Well my dalliance with Caitlin on the bright side didn’t last long. Likewise its accompanying promise to return today to an already written 1 class analysis of post-Soviet Russia. Untied to any specific and fast evolving situation, and in any case featuring a seventy-two minute podcast demanding a little more focused attention than I normally ask for, it’ll wait till the weekend …
Apropos May/June’s unprecedentedly global heatwave – in the broader context of one climate record after another being smashed with accelerating frequency – World Socialist Website two days ago ran a post by Thomas Scripps. As far as I’m concerned it says all that needs saying. 2
Rosa Luxemburg’s prescient formulation more than a century ago – socialism or barbarism – points to the truth that socialising wealth creation, as opposed to subordinating it to the needs of private profit, is humanity’s only hope of averting a litany of nightmares headed up by two in particular. One, global war in a thermonuclear age, I write about often. The other – capitalism’s intrinsic view of Nature as a resource it may exploit at costs borne by others, hence invisible on its ledgers of profit and loss – almost never.
Over to WSWS.
Europe’s record heatwave: Climate catastrophe or world socialism
The worst European heatwave on record is sweeping across the continent, burning through records in country after country as temperatures soar up to 18 degrees Celsius (32.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above their seasonal average.
Hundreds of millions of workers are slaving through 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) heat as the super-rich glide through air-conditioned homes, private lounges, luxury cars, planes and offices. Their bank balances, global temperatures and extreme heat deaths tick inexorably upwards together.
Over 1,300 excess deaths have already been attributed to the heat, primarily among the elderly and the very young. Based on previous heatwaves in 2022 and 2024, the final toll will be in the high tens of thousands, if not higher.
These mass casualty events are the result of capitalism-driven climate change and criminal government neglect. Decades after warnings were made of global heating, and nominal targets set, carbon emissions continue, and nothing has been done to prepare society for the consequences.
According to the World Weather Attribution consortium of scientists, the June temperatures seen in the last week would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago. Daytime temperature peaks would have been 10 times less likely even in 2003, and night time peaks 100 times less likely. Globally, since the 1980s, the rate of severe heat events has increased sevenfold.
Social infrastructure has been left totally unprepared. Power generation systems, including nuclear facilities, have been taken offline across the continent and transport has ground to a halt, with a section of the German motorway literally bursting apart at the seams. Houses and hospitals are overheating in all the major cities; thousands of schools have closed or shortened their hours …
Continue reading at the WSWS site …
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- More precisely, my introduction to the podcast in which that class analysis features is already written!
- Well almost everything … Corporate media collude in capitalism’s trashing of this earth, and reckless disregard for its ecosystems. Nor are those media which from time to time sound the alarm on environmental folly exempt. Not when their business models debar them from sustained attacks on the root drivers in a system which demands that private profit and accumulation trump every other consideration. Let that sink in. Every. Other. Consideration. See this Media Lens piece of June 4 on how well we are served by those media on this as on so many other vital matters.
I am Cassandra, so when I read your piece Phil and Caitlin’s about hope I simply shrugged. I lost all hope aout 10 years ago when I saw first hand what was happening to the insects and the global devastation of the 6th Mass Extnction that was well underway. I and others realised not only was action going to be too little too late, it was already past the point of no return. Most people who know what’s going on will say this privately but publicly it is still considered imperative to talk of hope. Everywhere people say we must have hope. But if we open our eyes and see the reality, that the forces of evil are spreading the darkness with increasing power, politically, economically, environmentally, spiritually and culturally, we will have our hearts broken and feel despair. But.. False hope is now a form of denial. if we go through the heartbreak and despair we reach a different kind of hope. One that can see death has a profound meaning and is the mystery through which life continuously renews itself. Life without death would have no meaning. And that in the heart of the very forces that cause destruction and evil is something teh universe needs to fulfill itself. Our very alientation for life, which is at the root of our destruction of life, is also what gives birth to our conscious awareness of life. Through us the universe is becoming conscious. This is the profound numinous mystery at theheart of it all, that this consciousness is the very energy that was the source of it all in the first place. But it is only when we give up false hope and see the dreadful reality that we can then embrace the deeper mystery and meaning of it all. Like I said, I am Cassandra – I did warn you!
Caitlin is more Cassandra than Pollyanna herself, Anne, but another friend – American writer Ed Curtin – emailed this in response to yesterday’s post:
I too was flummoxed but am unwilling to deem insane so passionate and effective a truth warrior on the basis of two off-the-wall paragraphs. In any case, and going back to your own comment, I agree with her on not giving the ecocidal bastards running the show the satisfaction of abandoning hope. On this as on so many other fronts the conviction that resistance is futile is music to their ears.
Yes to all you say but in the spirit of a true dharma debate, I disagree that giving up old hope is giving into the ecocidal life-hating ruthless greedy evil warmongers seeking profit above life. My way has involved giving up my old hope that a sweeping revolutionary new way of beig would bring peace, love and light to the world. I was naive. And you have been part of what has helped my fourth eye open – the eye that can see into darkness. (As always thank you for this!) After going through the despair etc. I began a different kind of guerrilla war on the anti-life forces in evidence now in all directions. But to begin this I had to give up my old hope and find a different kind of hope. So maybe we’re saying the same things after all! I hope your strength is returning and soon you’ll be back in yoru van in some of the beauties of the wild! With love Anne (As that is part of my guerrilla war tactics, to support and love those who are still on the front line like you and Caitlin and others.)
Love you too, sister xx
Well, on the question of ‘hope’ there is some gloomy information here: https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/2025-a-civilizational-tipping-point
But in the longer term, there is better news (of a sort). A civilisational collapse might be the impetus for learning from the past and building a better society. And even if that doesn’t happen, it would take forces far beyond human power to end all life on Earth. We’ve already gone through four or five mass extinction events, and it will be a few billion years yet before the sun expands catastrophically. Not much consolation for the present incumbents though.
On the other hand, there is quite a lot of good evidence for both re-incarnation and also the existence of a deeper reality behind this one. I’ve experienced three or four pretty strange things in this connection in my life, so although I claim nothing definite, there “may” be interesting alternatives around.
One of the things I most fear – the collapse of a rule of law we do so take for granted in the West – could arise in many ways, including the wake of nuclear war or catastrophic global warming. Lenin famously said every society is three meals away from revolution but he had the advantage of a disciplined vanguard party with a concrete slogan – bread, land and peace – ready to take over amid the chaos of an empire on its deathbed, bled out by war, and with court and tsarina under the hypnotic sway of mad bad Rasputin.
Now I fear the likeliest beneficiaries of societal breakdown will be the far Right and/or roving bands of criminals.
I agree that human agency lacks the ability to destroy all life on earth. But I think not only of the billions whose wretched existence in the global south did nothing to warrant any of this, but of the countless innocent species set to be taken out with us.
Yes, a disciplined vanguard party is what is lacking just now in the west, and I’m not sure if such a thing is even possible anymore, given the atomised character of current society, including especially on the left. (Even more dispiriting is the capability of my phone to anticipate what I am going to say).
On your not being sure such a thing is possible, I’ve made this point myself. Here’s a passage recycled many times in reference to a self avowedly vanguard Left:
Turning off predictive text is easy. I don’t because while it often delivers embarrassing output, the convenience outweighs that. I just have to remind myself to pay attention as I go, and again prior to hitting send!