Capitalism is designed to make you give up.
The very nature of class struggle, the very structures capitalism sets up, are made by intent or by accident to exhaust you, confuse you, make you miserable. Even the most dedicated people who organize against it are vulnerable to burnout; for every victory there are a hundred defeats, and even the victories require constant reinforcement to make sure they aren’t rolled back by the forces of reaction. This constant pressure to always be doing something, to be forever vigilant against an enemy that never sleeps, is exhausting, and with every setback there is the temptation to simply stop trying, to admit that there are some problems too great even to comprehend, let alone solve.
There is no challenge facing sad, battered, suffering, lost humanity greater than that of environmental destruction, and for me, it is the one thing above all others that makes me want to give up the fight. I have faith in the power of solidarity; I trust in my comrades and the unlimited possibilities of mass resistance; and I believe in socialism’s principles and its potential to change the world for the better like I’ve never believed in anything else. But the damage industrial society has wreaked on the Earth is so vast, so profound, so deep, and so difficult to comprehend. It’s the one thing I worry that socialism cannot repair in this wounded world. Even if we have the ability to cure the incurable wounds we’ve inflicted, it may be too late; a global revolution isn’t coming anytime soon no matter how hard we fight, and each day we cross off the calendar brings us closer to a reckoning that might be beyond our capacity to withstand.
This problem has hounded me my whole life, and in my deepest moments of despair, it drains me of my will more than the wiles of all the bosses, the fists of all the fascists, and the lies of all the hacks and careerists who ever served the status quo. And these feelings have only deepened with the recent release of a United Nations report that we are, at most, three decades away from a shift in the global temperature that will kill millions, irrevocably alter the shape of the world, and create misery, poverty, and desperation the likes of which our weary globe has never seen before. In the face of that, what can any of us do?
Reaction to the report has been as varied as it has been predictable. The reactionary capitalist class, who are responsible largely for both creating the problem and denying that it’s a problem, are steadfast in their determination to act as if nothing is happening, and to imply that the whole thing is hysterical at best and fraudulent at worst. As the ones with the most to lose from any systemic solution, and the ones most likely to be able to weather the effects of the coming global storm, they will never shift from this position unless we force them to. The media and centrist liberals make their usual concerned clucking noises, but as they too owe their socioeconomic positions to the capitalist system that’s behind it all, they will never demand any action that takes place outside the realm of market solutions and corporate ‘innovation’. The left has ideas but lacks the capacity to make any of them into reality. And ordinary people either fail to appreciate the severity of the threat, or shrug their shoulders, wondering what it is, exactly, they’re supposed to do about it.
As noted, this is what capitalism is designed to do: to make you fretful, panicked, indifferent, afraid, enervated; to make change seem impossible, to make everyone seem hostile to reform or transformation, to block every avenue of progress with denial or hostility or ineffectual hand-waving. If you’ve ever faced an imminent financial catastrophe, if you’ve ever been in a situation where you’re out of work and out of money and you see an immovable deadline looming after which things get so bad they might not be fixable, you know the feeling; and you probably also know the dreadful temptation to just carry on as before, to spend what little savings you have, rather than spend those last days in misery — and besides, what else can you do? That is the environmental crisis writ small.
So, too, are even the solutions and options presented to us designed to rob us of intention. We understand that it is just a handful of corporations that are responsible for the greatest share of environmental destruction; but it would take a total reversal of society and the economy to get them to stop. We understand, too, that we ourselves contribute in small ways to the inexorable march towards climatic devastation, but the things we can change are grains of sand on a vast polluted beach, and major alterations in our lifestyles — even if we are in a position to enact them — are only worthwhile if everyone does them. And everyone doesn’t. Everyone can’t.
Which brings us to the Dark Mountain Project. I first heard about it years ago, through the brilliant novels of its co-founder, the British author Paul Kingsnorth. Highly influenced by the prescient and powerful work of the poet Robinson Jeffers, one of the earliest prophets of natural catastrophe, the Dark Mountain Project gathers together writers and musicians, scientists and philosophers, and others who believe that, to a greater or lesser degree, the environment is beyond repair, and the human experiment is, essentially, over. It is our task, they believe, not to undo the damage we have done, but to accept that we have done it and make as graceful an exit from the world as we can manage, spending our final days leaving a record of our grief and sorrow for a planet that will soon be free of the species that murdered it.
It’s a powerful vision, and its ‘inhumanist’ approach appeals to me on a number of levels. It seems to me more clear-eyed about our current position, and it has the courage to admit that we have done things that cannot be undone and to ask us to come to terms with that. It has produced great art and compelling thought. And it bears a great and heavy sympathy for the people we have doomed with our short-sightedness and greed, asking us to leave them with an elegy rather than make them false promises as we have so often in the past. Its call to abandon the human project and simply fade away gracefully, becoming as close as possible to the nature we have despoiled before leaving the world for good, seems to me to have more dignity and truth than the paranoid fantasies of doomsday preppers and deranged survivalists.
And yet, and yet: it’s not enough. It still smacks, to me, of an amusement of the elites, of a privileged move by people who have the resources and the wealth to withdraw from the world and still live in relative comfort. Maybe some of its adherents can fuck off to Patagonia and let the clock run out while sitting in a stone alcove along a frost-caked beach; I can’t even afford to buy a condo. I live where I live and the way I live not because I have chosen to, but because I, like countless millions of others who can’t go commune with the dying planet in some picturesque wilderness, have been forced into circumstances over which I have virtually no agency. Beyond that, it smacks of giving up, of deciding that a hard solution is the same as no solution, an attitude I have often despised when it’s applied to other social and political problems.
Perhaps I contradict myself, having said that deep down, in the dark hours such as the one in which I write this, I suspect that even a global socialist revolution will not be enough to undo the harm we have done. But even if that’s true, I can’t give up. I have been conditioned to give up since birth and always kept fighting; giving up now, without even a token and purely symbolic show of resistance, means that my last act will be giving in to what capitalism has wanted me to do all my life. Even if I had the means, the will, and the determination to give up for my own sake and withdraw from the dying world, there are millions who do not have such a luxury, and it seems like a truly base betrayal to leave them to suffer.
Just after reading the UN report, I read this article in the High Country News. It too dealt with ecocide, and with the despair of helplessness in the face of such vast destruction, and with Jeffers and with Kingsnorth and with the Dark Mountain Project and with the need to maintain hope and with the need to fight for justice. It left me with no answers, but it asked a lot of the same questions I’ve been asking myself, and it made me feel less alone in the face of the unthinkable. I still don’t know how to cope with the idea of planetary ruination, and I still don’t know if I can make a difference, or how. But I know I am not the only one. And I know that I am not ready to give up, just yet.