So, we all know about Climate Change (give or take a few fanatics), and how it is a harrowing prediction. Obviously there is alarmism, and pessimism, and opportunism. Every two bit activist with an instagram channel and NGO funding is trying to make a career out of symbolic gestures and bullshit. We got publicity stunts, token demonstrations and unstructured radicalism.
The opposition to climate change is incoherent, scientifically illiterate and fundamentally dysfunctional. There is no central platform, there is no institutional development, there is no meaningful pool of political resources. There are only angry students on the street, confronting a state mechanism they do not in any meaningful way understand.
Just cycles of protests, riots and further declarations of pessimism. But I do not think this pessimism is actually aimed at climate change, rather, it is aimed at parliamentarianism. The main obstacle to ending climate change is not technology, resources, logistics, education or indeed one of a practical nature. We could begin tomorrow if we feel so inclined.
Rather the biggest obstacle is a wall of policemen, with ballistic shields and teargas. Each time the people take to the streets, each time change is demanded, they are met with blue bullies, who beat them, chase them off, teargas them and arrest them. The soldiers of a political aristocracy, who legitimate themselves through dwindling election turnouts and high disapproval ratings.
The signature of a weak state is actually violence. A strong state needs no violence, it produces prosperity, good living standards, democratic forums and a happy and loyal citizenry. It is rather a weak state, with a fragile claim to power, public discontent, austerity and oligarchical powers who require the billyclub to silence the people.
So how do you fight the police? Well, fists, cinderblocks and molotov cocktails, while certainly a very romantic approach, delivers lackluster results. Either you are given concessions or you are given escalations. In the United States, Occupy Wall Street was taken down by concessions, and the Minneapolis rebellion was taken down by escalations.
You either get a merit badge or a crack in the head, but following this, business remains as usual.
On top of that you have the worst kind of scientism and opportunism from the more pungent fringes of public consciousness, wherein Malthusians, the barbarians of the industrial era, are decrying overpopulation in an effort to save a system of waste, corruption and corporate dictatorship over the economy.
Supposedly, the world’s food supply will run out, and fail to sustain the surplus population as they call it. And yet, the wealthy corporations they serve are currently dumping hundreds of millions of tonnes of our food supply into landfills.
And this study is actually quite misleading, because for instance in Australia they interview households, even though the research trend indicates that most food thrown away happens at farming and distribution level.
This is because workers and capitalists have conflicting interests. Workers produce abundance, and capitalists demand scarcity. And since capitalists govern our economy, people therefore starve whilst perfectly good food rots in landfills and manure pits.
And that’s the thing that should actually scare you about climate change. The terrifying notion is not that it is going to drive humanity extinct, because it won’t, it will simply drive large segments of humanity extinct who find themselves on the southern side of the equator.
The ruling classes are utilising climate change as the next big smallpox. A way to exterminate the peoples of the world that they never successfully colonised. Their homes will become uninhabitable, but their resources are still up for grabs using special equipment and infrastructure.
This is why corporations are not particularly worried about climate change. During NATO’s invasion of Yugoslavia, they used radioactive warfare, to quote the article:
“BELGRADE, October 5. /TASS/. The use of munitions containing depleted uranium during NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugolavia was an “ecocide on a planetary scale,” a prominent Serbian expert on environmental issues, Prof. Velimir Nedeljkovic, has said.
“Almost 20 years have passed since 1999, and we have only started fighting for the truth,” the expert said during the presentation of the “Uranium-238. My story” documentary in Belgrade. “Back in 2000, it was already clear to me that it was not just an environmental disaster, but an ecocide not even of a regional, but of a planetary scale.”
“The bombings were carried out absolutely deliberately, and pursued certain goals. Kosovo is a geographical phenomenon, as rivers originating in this region flow into three seas — the Aegean, the Black and the Adriatic seas.
Therefore, NATO used depleted uranium to bomb a small region, but managed to contaminate three seas. Those seas are connected to oceans, so it is evident that the pollution was of a planetary scale,” the expert went on.”
And this is because Kosovo has deposits of minerals. Minerals and oil are not affected by radiation, only the people are. Only their food, water and air is. Industrial mining requires protective equipment as it is, it is already a hostile environment. Turning the surface into a similar hostile environment does not impede the interests of corporations.
So to a lot of oil companies, climate change is the gift that keeps on giving. Entire landmasses, completely deserted of people, innovations in robotics and automated labour, all of it spells opportunity for men who value money higher than human beings.
And there is every possible moral precedent for it. The transatlantic slave trade, the indigenous genocides, settler-colonialism, apartheid, reservations, a lot of it still goes on to this day, and throughout each iteration, from the 1470s to the 1970s, the powers that be insisted that they were part of a new generation, and that the crimes of the past would never be repeated.
We are not dealing with a climate disaster, we are dealing with the cultivation of a doomsday weapon. Politicians are not stupid, CEOs are not stupid, Fortune 500 companies are not stupid. They are not short sighted, they are not incompetent, they do not simply need more education.
They have all the information, research and academic resources they need, and they are all being told the same thing by scientists and politicians: You’ll be fine, you’ll get even richer, it’s the working stiffs who are going to suffer unprecedented amounts of poverty, death and ruin.
It is not climate disaster, it is not climate change, it is not climate crisis. It is climate warfare, a war declared by the haves on the have-nots, the oldest story in history, the precedent for every empire that has reigned for centuries.
And if we want to beat the police, if we want to beat the corporations, if we want to beat the haves, then we need to out-organise them. No more weekend activism, no more “causes” no more corporate “NGOs”, no more thinking voting is going to solve it.
What is needed is a popular front, a dual power structure wherein the working classes are organised through trade unions, labour councils and workers’ parties in such a way as to be able to perform general strikes, and to defend their communities from reaction.
Working class people do not kill people, or gun them down, or break people’s heads. Those are police tactics. What we do is that we form a picket line, and watch as society slowly boils to a fever. As the rich part of town begins to look like the poor part of town, and they begin to understand who is really in charge.
And that requires organised workers, not special snowflakes, not spiritual hippies, not people “fighting the system.”
NO, the problem is a complete lack of system, we need to build a system. No more rule by teargas, no more rule by shareholders, no more rule by lobbyists. Instead we need rule of law, and not the insipid bureaucracy of elected dictators, but rather a law which is mandated by the people, through national consensus, and ultimately, for the people.
