Capitalocene

Over at Salvage magazine(bleak is the new red),Seymour, Mieville and others riff at length on the climate catastrophe. Perhaps a bit much on the length but still, packed with insights. I wish I could afford a subscription. They end with this bit of bleak optimism:

"Capitalism has, one hundred and fifty years after Marx predicted, finally produced enough diggers to complete a grave, but in doing so, it ensured that all that was left to inherit was a graveyard."

These diggers are the billions of new workers of China, India and the quickly "developing" world. This age, our age, they then call the Proletarocene. Oppose this realism to the view of a young student climate club leader who advises "when building a cathedral you have to start with a foundation brick by brick." I could go on at length myself about bricks in the wall, or about the centuries it took to build cathedrals, or about the dismal progress since the first Earth Day, etc..We are told to build relationships, and certainly there is truth in that, but we remember the trauma of getting to know damaged people and the futility of trying to help.It is an emergency. Rome must be built in a day. This is the tragedy.

"Between salvation and garbage is salvage." It is hard to face the facts. Physics are not subjective, algorithms don't feel our pain. Consciousness is determined by our social being, which all too often is simply dogmatic ritual, the abstract fetish of commodity exchange and all that implies; investment, consumption, speculating, selling (one's labor power).As Zizek puts it, we know but we act as if we don't. Those under the spell of green capitalism put their faith in kinder, gentler, more sustainable investment ( renewables over fossil fuels) but fail to see the inherent death-drive:
M-C-M’. A regime of creative-destructive accumulation that is as inexhaustible as biospheric resources are finite.

Unfortunately, there is no green escape. As Salvage describes it: "This is the tragedy of the worker. That, as avatar of a class in itself, she was put to work for the accumulation of capital, from capitalism’s youth, amid means of production not of her choosing, and with a telos of ecological catastrophe. That thus even should the proletariat become a class for itself, and even if it does so at a point of history where the full horror of the methods of fossil capitalism is becoming clear, it would – will – inherit productive forces inextricable from mass, trans-species death."