From Dole Army Ex-Worker Collective

There’s been a disturbing trend over the last few years as people have turned to soviet & spanish nostalgia in order to cope with the collapse of the left as alter-globalisation and occupy produced no visible results, by returning to communism’s “true” sources, diving back to the past and trying to organise ideologically. Everywhere I talk to the left, I run into the same problem: productivist logic. When questioned on it, people often jump to things like “public transit everywhere” and “but what about insulin?” etc, fearing the loss of the current benefits of industrial society in case minorities (normally the disabled) get the short end of the stick. As a an incredibly disabled green anarchist, it’s horrifying to see, and even worse to be the subject to be debated over but totally ignored in practice. Speaking up often means getting called ableist, eco-fascist, transphobic etc, despite the sheer hypocrisy of accusing me of wanting me and others like me to die en masse. It’s pure liberalism from people using ideology for social capital.

This way of seeing the climate crisis and the capitalist economy as a binary state between the way we live today and a totalising hypothetical post-collapse “primitivist” society in which everybody is a hunter-gatherer is completely disingenous and shows a total lack of regard or care for addressing the crises we’re in the middle of. First of all, the planet’s biosphere is collapsing in the here and now, and the process started a long time ago. This means that whether we like it or not, the entire capitalist global work machine has begun to self implode into a patchwork of warring states as resource scarcity kicks in, mass famine hits most of the world, and global supply chains go to total shit.

Stop using disability as an excuse to not criticise your relationship to ecology. People like me who rely on medicine to survive, and who can’t work to feed ourselves, will be the first people to starve and die as Empire enters its death throes. There won’t be a hypothetical society in which our biggest concern is producing insulin, because states don’t give a shit about the sick in the face of war and economic ruin. Many people will be wiped out, and it’ll be brutal. The reality of the future we face is one of imminent collapse. Without a level of energy production that’s completely above and beyond what the climate can handle, the “cloud” will fall apart. Global finance capital, the tech industry with it’s massive server farms, crypto mines amd datacentres won’t continue, they physically won’t be able to except in more localised, isolated forms. This won’t end the capitalist economic order, but it will cripple the war machine & technocapital’s hold over Empire, and the ability for capital to continually grow worldwide & project it’s power will be diminished the more it’s cut off from the energy and resources like lithium, cobalt etc it relies upon.

So what does this mean for healthcare and production? It’s pretty simple: we’re fucked so long as it’s patented anyway. The corporate healthcare system makes medicine for profit, which means the direction of all research is railroaded toward what companies can sell, not what will help people the most. Copyright law directly prevents medical science from being able to do much, research on cures for common diseases is regularly shut down in exchange for long term treatments that can be sold for life instead. From top to bottom, the entire global healthcare network is a sham designed to uphold the liberal order via biopolitics and there is no revolutionary outcome that won’t involve a huge loss of medical expertise, productive capacity, and availability. Most medicine currently produced creates extreme amounts of waste and ecological damage due to excessive packaging, overproduction, ending up in the water supply and relying upon unsustainable crop monoculture and chemical industries. Like every part of the capitalist economy, the healthcare industry is far more destructive than it has any right or need to be.

Nobody has the answers for an ecological healthcare system, there’s far more people don’t know than they do know, we can only speculate and guess at ways to make treatment work for the most amount of people. It’s going to take a lot of research from people who know what they’re doing to really maximise the amount of people we can treat given the limited resources we’ll have as the century unfolds into ecological collapse.

But also, healthcare is not the biggest threat to the planet right now, and this is where I’m extremely pissed. I see so many theoretical debates, but unless you’re creating diy & underground medical mutual aid networks that lower people’s dependancy on the capitalist supply chains, get your head out of your fucking ass mate.

People want to imagine the death of capitalism as an overnight process after a worldwide revolutionary war, or as a series of smaller revolutions creating marxist leninist states that will wither away into nationalist oligarchies or something. This is completely out of touch with our modern conditions. For anybody on this planet to survive, fossil fuels need to end, ecology has to be defended, logging and monoculture farming need to end, etc etc. You don’t do this by “organising”, these are international megacorporations that your little protest won’t do shit about. If your goal as a leftist is to avoid mass death and destruction caused by capitalism and such, you’d be getting off your ass and directly stopping fossil fuels (stopfossilfuels.org), shutting down the pipelines, sabotaging the industrial equipment, and making it as expensive as possible for capitalism to maintain the growth economy. Your parties and organisations in the west are not a threat to any state, and while they might be able to do some good social support work, you won’t be leading the proletariat to a revolution, you’ll be leading a group of like minded people that are a minority among the left spouting communism as the sollution to the end of the world like a millenarian preacher, right up until you get wiped out by famine and bushfire.

The death of capital is not a binary, no war will be declared, because war has already long since been declared on and by the oppressed multitude under empire. The social war began long ago. There is an active global struggle of resistance already being undertaken as the centres of capitalist power are attacked directly by clandestine activists looking to stop Empire’s techno-capital war machines from tearing the planet apart. Typical ecocidal industry like fossil fuels and livestock farming, the arms industries, technocapital & various parts of the state machine are attacked every day, and communiques are thrown up wherever. Notice that in all this time talking about insurrection, I haven’t mentioned anybody firebombing up a hospital, or a medicine factory? There’s a fucking reason, there are way more important targets, nobody wants to get random sick people killed, and we can deal with that shit later when we can seize back control of medicine from big pharma who religiously guard their secrets.

More and more civilians will join the general insurrection as the existential threat of the climate crisis draws ever nearer and they experience profound loss or dread from it’s effects. Everybody wants to imagine radical ecological praxis as this thing that died with the ELF, and ever since iraq/afghanistan environmentalism was a failure so the only solution to the climate crisis is doubling down on leftism. They want to see them and their organisation be the ones guiding the masses, directly taking matters into their own hands during or after “the revolution”. It involves a slow progressivism and organisation-building which can certainly result in good mutual aid networks and the like but won’t grow fast enough to outpace collapse.

Industrial civilisation is collapsing whether we like it or not, fossil fuels are running out, but all too slowly. Production & use of them is growing in capitalism’s mad drive to maintain the status quoa, and the resource wars will make alternative forms of energy hard to get even before we get into criticisms of how “green” tech like solar panels are environmentally destructive. You have two options, you can help speed up this process by cutting the flows of energy to capital today, or you can sit back and let the situation get exponentially worse while using the disabled as an excuse to get into petty discourse. The former option will result in a bit of short-medium term instability as the backbone of the capitalist economy is attacked, the latter will make the overflowing of hospitals during covid-19 waves look like a joke as an apocalyptic scale set of disasters unfolds and causes chain reactions of mass death and suffering. It’s your choice.