 | ANALYSIS
Editor’s note: This is the second article we’ve published recently on the phenomenon of “cancel culture,” which increasingly characterizes liberal, progressive, and left movements in the United States and overseas.
Leftists often see censorship and authoritarianism as hallmarks of conservative, right-wing, and fascist governments and organizations. But throughout history, there is an equally troubling trend of left-wing authoritarianism.
Today, this strain of politics is ascendant, and the use of censorship and violence to curtail political speech has become increasingly accepted and mainstream both among Democratic-party ideologues, media and tech elites, and the professional managerial class, and among college-educated “radical” leftists.
Deep Green Resistance has been targeted by these types of attacks, which, we theorize, are often either the work of agents provocateurs or are encouraged by corporate mercenaries and government agencies, which prefer movements to engage in endless internecine conflict rather than facing resistance movements based on principled alliances.
By The Red Goat Collective / CounterPunch
Does the US Left have a “cancel culture” problem? Or is ‘cancel culture’ just a cynical right-wing bogeyman aimed at disparaging leftists, Millennials, and academia?
Perhaps cancel culture is mostly mirage: the social media shadow of American celebrity obsession, distracting us from the overall healthy left culture on the ground?
Maybe left-wing cancel culture is real, but marginal. Just a crazy niche of fringe folks—better to ignore?
Or is there a genuine ‘there’ there—a problem with significant reach and influence—and if so, what does it consist of?
While we’re by no means settled on the term “cancel culture” and remain open to other possible names for ‘it,’[1] experience and investigation over the past decade have led us to the conclusion that, yes, indeed, there is a ‘there’ there: whatever we call it, ‘cancel culture’ indexes a real problem on the Left. And it is no minor matter, of interest only to the ‘cancelled’; it hinders whole sectors of the organized and movement Left—intellectually, socially, morally, and politically.[2]
How might we define this left cancel culture? It is undoubtedly a tall task, and we do not mean to offer here a monolithic or final definition. Nonetheless, for now, we offer this: that cancel culture on the left can be understood as a bundle of distinct yet interlocking methods that mishandle problems among regular and working people, as if some regular people are—or are always on the verge of becoming—the enemy (and others, their fragile and helpless victims).[3] This blunt projection of demonization (and blanket victimhood) leads to treating differences, complexities, and conflicts that could and should be approached through reasoned discussion and principled struggle instead as melodramatic antagonisms that demand one or another form of coercion—whether by relying on existing institutional power, or the moral panic of ‘mob rule’.
We might grasp cancel culture here as an expression of punitive (or carceral) thinking within our own social movements, whereby the punishment and purge of individuals comes to symbolically substitute for the collective structural and cultural transformations that liberation ultimately requires. In this sense, cancel culture represents a seeping of ruling class methods of punishment and ‘divide and rule’ into the emancipatory movement, but without access to the resources of the ruling apparatus—a fact which makes cancel culture’s maneuverings in some respects even cruder, more erratic, and less discerning than the more sophisticated attacks of established state power. However genuine the concerns that may animate it, cancel culture remains a grossly inadequate salve for real world injuries and actual domination.
Let us be clear, we are not here making a ‘liberal’ argument: We concede that there are antagonisms in the current capitalist-imperialist world system that are so deeply entrenched that they may indeed require the use of force to overcome and transform them. This is, in other words, not a ‘defense’ of the economic and political Bosses who are positioned to force underlings to endure indignity, exploitation, and abuse—and then to deny them access to institutional recourse. But cancel culture trains us to see virtually all social conflicts, even those among our own comrades, allies, and regular people, through this harshly antagonistic lens. And that’s a problem. Leaping to treat even what may be fleeting (or unsubstantiated) offenses as unquestionable mortal injuries, cancel culture can quarantine and ostracize, but can it understand, let alone heal or transform, the underlying problems to which it responds? Can it attract and sustain the kind of broad mass involvement we need if we are ever to win the deep social transformation our times demand?
The list of fallacies below is an attempt to clarify and compile some of the false assumptions and wrong methods—sometimes held consciously, often unconsciously embedded in existing practices and organizations—that enable ‘cancel culture’ (hereafter CC) and more generally perpetuate the marginalization, divisiveness, and even self-destruction of the contemporary Left. While we’ve tried to represent the operative notions here in a way that shows their serious problems—and with a hefty dose of sarcasm—we’ve also tried to do so in good faith, using language not too far from what perpetuators and participants of CC might recognize as their own, even as the ideological undercurrents we bring out for each are seldom brought to the surface so explicitly.
One last note: It could be pointed out that many of the problematic ideas and practices below are themselves symptoms of deeper issues—from the logistical limitations of contemporary left organizations, to the weakening of the labor movement and other forms of progressive politics based in democratic accountability, to the distortions of corporate social media algorithms, to a sense of despair and suspicion that pervades society generally in this age of compound crises, when an emancipatory path forward may seem in doubt.[4] Nonetheless, though the notions enumerated below can indeed be seen as the symptomatic effects of more fundamental causes, we believe that ideas and methods that take hold of the minds of millions can become causes in their own right—and that many of these fallacies have taken on a life of their own.[5]
And so, we present: 21 Fallacies that Fuel Cancel Culture.
1) Optics are more important than Substance.
Worry more about how things look from the outside, and less about what’s happening on the inside—be it a meeting, an organization, an event, a relationship, or an artwork. External appearances are not even ‘external’ anymore, since such optics, with the help of social media, quickly become internal factors as well. A tweet from a private meeting can start a public firestorm that will consume an organization even before said meeting is completed. Whereas it might have once been possible to explore the nuances of complex matters internally, admitting rough edges and testing unorthodox interpretations in private before deciding on public positions or precise language for broader consumption, this line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ has collapsed. Anyone attending a meeting might shave a sharp splinter from the draft party platform and send it flying as a deadly public blow dart in an instant. Therefore, we must now hold every ‘private’ gathering—every meeting or seminar, every moment, each sentence—to the same public optical standard we would use for an official press conference. No word, phrase, or idea that can be decontextualized or excerpted—tik tok-ed or tweeted—to imply something ‘offensive’ or ‘problematic’ should be allowed, even in private. The enforced loss of spontaneity (and honesty) is a small price to play for making sure we aren’t made to look like fools or bigots. Better to strangle internal discussion than to take a public dart in the neck.
2) Engagement equals endorsement; Association is complicity.
To engage someone in public conversation means you are endorsing all their (potentially problematic) ideas or associations, or at least making light of them—even those ideas that are not part of whatever conversation occurs. Thus, an interlocutor must be deemed ‘safe’ of compromising statements or associations prior to such engagement. If you or your organization don’t have the time or resources to research all the ideas and statements of a potentially ‘controversial’ person ahead of time, well, then maybe you should just not bother engaging them at all. After all, merely being associated (even privately) with a person deemed problematic is enough to compromise you. It is thus better to cut ties with problem people than to sustain contact with them, since the influence of association can only pull in one direction: the ‘bad’ one. The idea that your engagement might encourage positive change in the person deemed problematic, or at least help keep that person from further sliding in the problematic direction, is naïve, at best. Worse, the idea that such association might help the rest of us better understand the context or incorrect ideas that gave rise to the problem in the first place insultingly implies we don’t already know enough to pass judgment. In short: it’s just not possible to do something good with someone bad. Cut ‘em loose.
3) Conversations can’t change problematic people; Political opponents can’t be won over.
If a person opposes us now, they’ll most likely oppose us forever. It’s not possible that discussion with ‘problematic’ figures might give the person in question a chance to clarify, correct, contextualize, qualify, or walk back troubling ideas. Bad ideas can’t be deflated or improved through engagement or ideological struggle; they must be de-platformed. It’s not possible—or not worth taking seriously as possibility—that such people could have, even at one and the same time, multiple views, values, interests, priorities, associations, or commitments that conflict with one another, with some pointing towards a better way forward, others holding such progress back, or with some ideas being residual remnants reflecting that person’s history, but not necessarily their future. People don’t change. They are static and self-identical. Disregard that dialectical bullshit about people as constantly BECOMING relative to what they HAVE BEEN and what they MIGHT BE. People just are what they ARE. Those the enemy has persuaded are lost to us forevermore. Say goodbye to your Trumpy uncle.
4) Problematic views and acts flow from malice or monstrosity, not mere error.
Why give a person the benefit of the doubt when you can cast them as your conscious and mortal enemy, a living embodiment of all you seek to oppose and destroy? Forget that quaint notion that we should “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.” It’s best to assume that the do-er of a problematic thing was, at the time of said offense, in possession of all relevant information, the full range of opinion, and had their senses about them, and yet still—even after all of that—pursued this bad idea or act as the one that they still wanted or needed to take. Circumstances don’t mitigate wrongdoing. In the off chance that an offending person was not in sound mind or body at the time of an act in question, well, that’s tough shit: they should have known better than to put themselves in a position where they would be likely to fuck up. If their sources of information, opinion, or logic are flawed, well, that’s their fault too. There is no need to factor where someone has come from into our judgment of them today. Good People don’t make Bad Mistakes, therefore, making an error deemed Bad is proof of being a Bad Person. Talk of mitigation is liberal bullshit that upholds an oppressive order of privilege.
5) People can be reduced to their worst action or idea, without doing them an injustice.
Why assume that something bad someone has said or done was an outlying mistake when it can be seen instead as the expression of their essential being? People’s worst moments express their truest selves. (Indeed, for every shitty thing they’ve done that we’re aware of, there are probably a dozen shittier things still unknown to us—we need to factor in these ‘unknown knowns’ as well.) Further, to call attention to the good work that people have done (or might do in the future) as a matter of contextualizing a misstep is to make light of their shittiness. The aftermath of harm is not a time for ‘balance’ or ‘perspective’—and, let’s face it, these days we are always in the aftermath of harm. The only thing that ought to be discussed once a wrong is reported is that wrong; any other element of a person’s work, character, or history is at best irrelevant. Worse, mentioning the ‘other side’ is insulting and insensitive to those who feel they have been harmed and understandably want ‘justice’. It is fine and just to essentialize those you oppose.
6) The passage of time is irrelevant.
A wrong committed decades ago is just as relevant as one that happened last week. There is no reason to assume that someone who did something shitty years back (be it donning an insensitive Halloween costume or acting like an asshole at a party) has taken time to think about it, or to improve their conduct or philosophy in the interim. Certainly, there is no obligation to investigate whether someone has made steps to improve since those events years ago; it’s perfectly ok to treat them now as if they are the person they were then—or that someone told you they were then, since maybe you weren’t around when whatever went down went down. Since our movement seldom seeks to put people in actual prison—that would mean cooperating with the police state—formal sentencing never occurs…but also must never end. People can and should be banished and branded for life, regardless of what they have done to improve themselves or address the relevant issues. We must assume the worst if we are to keep our spaces safe. People don’t change, so there’s no need to give them a chance to. Debts to victims or to society can never be repaid. But a culture of permanent excommunication will prevent harmful future behavior and help past victims heal.
7) A threat to ideological comfort is a threat to safety.
Being subjected to challenging, provocative, offensive, or incorrect ideas puts the person hearing them in jeopardy. Intellectual discomfort causes harm. Therefore, it is ok—even imperative—to exert prior restraint, up to and including prohibition and exclusion of discomfiting ideas or words (or the people seen as likely to express them). People have a right not to be offended—not just a right to respond reasonably to what offends. Moments of intellectual provocation are not ‘teachable moments’; they are triggers for trauma. Making people think too hard about difficult subjects becomes a kind of violence. In particular, people’s ideas about their own perceived identity or oppression must not be challenged. People from historically oppressed groups especially cannot and ought not be subjected to arguments or debates about such topics, in print or in-person, regardless of the merit or content of the criticism expressed. Ideas that people have grown attached to should be viewed as parts of their physical or spiritual being. For someone to abstract and criticize said ideas—even for purposes of temporary analysis—amounts to a kind of ‘attack.’ Therefore, it is the job of good ‘allies’ to protect oppressed or traumatized people, not only from clear and present physical or institutional attacks, but from intellectual or ‘existential’ ones as well, like, say, someone asking a critical question about a concept or term with which they presently identify. Most certainly, it’s not possible for someone outside of this social group to offer helpful insight on matters pertaining to that group’s current situation, no matter how much genuine study or listening on the topic they’ve done. Immediate experience trumps outside knowledge, period. (Never mind that what counts as ‘experience’ may be at least in part the product of the ideological lenses through which a person has been taught to look.) A corollary: oppressed groups are monolithic, without significant ideological, intellectual, political, or methodological conflicts withintheir own ranks. So, it’s ok for one spokesperson of said group to give voice to the entire group’s will or interest. Anyone who contradicts such a spokesperson—especially if they do not personally belong to the category in question—is disrespecting or harming the group and needs to shut the fuck up.
8) Complicated things (and people) are compromised and not worth engaging.
How can we learn from people or things (including artworks) that are themselves ‘problematic’? Why not just move on and replace the shitty with something safer? Sure, there may be artworks (or people) that now stand for something offensive but have been deemed ‘brilliant’ in the past. But what does it say about you if you overlook the offensiveness in favor of the brilliance by promoting such content? Are you saying that aesthetic beauty or intellectual rigor or historical influence is more important than keeping our spaces safe and inclusive? How can we reduce the influence of problematic works or people if we keep giving them airtime? If someone is seen to be seriously wrong on 1 out of 10 issues, then their insight on the other 9 things is compromised, if not altogether invalidated by their hypocrisy. Hearing them out on those other 9 issues would only be providing cover for the problematic 10th. You can’t just bracket off the bad parts; they bleed into everything. The bad gobbles up the good. It’s thus not conceivable that a person or group with 9 incorrect ideas might nonetheless have something crucial to teach us regarding the 10th. Wokeness comes in batches—no sense distinguishing all these different aspects. As a corollary, wherever possible, people should declare themselves with clear and easy-to-read labels and signs. If the expressions of such a person appears to be complicated, or not immediately ‘clear’ and on the ‘correct’ side in a way that can fit into, say, a series of rapid-fire tweets, then that person bears the responsibility for any confusion that results. The responsibility certainly does not fall on the viewer or reader to investigate such complexities. Who has time to do close readings these days?
9) To entertain a ‘problematic’ joke or cultural product is never innocent.
Laugh at impure humor and you open your belly to the abyss. To listen to a comedian or other cultural content creator who is pushing values deemed bad is to risk being influenced by that content—how can one be exposed to bad content and not be marked? Even worse, it is to give the impression to those who have already made up their mind about the comedian or cultural producer that you have not made up yourmind. Such indecisiveness on your part throws the settled judgements of the offended into doubt—an existential insult. After all, if you trusted and believed in them properly then why couldn’t you take their word for it? Why did you need to go and explore it for yourself? What, do you think that you’re smarter than the rest of us? That your curiosity or ‘complicated’ enjoyment is more important than other people’s right to have their grief-laden verdicts accepted without question? The death of comedy and entertainment is a small price to pay to make sure nobody gets their feelings hurt.
10) Every “micro”-aggression is just the toxic tip of a macro-iceberg.
There are no innocent errors, just instances that have yet to be analyzed and traced down to the deeper danger beneath. The difference between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ aggressions is a microscope; little annoyances or snubs are made of the same stuff as life-threatening mortal violations. It is thus correct to react to a minor offense as if it were a major one—especially if a patternof minor problems has been alleged. In the latter case, one need not give the offender a chance to correct their behavior before bringing out the big guns: they already have a ‘history of misbehavior,’ after all, and must be condemned for it. Their chance for rectification and improvement has passed (even if this is the first time we’ve communicated our concerns to them). The fact that existing law makes qualitative distinctions between different categories of acts—and that the alleged behavior may not have crossed any legal line—is yet more proof that the Law is a relic of an oppressive order that doesn’t take oppressed people’s wounds seriously. By amplifying and harshly punishing examples of even low-level alleged misbehavior, we amplify the safety of our special spaces (at least for all who have not been flayed alive for past missteps). Fuck fine distinctions and fuck due process.
11) The moral imperative is to eliminate (what might be) evil, even if it means wrecking good work.
Political progress is to be understood not as a complex positive project of building something Good from the mixed materials that now exist, but rather, negatively, as the elimination or exposure of those elements deemed Evil. Better a pure Nothing than a compromised Something. Radical political intervention is best understood as a solvent to burn away the bad rather than as an adhesive or mixing agent that holds things together so that the better can be built. Isn’t it best to purify oneself and others of sympathy for the devil rather than to burden one’s brain or one’s organization with the messiness of sifting through more mixed elements? Tear that shit down. We’ll worry about building things later (maybe).
12) If we deprive badness of a platform, it will lose its platform elsewhere, too.
If we can prevent bad or backward ideas from getting a hearing in ‘progressive’ or ‘left’ platforms, this will prevent their circulation elsewhere. We can meaningfully reduce the circulation and impact of ideas in the ‘mainstream’ by denying them the ‘legitimacy’ provided by left spaces and engagement, however small and isolated the Left may be at present. The possibility that such an approach might rather enable the Left’s own blindness and disconnection from the actual state of ‘controversial’ debates, and thus perpetuate or expand our isolation from people who are already influenced by that ‘mainstream,’ is a secondary or tertiary concern. The further possibility that spending time with someone or something deemed objectionable might actually help us better relate to our neighbor or coworker or family member who has also been exposed to that person or thing, is swallowed up by the danger that such exposure will merely drag us into being ‘like them,’ or else give comfort to the enemy. The related likelihood, that I can only criticize something accurately if I know the object of critique intimately, is eclipsed by the danger that, in giving stuff deemed bad such close attention, you impart the impression that you secretly or not-so-secretly actually like that garbage. Can’t have that. Sure, right now the millions of people watching so-and-so’s podcast or cable show may not be waiting for our permission to do so—or even know that we exist!—but unless we model what a principled refusal to look or listen looks like, how will said millions ever learn to do likewise? If enough of us just close our eyes and block our ears really tight then it will almost be like the big bad wolf outside the door isn’t there anymore.
13) We can win social change without winning over the millions who currently disagree with us.
After all, isn’t righteousness on our side? Aren’t we fighting for the good of the entire planet? Who needs to win over the conservative hicks (or centrist fence-sitters) in a backward country like this one? Or heck, even in our own households, communities, or classrooms? It’s not like revolutions require super-majorities, do they? Can’t a militant minority do the job? It’s not like radical change means you need to win masses of people over. Those who disagree with us are probably stupid and hopeless. (The masses, alas, turned out to be asses.) Best to protect our spaces from such “deplorables.” Wouldn’t building an expanded base end up watering down the purity of our correct politics anyway? Why take the risk that our ever-so-precious conversation or community could be mired with their mess?
14) ‘Digging in’ in the face of CC critique is proof of privileged arrogance and domination.
If someone refuses to give in to criticism and public pressure to retract or apologize, no matter how small the issue was to begin with, their resistance to recanting itself reveals a bigger issue, which may require more extreme response. In particular, for a person associated with a historically dominant group to refuse to admit the validity of criticisms coming from someone associated with a historically dominated group is to engage in an arrogant abuse of privilege, regardless of the merits of the criticism expressed. Such resistance suggests that the refuser disrespects not just their immediate critic, but the group that critic is speaking for and the entire historical experience of collective oppression that has led up to this point. Someone who refuses to give in to group pressure could not possibly be a person committed to the facts as they understand them, nor could they be expressing honest concerns out of their love for the cause; they are merely providing new evidence of how insensitive and domineering they are, a fact which then in turn pretty much settles the question of whether or not they were actually guilty of the precipitating offense in the first place (as if it were in doubt!). Although there may not have been clear evidence for that first catalyzing event (ok, now we’ll admit it!), the evidence we gather from the accused’s resistance itself is retroactive, since resistance to the group itself proves that the person is the type to commit those other egregious errors as well. (Never mind that the extreme group response itself may be what pushed the targeted person to double-down in self-defense in the first place.) Corollary: Even a false accusation can be of use; it helps us see who is willing to go along with the group, and who is not. If someone ‘digs in’ and disputes the nature a ‘minor’ offense, they are merely revealing that the problem goes deeper, as we predicted. A micro-violator who is stubborn about their problematic millimeter might as well be demanding our most precious mile.
15) The open exchange of ideas is not to be trusted.
“Free speech” is an oppressive concept, a chimera that elides the actual-existing power dynamics that rule our world. Face it: beneath every invocation of “freedom” is the reality of power. Considering the compromised nature of discourse, then, it’s preferable to use force to shut down purveyors of bad ideas, if we can, rather than to use reason, argument, or evidence to refute the ideas themselves. Why debate when you can de-platform! The fewer people are exposed to those bad ideas, the better. Let’s be honest: We don’t trust people to sort truth from lies, even with our help. And if we’re really being honest, we’re not sure we can unpack and criticize the specific ideas of our enemies effectively anymore, anyway, since we’ve pretty much limited our intake of them to second-hand snippets and soundbites for years. (Not everyone has the luxury of spending endless hours in the library, dude.) Therefore, we’re justified shutting down misleaders in advance to protect the herd. Why initiate or allow complex debate and discussion that is just likely to confuse people? Or even worse, to lead our group to lose its clarity, unity, and focus? If our organization admitted that it didn’t yet have a clear, single, united view on something important, well, wouldn’t that make us seem indecisive and weak? How can we be the vanguard of the revolution if we admit we’re still thinking things through? Airing important differences aloud impairs our movement.
16) Opinion and rumor about certain things must be accepted as fact.
The statement of a strongly held feeling about another’s wretchedness, even if lacking substantiation, can be enough to decide the truth of a matter—at least for now. And since there is no obligation on the rest of us to investigate said ‘truth of the matter’ –since we’re all busy and life is hard, and investigations are difficult, and our activist organizations don’t have the resources of the state to call upon—it’s fine to let such strongly stated assertions stand as accepted truth…pretty much indefinitely. Furthermore, it’s improper to point out that a second-hand (or third- or fourth-hand) account is not a first-hand one. This is not the time to distinguish between hearsay and solid evidence! Similarly, it’s not ok to ask for evidence or substantiation in the wake of an unproven claim on a sensitive topic. What’s wrong with you, do you not believe INSERT SPECIAL CATEGORY OF PERSON HERE? It’s better to uncritically accept and quickly act upon serious but unsubstantiated rumor than to subject oneself or one’s organization to the messiness, discomfort, uncertainty, or complexity of pursuing an actual investigation.
17) Accusers (even third-party ones) are always reliable—so due process need not apply.
It’s not necessary to hear ‘both sides;’ when we’re dealing with an iteration of systemic oppression, one side is more than enough. Aggrieved people don’t lie, dissemble, or exaggerate. In fact, the experience of being aggrieved necessarily improves moral character. All that violence and systemic injustice and desperation a person may have been exposed to doesn’t leave any compromising psychic wounds. Aggrievement and oppression, however, do make people more vulnerable to harm, especially when others doubt or question their honesty or reliability. Thus, denying aggrieved people the fullness of human complexity, including the potential to be dishonest or just confused, is less bad than making it seem like you don’t take their every word for gospel. It follows that accusers or allegers need not—indeed, shouldnot—be made to go on the record in detail. (We must ‘believe survivors,’ yes, but without requiring them to be specific about what exactly we’re being asked to believe.) It goes without saying that the accused need not have the right to confront their accusers, or even to know the specifics of what they are being accused of. (Habeas corpus is so 20th century and so ‘bourgeois state-y’—forget that liberal crap about it being a product of historical struggles against state repression.) It’s more important to protect the anonymity of accusers, and even 3rd or 4thhand rumor-ists and gossips, than it is to provide the accused a fair chance to address what’s been said about them. Transparency just doesn’t apply to those who circulate charges—that would put them at risk, since, after all, we must assume that all who have been alleged to have caused harm in the past are out to perpetrate even greater harm in the future. The sheer possibility of retaliation, which can never be fully ruled out, means that we must not demand accountability from accusers, or from those who speak in their name. Thus, it’s perfectly ok to weaponize defamatory gossip behind the back of the accused, to work to exclude them from spaces (including online ones), or even to go after their livelihoods, rather than to try and clear things up through more direct two-way communication. Further, since we cannot expect the actual victim to take on the burden of speaking up, anyone speaking in their name or on their unconfirmed behalf must be treated with all the deference owed to the actual alleged victim. The fact that some who speak in the victim’s name may not be authorized to do so and may even be weaponizing the situation for their own ends is outweighed by our belief that Excommunicating Perpetrators objectively helps Victims In General to heal and feel safe. Forget the lessons of the ‘telephone game’ we learned in kindergarten; second- or third- or fourth-hand allegers should be treated as if they are giving reliable first-hand accounts. There are no misunderstandings, only survivors and perpetrators: Which side are you on?
18) Exaggeration in the cause of social justice is necessary.
Emotional amplification, public dramatization, or even deliberate exaggeration is justified in cases where someone is speaking out against injustice or alleged wrongdoing. Feelings of aggrievement are to be validated, not questioned or fact checked. The more passionate someone is in denunciation, the more trustworthy they become. No Investigation? No Problem! Amplifying what might have occurred is more important than figuring out what actually did. (Never mind that mounting evidence shows that mental health problems in this country are at an all-time high. And never mind that COINTELPRO in the 60s and 70s routinely organized campaigns of false accusation to wreck radical organizations and defame left leaders.) Let’s face it: in these crazy media days, one needs a bullhorn to break through the noise, a sledgehammer to knock down the wall of indifference. Nuanced accounts of complex interactions won’t cut it. We need to Go Big to grab people’s attention and make things stick. Therefore, rounding up the rhetoric regarding particulars is not only permissible; it is necessary. We must cherry-pick the statistics and images that best fit our worldview, even if they bestow a misleading picture of the whole: how else to dramatize the essence of evil and get people caring about a system of oppression whose effects are often diffuse, subtle, and uneven? Sure, our exaggerations may lead to the proliferation of factual inaccuracies in the short term—maybe even a simplistic sense of the overall situation—but, in the long term, the heat and attention created by our maximalist presentation will lead to more people getting involved, therefore illuminating other abuses elsewhere. (Those who burn out on the melodramatic framing weren’t really committed to the cause in the first place.) Whatever harm is done to people who are tarnished, indeed slandered and defamed, by broadcast falsehoods in the process, is not our concern. It will be worth it in the long run. Can the harm done to an accused wrong-doer ever really be compared to that of the harm-sufferer, even if the harm in question remains unsubstantiated? In contrast to the longstanding judicial principle that “Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent be convicted,” we affirm that “Better 10 men ruined by false accusations than one victim be doubted.” (No men in this society are “innocent,” anyway.)
19) Vengeance arcs toward justice.
Sure, we might be a little rough or excessive sometimes, but the arc of retaliation bends towards righteousness. (Or at least towards what feels righteous.) When in history have regular people’s urge to vengeance led them astray? It’s wrong to tell those who are feeling the need to strike back or destroy that they should channel that rage in a more constructive, reasonable, strategic, or fair manner. That’s tone-policing. Better to encourage righteous rage and fan the flames, wherever they lead. Tailing spontaneity and immediate emotion is the way of the future: as evidenced by what goes viral on our corporate-owned social media feeds. In times of big changes and sweeping historical crisis, it’s bourgeois and oppressive to be worried about the fate of just one individual (or other individuals who happen to be connected personally to that one individual). If we need to go a bit overboard in punishing a particular person in order to send a message to others and make our group’s militant morality absolutely clear, so be it. We were never going to win over everyone anyways. And you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Individuals are disposable.
20) Hyper-sensitizing individuals will lead to collective liberation.
In the struggle to radically uproot vast systems of oppression, we prioritize tenderizing individuals, one by one. If some people must be broken like eggs, others must be taught to think of themselves as fragile eggshells. Our goal is to make as many people as we can as sensitive as possible to the myriad offenses that exist in the world today—especially those ‘small’ offenses they experience directly, at the hands of other regular individuals on a day-to-day basis or on social media. As ‘micro’ offenses rather than macro- ones—papercuts not limb loss, bad word choices more than cluster bombs—such offenses may not be immediately obvious. Training people to see how small affronts and slights are actually BIG ones is thus crucial work, much more important than training people to work through the smaller stuff charitably, in light of the truly humongous threats all poor and working people now face. Similarly, training people to focus primarily on the offenses that affect them personally is more important than encouraging them to struggle in solidarity against the oppression of others, let alone spending time studying more abstract things like History or Social Theory that may take them away from their immediate self-interests. Focusing on other people’s oppression leads to ‘savior’ complexes, but teaching people to amplify all the many small slights they themselves experience personally: that’s the road to liberation. Each molehill, when inspected properly, reveals a mountain. Who is to say that the Big Crises we all share are more important than the millions of tiny ones that divide us and make us unique?
21) Fuck it, let’s be honest: Radical change ain’t happening in the USA (unless built upon its smoldering ashes).
Contrary to our at times ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, we don’t really feel it is possible to change this country in a deep or transformative way. So, let’s just enjoy our moral superiority, our exclusive ‘movement’ spaces, and our curated media feed until the ship goes down or the smoke of the last forest fire consumes us. In the meantime, the best we can probably do is kneecap every ‘privileged’ or ‘problematic’ person, project, or institution we can reach. Sadly, the real big oppressors—the Dick Cheneys of the world—are generally protected behind bunkers of money and armed security: the best we can do is to take aim at whatever dick we can reach. All we’re really good for, here and now, is to fuck this bad shit up, while keeping enclaves of righteousness alive—maybe for after the fires burn out and we re-emerge from this cave. Most Americans are so complicit (settler colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, etc.) that they can’t really be part of any positive solution, anyways. So, if we end up tearing down our former comrades and driving away potential recruits or allies…No. Big. Deal. (Never mind the fact that capitalism is increasingly wrecking their lives and futures, too.) Let’s be clear: We didn’t start this fire. So, is it really fair to expect us to take responsibility for putting it out? Such a responsibility is a burden that oppressed and aggrieved people especially should not have to bear (even if there is no one else to bear it). Who the fuck are you to suggest otherwise?
IN CONCLUSION
‘Cancel culture’ teaches its adherents to focus on weaknesses of people in order to tear down their strengths, rather than uniting with people’s strengths to overcome those weaknesses, in light of the common threats we all face. It trains people in suspicion, fear, hyper-sensitivity, and overreaction, and thrives on decontextualization and sensationalism. It teaches people to weaponize vulnerabilities and to instrumentalize others as means to an end, rather than treating them as human ends in themselves. It traffics in moral posturing more than political strategy, expressing a burning impatience with wrongdoing in the world—this is its positive aspect—but too-often directing that impatience against regular people, against comrades, and often against intellectual discussion or due process itself: all things we need if we are to change the world for the better. Unable to strike meaningfully at the heights of the system, CC tends towards ‘horizontal violence,’ with callous disregard for those it harms or the work it wrecks.
To be sure, cancel culture did not come out of nowhere. It is inseparable from the habits encouraged and enabled by corporate social media: Hasty generalization, reduction of complexity, public virtue signaling, echo chambers discouraging dissent, the fear of false ‘friends,’ and the rapid dissemination of unreliable information are all key features of its function. It takes advantage of the impunity of the online troll and the connectivity of social networks to pursue all-spectrum bullying. At the same time, CC reflects the sad sobering reality that in the contemporary USA, the ‘muck of the ages,’ the impurities and damage of capitalism, empire, male-domination, racism, narrow individualism, etc. have indeed marked us all, in one way or another. But rather than finding in this common state of imperfection a basis for humility, compassion, and mutual improvement, CC seizes upon the faults of others as if those who have strayed thereby become irredeemable monsters—infiltrators to be purged, punished, or eliminated from pristine existing spaces. Faced with a complex world of developing human beings, always operating in conditions not entirely of their own choosing, cancel culture insists on Angels and Demons. It thereby discourages genuine openness, intimacy, trust, friendship and understanding, while silencing those who don’t abide its wild swings of judgment.
As we’ve seen above, cancel culture traffics in guilt by association, expresses cynicism about people & their potential to change, and embodies an anti-intellectualism mired in narrow identitarianism, as well as deeply problematic notions of evidence & epistemology. It also evinces a profound lack of strategy, for which it substitutes performative moral panic and self-righteousness. At times, to be sure, cancel culture is instrumentalized deliberately to forward individual careers, or to deliberately destroy movement-organizations, whether by those with personal vendettas or in the employ of the enemy state (see COINTELPRO). Such deliberately destructive actors, however, could not succeed without the help of many well-intentioned people, who, nonetheless, tacitly enable cancel culture’s destructive practices. Even as, on some level, they may know better.
By helping to surface left cancel culture’s fallacious methods here, we hope to contribute to an increasingly conscious and collective process of thinking through and beyond the present impasse. Together we can and must develop the theory, the practice, and the sustaining infrastructure that can move beyond cancel culture, re-ground left movements and organizations, and thereby give us a fighting chance to build the culture of respect, debate, and comradeship we will surely need for the struggles to come. We need movements that can build effective resistance to the current unjust and unsustainable world system, that can shepherd broad popular forces capable of defeating the ruling-class agenda, that can help people to grasp the world’s problems in their genuine complexity, and that can nurture into existence a new world that will be more reasonable, just, and free than the one we have now.
In that spirit, the Red Goat Collective welcomes all manner of thoughtful responses to this polemic, at the email address below (or elsewhere). We also welcome stories of how ‘cancel culture’ has played out in readers’ own circles, as well as resources and reflections to help our movements and organizations develop alternative methods for dealing with the challenges we face. Thank you for reading. And for continuing the discussion.
Notes.
1) Other candidates include: culture of disposability, culture of excommunication, carceral culture, leftist purge culture, call-out culture, the neoliberal personalization of politics, left authoritarianism, cannibal leftism, culture of shame or disgrace, culture of suspicion, sectarianism, “woke” mob rule, moral panic, culture of escalation, de-platform culture, the proverbial “circular firing squad,” and good ol’ fashioned Calvinist Puritanism.
It also should be said that many of the ideas examined below can be found in some form on the Right (or the Liberal-Center) as well. (See for instance the current reactionary campaigns to keep children ‘safe’ from “Critical Race Theory,” as well as the bipartisan Cold War history of anti-communist blacklisting.) To those who would dismiss our critique here as being ‘one-sided’ for bypassing the ’real threat’ from the Right, we point out the following: while some (but not all) the ideas criticized below may be found on the Right (or in the Center), those bad ideas are largely compatible with the Right and Center goals of maintaining or deepening the current unjust social order. Such ideas clash, however, with the Left’s historic mission of universal emancipation and global human flourishing; we thus direct our critique where prevalent ideas and practices stand in the way of our ostensible goals. We would further add that such obsessive fears of the Right, however understandable, at times work to suppress critical discussion on the Left about some of the fallacious methods we examine below—as if to engage in serious self-critique within our movements would be to give quarter or credence to right-wing attacks, rather than a way of inoculating against them. ↑
2) Socialist feminist Liza Featherstone forcefully frames some of the problem in terms of the hegemony of neoliberal individualism and consumerism, in her February 2022 Jacobin essay, “The Political is Not Personal”: https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/the-political-isnt-personal . Black linguist and conservative social critic John McWhorter frames part of problem in religious terms of the “Woke Elect” in his 2021 best-seller Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Katha Pollitt’s May 2022 column in the Nation magazine, “Cancel Culture Exists” documents several specific instances of unjust cancellation, while arguing that many more such cases remain publicly unknown: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cancel-culture-exists/ . See also Ben Burgis’ 2021 book Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/05/canceling-comedians-while-the-world-burns-cancel-culture-moralism-social-media, and Ngoc Loan Tran’s 2013 essay, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable,” https://www.bgdblog.org/2013/12/calling-less-disposable-way-holding-accountable/ , as well as Bill Fletcher Jr’s Feb. 13, 2019 article in The Nation, “Rethinking Ralph Northam”: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ralph-northam-blackface-jesse-jackson/. This recent piece in The Intercept by Ryan Grim details how a ‘cancel culture’ dynamic can interrupt and undermine even an honest democratic socialist attempt at transformative justice: https://theintercept.com/2022/05/08/maryland-campaign-brandy-brooks-progressive-accountability/. ↑
3) We should note here at the outset that we are thus notprimarily concerned with the ‘cancelling’ of those who truly do sit atop oppressive hierarchies, and who use the power and privilege of their position to take abusive advantage of those who have no choice but to suffer their domination. We are instead mainly concerned with the way in which methods that might be appropriate to conditions of truly systemic oppression and desperation—where people have next to no other options, where the stakes of inaction are high, and where the structurally exploitative commitments of the offenders are unapologetic and clear—have been taken up against our fellow working-class people, middle-class comrades, movement leaders and allies. Taken up: as if the things that divide us, despite our roughly common class position, are just as incommensurable and beyond reasoned resolution as those that stand between us and imperialist-capitalist class elites. Taken up: as if we could ever have a chance of overthrowing our true ruling-class enemies and transforming current oppressive social conditions, without learning somehow to live, grow, work, and struggle alongside other roughly regular people, people with whom we will undoubtedly have all manner of disagreements—some of them serious—but whose common interests and concerns nonetheless remain our best leverage for realizing serious social change of this world. ↑
4) Arguably, the entire phenomenon is shaped (albeit unconsciously in some cases) by the verdict that universal liberation, popular transformation, and social revolution beyond capitalism and its structuring inequalities are no longer possible. With the horizon of revolutionary abundance thus ruled out, all that remains for such a ‘Left’ are fights for small reforms, coupled with rhetorically inflated yet imaginatively impoverished, often inward-looking, competitive clashes over the scarce discursive space and social resources still allowed us by our capitalist overlords. ↑
5) Readers seeking a straightforward set of “alternative” methods or substitute approaches to the problems that ‘cancel culture’ mishandles will not find such a positive guidebook here, though we believe that better ways of handling genuine movement challenges are embedded throughout the critique. We certainly welcome the process of creating such alternative and improved methods in the days to come. In the meantime, we believe that clearly identifying, exploring, and establishing the validity of criticizing these problematic ideas and practices publicly and forcefully can be a key step in building the intellectual and social space within which new and better organizational and cultural approaches can incubate. The process of developing new methods of work must, in the end, be a collective and inclusive endeavor. (One such archive of methods is the work of Mariame Kaba, compiled in her 2021 book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.
“Cancelled Culture” by wiredforlego is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
by DGR News Service | May 23, 2022 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization, The Solution: Resistance
Editor’s note: Civilizations are defined by the growth of cities, vast acreages of agriculture, and hierarchical social systems—and after creating short term surpluses of energy and wealth at the expense of sustainability, they inevitably collapse.
Today, we live in the first global civilization. The harnessing of fossil fuels has brought unimaginable power, but also terrible destructiveness. No technological innovation or social organization will be a simple silver bullet to solve these issues.
Nevertheless, people around the world continue to experiment with alternative social arrangements. One is permaculture, which is often reduced to “gardening” but is actually a systems-thinking approach for deliberately designing human settlements, societies, and subsistence economies for sustainability and justice. In this era, systems-thinking around sustainability inevitably includes strategy and action to defend the planet, in addition to building alternative ways of living.
In this piece, Jennifer Murnan argues that permaculture practitioners, who often becomes insular “lifeboaters” or “survivalists,” should link their work to political resistance movements working to dismantle industrial civilization before it’s too late.
by Jennifer Murnan / Communities that Protect and Resist
Currently, permaculture operates in the realm of bright green environmental activism and adherents seemingly believe that the current culture can be transformed. Why should permaculturalists choose to align themselves with the deep green environmentalists that support dismantling civilization?
It’s all about deep abiding love for the truth that requires brave resistance to untruth. It’s about following that love down the path of truth. That’s what resistance in the form of permaculture is. That’s what the allure of permaculture, a permanent, sustainable culture, is for me.
We are animals, terrestrial animals, whose primary needs are for clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, healthy food to eat, and the security of community and relationship with each other and our fellow living creatures. Life for us is totally dependent on the health of the earth and our kin, human and non human. All that we create must serve this fundamental truth.
The Permaculture movement has always run counter to the beliefs and principles of global civilization. It views nature as a partner, a teacher, and a guide whom we honor and are completely dependent on. This is completely contrary to the cultural view of western civilization; that the natural world is here to serve us, to be used and abused at will, and that this abuse is justifiable.
Permaculture practice, by definition, is an attempt to depart from the model of exploitation and importation of resources necessitated by civilization. To live permanently in one place is the antithesis of the pattern exhibited repeatedly by civilizations. Civilizations cannot live in place. They violently import and exploit human and natural resources, exhaust their ecosystems, experience population overshoot, and collapse leaving an impoverished land base in their wake. Western industrial civilization is currently playing this scenario out on a global scale. Permaculture not only cannot exist within the confines of civilization, it also cannot coexist with a civilization that is devouring the world. It is neither ethical nor practical on the part of permaculturalists to attempt to do so.
Another reason lies in the common visions of the primacy of the earth shared by deep green and permaculture activists. The first ethic in permaculture is ’Care for the Earth’. Without this basis, the second and third ethics, ’Care for people’, and ‘Redistribute surplus to one’s needs’, are impossible. Healthy organisms produce a surplus to feed and enrich the ecosystem in which they exist. Simply put, there is no health unless Earth is cared for first.
“The Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything.”
— Derrick Jensen Endgame
There are attitudes shared by Permaculture and the Deep Green movement. Permaculturalists believe in working with nature and not against it. Fostering a respect for all life is inherent in permaculture practice. Valuing people and their skills creates more diversity, creativity and productivity in permaculture and deep green communities. Alignment between Deep Green and the Permaculture movements is especially apparent in two permaculture design principles.
Seeking to preserve, regenerate and extend all natural and traditional permanent landscapes is a goal of both communities. Preserving and increasing biodiversity of all types is recognized as being essential for survival by both Deep Greens and Permaculturalists.
A primary reason for permaculture to become part of a culture of resistance is that permaculture’s two guiding principles logically mandate dismantling civilization. The precautionary principle states that we should take seriously and act on any serious or destructive diagnosis unless it is proven erroneous.
Civilization has proven itself to be destructive to ecosystems since its inception. Western industrial civilization is causing the wholesale destruction of every ecosystem on Earth.
Practicing permaculture individually can be construed to be a revolutionary act, capable of saving the planet. But individual acts can’t possibly do the trick. Like any other liberal act, it fails to recognize the systems that are destroying the planet and confront them. The most elegant and nurturing permaculture garden will not stop the operation of a single coal fired plant or deep sea oil drilling or fracking or the destruction of a rain forest.
“The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship; This culture doesn’t just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it’s long past time we recognize the pattern.”
— Aric McBay
A large scale and effective response to this destruction is necessary. The tactics of the environmental movement up to this point have been insufficient. We are losing. It is time to change our strategy. Therefore, the Deep Green movement is advocating for all tactics to be considered to stop the murder of the Earth. This includes, but is not limited to, practicing permaculture, legislation, legal action, civil-disobedience, and industrial sabotage.
There are problems with holding the permaculture movement as the sole solution to global destruction. While transitioning to sustainability in our personal lives is important, even more important is confronting and dismantling the oppressive systems of power that promote unsustainability, exploitation, and injustice on a global scale. In fact, if these systems are left in place, the gains made by the practice of permaculture will be washed away in civilization’s tidal wave of destruction.
“Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral and stupid. Sustainability, morality and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.”
— Derrick Jensen
One of the necessary steps to restoring our relationships with each other and our planet is dismantling the current destructive systems of power through organized political resistance. We are in global ecological crisis, and the love and resistance inherent in permaculture can and frequently does ally with the victims of oppression, support and increase the health of natural systems, work to support and reclaim indigenous knowledge and greater than human wisdom and teaching.
The second guiding principle of permaculture, ‘intergenerational equity’, also necessitates immediate action in response to the destructive force of civilization. This principle states that future generations have the same rights as we do to food, clean air, water, and resources. This statement applies to all humans and non-humans equally. Daily, entire species are being eliminated from this planet as result of the activities of industrial civilization. ‘Intergenerational equity’ for them has ceased to exist and every day this destruction continues more species go extinct. Allowing this to continue is unconscionable.
Permaculture is based on close observation of the natural world, and I believe it can only realize its full potential in a human community that acknowledges the natural laws of its land base as primary. Practicing permaculture in any context other than this necessitates subverting our principles and betraying everything that nurtures and sustains us, all that is sacred, our living earth. We can only truly belong in a culture of resistance, and in communities of resistance.
Both permaculturalists and deep greens know that the earth is everything, that there is no greater good than this planet, than life itself. We owe her everything and without her, we die.
“The earth is our mother. We all come from our mother and to her we shall return. We are of the earth and it is absurd to imagine that we can “own” it, even in small pieces.
And yet the earth has been divvied up as private property. Property is a legal concept, a cultural production and not an intrinsic quality of land. Notions of what can be privatized seem to be infinitely expansive: land is privatized; seeds and genes are privatized; and even water is privatized.”
— Sandor Ellix Katz The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved
It is insane to “own” the land, the water, the air, yet this culture’s laws support and enforce that delusion. We design systems within boundaries and fail to challenge those boundaries, so our designs never truly integrate with their ecosystem, are defenseless against the onslaught of subsurface mineral rights which supersede surface rights and the resultant mining operations, the privatization and theft of water from the natural watershed that nourish the land, and rigidly enforced illusion of individual ownership over the concept of collective responsibility.
One of the necessary steps to restoring our relationships with each other and our planet is dismantling the current destructive systems of power through organized political resistance. We are in global ecological crisis, and the love and resistance inherent in permaculture can and frequently does ally with the victims of oppression, support and increase the health of natural systems, work to support and reclaim indigenous knowledge and greater than human wisdom and teaching.
This is it; we need each other, everyone, every tactic we can muster in defense of the earth. We have never been able to afford civilization.
“The task of an activist is not to navigate around systems of oppression with as much personal integrity as possible. It’s to bring those systems down.”
— Lierre Keith
(See also: can permaculture become a revolutionary force?)
Photo by Olivier Mary on Unsplash
by DGR News Service | May 16, 2022 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization
Editor’s note: Collapse is not just coming; it is already here. Wildlife populations are collapsing, from oceanic fish to birds to amphibians to plankton. The climate system is breaking down. Glaciers and ice sheets are collapsing. Dead zones are proliferating in the ocean. People in wealthy nations are only insulated from these realities because of massive energy inputs—mostly from fossil fuels.
These are predictable results. An unsustainable culture will destroy the planet, and then it will collapse. Each day, more forest is logged, more pollution emitted, and more water poisoned. It is a tautology, therefore, that the sooner collapse happens, the more of the natural world will remain.
Predictions of societal collapse have been made for decades, and while specifics often turn out to be wrong, the general trends are undeniable. Today’s article looks back at “Limits to Growth,” one of the first such studies.
By Kirkpatrick Sale / Counterpunch
Sometime in the 1960’s a group of prominent businessmen in Europe decided it was time to face up to the contradiction that lies at the heart of mode n capitalism: it is a system based on infinite growth in a world with finite limits to growth: in input (resources, including food), throughput (population), output (pollution), and a likely collapse if any one of these limits is exceeded. In 1968 they created an organization called the Club of Rom e , the task of which w as to examine what the prime leader of the group, veteran Italian businessman Aurelio Peccei, described quaintly in his 1970 book, The Predicament of Mankind: Quest for Structured Response to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties.
Fifty years ago this spring the Club published a book called The Limits to Growth, based on a study using complex computer models by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Donnella Meadows and her husband Dennis, with a couple of MIT graduate students. It used advanced computers to chart out different scenarios, including one in which nothing is done and we continue heedless growth. Its conclusion was stark and simple:
If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity, causing “overshoot and collapse” with a tipping point around 2020-30.
The book was a worldwide best-seller, but its conclusions were widely challenged and, in centers of political and economic power, mostly ignored. Growth is, after all, the lifeblood and raison d’etre of capitalism and the idea that there should be limits to it was so repugnant as to be essentially incomprehensible. A lot of people are making a lot of money, and a very few a very lot, so what would be the point in imagining that there would ever be an end to it?
And so the whole point of the Club of Rome’s efforts was shunted aside. It had wanted people to start rethinking the assumptions of capitalism, questioning where untrammeled growth was taking us, and reflect upon the new kind of world that computer technology with its immense (and basically uncontrolled) power was leading us to. And so capitalism became global capitalism, and then added computer capitalism and internet capitalism, and it continued to grow exponentially with no thoughts whatsoever to limits. It seemed as if there were something inherent in the computerized culture that demanded the growth-lovers would win out over the limits-warners.
A second study in 2000 confirmed that the original analysis found that nothing in the original thirty years earlier could be invalidated. “To the contrary,” said international banker Matthew Simmons, “the chilling warnings of how powerful exponential growth can be are right on track.” Only four years later the Meadows themselves came out with “The 30-Year Update,” holding that the original may have overemphasized resource depletion (fearing a coming “peak oil”) but underplayed pollution and the impact of greenhouse gasses, and nothing had been done on our path to overshoot. The growthists still ignored it and added cellphone capitalism and central bank appeasement into the mix in such a way that democratic control or restraint proved impossible.
A fourth study came in 2014 at the end of the Great Recession from University of Melbourne scholar Graham Turner who came to the conclusion that resource depletion, overpopulation, economic decline, industrial slowdown, and environmental collapse were following almost exactly the lines of the 1972 forecast—and leading straight to “overshoot and collapse” in 2020-30.
The most recent reassessment was in 2021 in the Journal of Industrial Ecology by Yale scholar Gaya Harrington, who found that the original Limits to Growth scenarios, including the dangerous business-as-usual one, “aligned closely with observed global data,” and “this suggests that it’s almost, but not yet, too late for society to change its course.” As for business-as-usual, “Pursuing continuous growth is not possible.” She failed to add “without overshoot and collapse.”
And just a month ago Dennis Meadows, asked how he felt about his original work, said calmly that all analyses “have generally concluded that “the world is moving along what we termed the standard scenario” of growth. He was not sanguine about society doing anything about changing that and averting global tragedy. The human species, he said, puts a “high survival value in focusing on the short term nearby and not worrying about the long-term far away.” A few weeks after that the latest comprehensive UN climate change panel confirmed that, concluding that severe overheating of the world caused by greenhouse gases has already caused “widespread, pervasive impacts to ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure.”
So all of the proposed reforms and remedies offered up in “green new deals” and renewable energy panaceas anywhere to date are completely useless because they are not aimed at capitalism’s fatal commitment to growth that the Club of Rome had wanted the world to reconsider. And there is no sign anywhere that the nations of the world are willing to confront this fact and head toward any policy or proposal that would acknowledge that, much less doing anything to reverse it.
The inevitable result: “overshoot and collapse,” and not far off, either.
Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books over fifty years and lives in Ithaca, New York.