Boiled in the bag

A call to action

Now what, exactly, do the ruling class expect will eventually happen as each summer the temperature creeps up a couple more degrees, the rainfall decreases even further and wild fires spread? This year Europe is expecting 100,000 deaths due to the heat, mostly the old, the sick and the very young and of course, living and working in buildings not designed for searing heat and of course, with no air conditioning (as if we have the energy available to power them).

The ruling class and their corporate/state media manipulators are not even in denial, they simply avoid the issue entirely, with Net Zero now a dead duck, even as Europe goes up in flames. Instead they’re too busy preparing their captive populations for war on Russia and I figure that this is no accident. What better way to avoid talking about heat death by preparing us for death by war?

How is it possible that this situation has come to pass? The ruling class and their bought and paid for intelligentsia have known that the world would get hotter and hotter since the 1970s, if uncontrolled production of greenhouse gases was allowed to continue. Clearly the psychotic desire for more and more wealth trumped everything. Hubris and a complete disconnect from reality took over and drove the rulers and the corporate shareholders in their insane desire for more and more wealth and of course, the political power to hold on to it. Rational thought ceased if it was ever there in the first place.

The climate change or ‘Green’ movement has revealed its impotence and bankruptcy by failing to confront the real cause of the problem: industrial, corporate capitalism. Instead, it chose to use a very middle class, ‘moralistic’ approach to the problem, a ‘Save the Elephant’, ‘use less plastic’, recycle our endless parade of consumer products, approach. In other words, an individualist approach that by changing our ‘life styles’ we could reverse the coming disaster when the reality is that the vast bulk of the damage to the planet’s ecosystem is not caused by us as individuals but by gigantic, transnational corporations. It’s this handful of corporations that are mainly responsible for the production of the greenhouse gases and the environmentally destructive industrial chemicals, that are gobbling up water, polluting the air, ripping up forests, chowing raw materials, that are wreaking havoc on the planet. And of course, waging very profitable wars.

Thus the problem confronting us is, as it always has been, capitalism, except now it’s the entire planet under threat rather than individual countries, such are the disasters unleashed by unrestrained production and capitalism’s endless wars over resources and markets. So how do we, at this very late stage, turn this around? Is it even possible given the failure of the (former) revolutionary forces of the West to overthrow our governments? Yet, this is what we have to do, if we are to stand a chance of surviving this planetary crisis.

It should be pretty obvious that either a transformed, existing or an entirely new revolutionary force is needed, one that is prepared to take on the task of overthrowing the existing order by whatever means necessary, that anything less than this, dooms us to extinction. Is this possible? It’s certainly absolutely necessary, we really don’t have a choice in the matter. You might say that it should be surely obvious to anyone with a working brain that we have reached the ubiquitous tipping point, that unless we act now, it’s game over. Yet, judging by the responses to events, it’s business as usual. How is this possible in the face of the events unfolding around us?

I think the answer to this lies in the blind, self-interest of the ruling classes driven by their well-paid servants, whose livelihoods and futures depend on their paymasters. The perfect example of this in the UK, is the BBC’s mind-boggling coverage of the European climate disaster unfolding before us, where climate facts are presented merely as opinions of scientists, thus diminishing the urgency of the situation. This enables us to justify and rationalise our lack of action. Multiply this and we have created an entire society living in manufactured denial. Is it any wonder why, right now, we are not shitting in our collective pants? Why a façade of normalcy has been constructed that masks the reality of impending disaster?

But the ruling political class are all too aware of the impending crisis and the potential for a revolutionary upsurge, hence the construction of an expanding fascist state, one repressive step at a time. A state that is widening its repression to include ever greater swathes of society by criminalising even the most innocuous of opposition. The state has lost its legitimacy. If it is to survive it has no choice but to repress all opposition to its rule. Yet what remains of our socialist opposition still behaves as if we live in a democracy, when the reality is that we inhabit a hollow shell that has only the appearance of a democracy.

We are running out of time, events are outstripping our ability to respond with a coherent plan, yet respond we must, so in the words of our esteemed ancestor, ‘What is to be done?’ The task is so huge that it’s difficult to know where to begin yet begin we must even if I’m not sure what comes first. My instinct tells me that what we need is a call for action, an appeal to all right-thinking people that it’s now or never for us to take charge of our own destiny. Capitalism is destroying our once beautiful planet in the name of private profit and destroying humanity in the process. Are we to do no more than wring our hands in vain?

It seems so pretentious of me to write these words, after all, who am I to demand such radical action? By what right do I ask, nay, demand such radical action? Yet as a person of conscience, aware of the parlous state of our existence, what else can I do? To do nothing is to abrogate my responsibility, thus I’m left with no alternative, especially given that those who claim to lead political alternatives to the current insanity, have betrayed us and abandoned their responsibility to act on our behalf. So, a call to action though how this is to be promulgated I have no idea but I have to start somewhere.