Mini-Theory Blog: Let’s Start at the End
Editor’s note: Featured weekdays on Mastodon, our Mini-Theory Blog examines one left wing idea, theory, or concept in 5000 keystrokes or less. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today.
How to Make Sense of the Death Cult You Live In
If we’re speaking frankly, I don’t think our present social, political, and ecological situation warrants any false optimism or misplaced bravado. Faced with a confluence of rising politically empowered fascism, a global pandemic with a staggering body count, and a boiling planet literally bursting into flames all over the globe as a result of fossil fuel consumption and a capitalist way of life dependent on it, people are justifiably terrified. Quite rationally as well, they’re also confused and outraged at a larger Pig Empire establishment that told them, over and over again, that none of this could ever happen here, and in some cases continues day after day to engage in overt denialism, a sort of society-wide masquerade of feigned-ignorance and apathy. In the fog of this industrial scale gaslighting, the fascist creep continues, Covid rages, and the temperature rises in what even the UN is now calling an “era of global boiling.”
Taken as a whole, the picture is disheartening and overwhelming. Furthermore, figuring out why all of this is happening, and who is ultimately responsible, isn’t exactly easy in a society where the mainstream commentariat won’t use words like fascist, eugenicist, liar, or Malthusian. This combination of fear, uncertainty, and inability to identify reliable, in-context explanations for current events, has historically provided plentiful recruiting opportunities for all manner of fascist movements, religious cults, and violent social engineering projects. It’s important that we both acknowledge the rationality of this fear, and work to dispel mass uncertainty by stating the facts of our present situation and putting them in the proper social, political, and ecological contexts. As such, I’d like to share something I wrote just about a year ago that I think very succinctly covers the grand question of “what the hell is going on” in the Pig Empire, and by extension, the broader globe:
“The Earth is literally dying, and fossil fuel capitalism is the murderer. As a society we are now being presented with a clear choice; continuing the rule of capital (and capitalists) or ending this nightmare in time to save a planet habitable by billions of regular people. We are quite literally at the end of the ecological line, and the final decision – will it be socialism, or ecofascist barbarism? Unfortunately, but not coincidentally, this is happening at the precise time that liberal democratic societies have handed all of the political power, and most of the ability to influence ideas, to the ruling reactionary billionaire class.
Faced with what is unquestionably an existential threat to the very existence of capitalism, the rich guys have clearly decided to throw their lot in with fascism, and the propagandists and politicians they buy have come along with them. Not one single “right wing populist” movement gaining or exercising power, anywhere in the Pig Empire, is organic in nature; these now-thoroughly mainstream political and social movements are being funded, and ideologically directed, by billionaire eugenicist supervillains who would rather burn the world to ash than surrender one iota of the power and privilege afforded them by capital and capitalism. Why have they chosen fascism? Because if your plan is to march eight or so billion “useless eaters” off the ecological cliff like lemmings, it’s probably a bad idea to let them even pretend to vote on the concept. After all, they might not agree that dying to preserve capitalism and the unsustainable lifestyle of capitalist parasites, for perhaps three more generations, is a plan society as a whole should be pursuing.
All of which only leaves the question of why it is working, and the answer to that is two-fold. For starters, it’s much easier to co-opt a fake liberal democracy where all the decision making power resides with the wealthy anyway. Secondly, ours is a reactionary capitalist society built on wealth accrued from slavery and genocide, and it is ideologically infused with several hundred years of justifications for those practices; after several centuries of normalized foundational colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism, regular people in the Pig Empire are already primed to believe fascist nonsense.”
With my apologies to those of you who’ve heard this song before, I bring this up again now to help new readers place both current events, and the rest of my writing, within the necessary context for full comprehension. The truth is, even “the end of the world” isn’t all that hard to understand when you’ve got an evidenced-based framework and overview through which to examine it. The problem here is that the guys who own all the politicians, and the guys who own all the media – our capitalist class in the Pig Empire – have a vested interest in preventing you from applying a rational lens to their actions. The perceived chaos and confusion are the point; the proliferation of myriad nonsensical conspiracy theories wrapped around tiny grains of truth are the products of a larger conspiracy. If you weren’t confused, you’d never buy into the exploitation and eventual social murder of yourself, your family, and your friends.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
Subscribe to NIDC to for email updates whenever a new post is published.
