What Is To Be Done (take 6)

Time for a little re-calibration perhaps? "All that is solid melts into air" has a new resonance and yet the point is not just to interprate the world but to change it, right? I have longed for disruption so now I have to figure out how to make lemonaid out of lemons.So let's see... In his book Against the Crisis, Stale Holgersen makes a compelling case that "crises are not opportunities- they are the enemy" because of the tendency for Capital to exploit and benefit. Even that Capital requires crisis (creative destruction) to survive. As I've argued here, ecological crisis could be categorically different, but let's just substitute the word crises- even polycrises- with rupture and see what happens. A somewhat different beast, a tear, a rent, a violent opening that occurs suddenly. This is what Mao was hoping for when he (perhaps) said "Everything under Heaven is in utter chaos- the situation is excellent." That chaos/crisis opens up a space so wide, creates a vacuum so deep, that the condition of possibilities is wide open. That space was on the horizon in 1914, in 1968, and, it could be argued, in 2008. How pregnant is the current conjecture? Not just for the Left, but for any radical formation? What nudge might be needed to blow that space up so that the current ruling order is so de-legitimized that something new can fill the void? I would argue that the effects of global heating and ecological breakdown, if exploited with skill and discipline, could do the trick. And thanks to physics, is more likely than any other force. This brings up the much-maligned concept of "heightening the contradictions". It is in this sense that I hope and pray for a series of Cat.5 hurricanes to strike the Gulf Coast at the same time the stock market crashes after some bubble bursts and just to top things off the National Guard massacres a bunch of Black protestors. That ought to do it! Of course along with this alignment of luck, there would have to be some conscious agency,ie.. good organizing, a charismatic leader perhaps, a plan for how to fill the vacuum. Ideas, yes, but ideas alone won't do it. Sad to say, at this point, you need the help of fate. I know. How cruel of me, what about the innocent victims? What about the Working Class? What about MAGA Trumpism? To which I answer: how brutal is business as usual? Victims? My God. And at the point of rupture I can see much of the working class forming the ecological class because choices will be constrained. The folks that really have to make a choice are the liberals clinging to "green capitalism". As for Trump, there is a sense in which he is doing much of the preliminary work for us. The point here is that the sooner this rupture happens the better, in terms od species loss, in terms of what is left to possibly salvage. The longer we sink into this slow attrition, watching the things we value slowly dissolve, the harder it will be to re-build.