What a relief, to have finally conclusively failed, to be cleared of the possibility of more responsibility, more guilt. We had nothing to win but blame and recrimination, and now we’ve won all of it.
What a relief, in 100 years everything will be underwater, canoe tours of Manhattan, snorkel tours of Venice, the massive citadels living glorious deaths beneath two meters of seawater, capital and capitols finally underwater, nothing truly insolvent under the erosion of time. Only the orgiastic joy of the end.
Should we not burn every drop of fuel in one massive fire, should we not organize a worldwide Grande Bouffe, should we not eat until we all die of indigestion or fuck until we all die of starvation, should we not greet the sweet slow lapping of the ocean on the coast line with a sweet lapping all our own, should we not join together finally in the unity of the age, should we not hold parades to death, should we not perform the art of dying all at once to prevent ourselves from dying slowly?
Did you feel it, there, in between the lines of the New York Times’ somber tone, do you feel that desire, that celebration of death, that sweet fascism of the inevitability of humanity’s failure?
We’ve already murdered all futures. To do nothing is genocidal, yet to do anything is genocidal, genocide is here, we’ve made it real, so why worry?
Because that “we” is the lie shrouded within (and productive of) all this millenarian truth. You believe the NYT’s
“we”, you think “we’re” all in this together, that “we” caused this? As long as the political horizon includes this “we” then all “we” can do is survive. Survival
applied to a global “we” built by the concealing-through-catastrophe of all division—not only the division-of-labor but also of sexuality, gender, race—and “we”
will discover, in “our” long decline, the increased rationalization of an ever-more-direct
division-of-suffering.
Starving, drowning, dying of thirst, becoming the refugees of an ecological disaster or resource war, this is the future of work for the massive surplus-populations of the global proletariat. Being-excess, eking what tiny value can be won from the toxic scrap heaps, living slow and dying young: this is already the labor of much of the toiling classes. As ecology collapses the capitalist becomes more literally vampiric: if clean air is scarce, then only the slow choking of the poor can make him rich.
Is it not possible to see the shift toward service work as a less obviously murderous step on this path toward the direct extraction of life, of lived-excess, of joy? The smiles and cheery good will, the happiness of the service worker is the ruthlessly extracted product at the front lines of economic innovation. The privilege of the working class in the Global North is to have your quantum of surplus-life extracted more slowly, "how can I help you" by "how can I help you".
Now more than ever we must kill the owners and smash the state, because as scarcity becomes more and more actually material, manufactured-scarcity will become even more terribly desperate. The enclosure of the possibility of joy adds to the historical task of the revolutionary the need to produce a world which, in the face of ecological collapse, can produce a joy that rejects all deathly logics, that rejects the “we” that must survive, that builds an us that can live, truly live.
No to the prophets of resilience, who tell us every catastrophe can be withstood, as long as we stay exactly where we are, piling sandbags and building seawalls!
No to the surgeons of survival, who believe politics means deciding who and where must be excised from the body-ecologic!
No to the partisans of death, who say since it is all already over, there is only further division, so do something and get dividing!
It will be the creativity of the masses again become historical subject, or else all there will be is the cold unfolding of an increasingly miserable survival cut through with moments of the hot suicidal embrace of mass-death.
Starving, drowning, dying of thirst, becoming the refugees of an ecological disaster or resource war, this is the future of work for the massive surplus-populations of the global proletariat. Being-excess, eking what tiny value can be won from the toxic scrap heaps, living slow and dying young: this is already the labor of much of the toiling classes. As ecology collapses the capitalist becomes more literally vampiric: if clean air is scarce, then only the slow choking of the poor can make him rich.
Is it not possible to see the shift toward service work as a less obviously murderous step on this path toward the direct extraction of life, of lived-excess, of joy? The smiles and cheery good will, the happiness of the service worker is the ruthlessly extracted product at the front lines of economic innovation. The privilege of the working class in the Global North is to have your quantum of surplus-life extracted more slowly, "how can I help you" by "how can I help you".
Now more than ever we must kill the owners and smash the state, because as scarcity becomes more and more actually material, manufactured-scarcity will become even more terribly desperate. The enclosure of the possibility of joy adds to the historical task of the revolutionary the need to produce a world which, in the face of ecological collapse, can produce a joy that rejects all deathly logics, that rejects the “we” that must survive, that builds an us that can live, truly live.
No to the prophets of resilience, who tell us every catastrophe can be withstood, as long as we stay exactly where we are, piling sandbags and building seawalls!
No to the surgeons of survival, who believe politics means deciding who and where must be excised from the body-ecologic!
No to the partisans of death, who say since it is all already over, there is only further division, so do something and get dividing!
It will be the creativity of the masses again become historical subject, or else all there will be is the cold unfolding of an increasingly miserable survival cut through with moments of the hot suicidal embrace of mass-death.
