Link: On the Rule of Capital, Climate Crisis & the Rise of Fascism in the Pig Empire
On the Rule of Capital, Climate Crisis & the Rise of Fascism in the Pig Empire
At the end of August I wrote a very long essay that touched on my struggles to warn readers about what I have perceived as an ongoing fascist coup in the larger international Pig Empire for several years now; particularly when those people are predisposed institutionally, culturally and even economically to insisting that fascism is effectively impossible in America. In this discussion, I’d like to unpack that experience a little further and talk about a very specific type of push-back I frequently encounter from well-meaning, often fairly well-educated observers who at least lean towards left wing political ideology. Indeed, there is a disturbingly repetitive conversation I keep going through with (some) other leftists that looks a little something like this:
“Trump is a fascist, has installed a fascist administration and is employing fascist politics to dismantle what’s left of American democracy, grant himself absolute power and push America towards a permanent white nationalist ethnostate.”
“How can you say that when America, a nation effectively founded on white supremacy, has always been fascist and capitalism itself is fascist?”
“While it’s certainly true that America has always employed fascist ideology, and indeed the Nazis themselves copied white supremacist American policies on their way to conducting the Holocaust, the United States has always insisted on maintaining the basic trappings of an (admittedly rigged) democracy; as those trappings are eroded or destroyed, America increasingly runs the risk of falling into open, or overt fascism – which typically ends in mass graves and even genocide.”
“You’re certainly right that things are getting much worse, but I still don’t believe this is fascism. After all, the United States is a rigged oligarchy that you admit employs fascist ideology to further the goals of capitalists. If that illusion has worked for the American ruling classes for hundreds of years, even decades after the fall of the 3rd Reich, why would they risk the golden goose by changing it to open (and presumably unpopular) fascist rule now?”
This is of course a perfectly reasonable question that cuts right to the heart of the fascist ideology underpinning the entire Pig Empire colonialist, extractivist and most importantly, capitalist project. Furthermore the twin questions implied here, essentially “why fascism” and “why now,” are both buttressed by the obvious fact that significant portions of the ruling establishment in America and the larger Pig Empire, appear to be actively opposed to abandoning these trappings of liberal democracy in favor of overt fascist rule. If you’re not prepared to put much more thought into the equation, it can be very easy then to just write off the idea that what we’re seeing in the so-called “West” is fascism at all and simply call it a day.
This conclusion is however, objectively wrong and students of rudimentary political theory will probably recognize why pretty quickly. For starters all politics and political activities ultimately revolve around material conditions; although these conditions may influence and affect different actors across different classes in our society, in drastically different ways. Additionally the concepts of factionalization and individualized greed among the bourgeoisie are essentially old news or established knowledge for anyone with even a casual understanding of Marxist revolutionary theory. Taken together, these ideas end up coming out something like “changing material conditions in a society will change the behavior of political actors in that society, but not necessarily in unison or in precisely the same way.”
Returning to our modern world example, we’re forced to immediately address some harsh realities about our political systems in the Pig Empire. For starters, the political actors in our societies are primarily the wealthy ruling classes as often represented by the corporate entities they own. These folks buy the politicians that control public policy, they own the media organizations that shape public discourse and they are the architects of the financialized, hyper-capitalist markets than ensure a fundamentally unequal division of resources (in their favor) for essentially all mankind; they’re called the ruling class for a reason. This isn’t just vulgar Marxism however because it is simply not enough to say “money is power” in the Pig Empire; wealth in a capitalist “liberal democracy” means having the money to buy power to protect and increase your wealth, which in turn increases your power and influence. In other words, under capitalism (even in a democracy) wealth and power are parts of what amounts to a political perpetual motion machine that works to advance the rich, typically at the expense of the poor or otherwise marginalized. Neither is it valid to call this a “conspiracy theory” because while there are certainly many individual political actors with their own agendas among the so-called “power elite,” the overwhelming class solidarity among the ruling establishment in the Pig Empire and their unflinching commitment to a capitalist economic order that ensures their continued dominance are at best, poorly guarded secrets – accessible to nearly anyone with a library card or an internet connection.
Now to be clear, even in a rigged oligarchy that merely retains the trappings of liberal democracy, these people (and corporations) don’t have all of the power to decide our collective futures, but they do have such an overwhelming degree of influence that ultimately the result is the same – what the rich people want, our societies usually deliver; even if it requires using antidemocratic tactics or deceiving the very people our leaders swear they serve, to accomplish such. It is however still possible for the will of the general public to override the desires of the ruling class to some degree in a liberal democratic system; although in light of how rigged the electoral process is in most of our societies, it may take an overwhelming majority of the labor class, acting in near-perfect political solidarity to do so. Given that the rich control all the microphones, engage in open deception for the purpose of exerting influence and are prepared to use the power of the state to attack labor class organization on the regular, this degree of solidarity is unsurprisingly rarely achieved except in situations that represent a grave collective danger to the survival of said labor class – keep this in mind, it’s going to come up again.
It is additionally important for our discussion to actively note that the ruling classes in our capitalist societies also hold a number of systemic advantages due to their outsized wealth, influence and power within those societies. This of course includes advantages of opportunity, technological advantages in an increasingly interconnected global environment and of particular interest to us, an advantage in terms of raw access to information and knowledge. The most obvious manifestation of this is probably the rampant insider-trading and quid-pro quo relationships that go on largely undetected on Wall Street and in the Pig Empire’s halls of power, but the rich also have increased access to market information, foreign policy information and even vitally important scientific information, well before the public at large.
When you remember that this same class of people, if not precisely the same individuals, also have control over the for-profit Pig Empire media, it stands to reason that the ruling class can exercise some degree of censorship over particularly incendiary or otherwise dangerous (to them) knowledge. This is of course as much about focus, framing and repetition in the discourse as it is actively keeping secrets, but by and large the effect is somewhat similar to active, overt censorship and there have been numerous books published that demonstrate this phenomenon – most notably, Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman.
So now that we’ve established a working, back of the napkin model for establishment power let’s talk about some additional basic facts about humanity’s present (global) political situation that are more or less common knowledge, but are rarely examined inside the context of an actual framework of power as it functions in a capitalist, “liberal democracy.” Factually there are almost eight billion people on this planet and right now the vast majority of them are speeding towards a mass extinction event caused by fossil-fuel driven, climate catastrophe. Factually we’re running out of time to prevent this, the only reliable way to do so requires us to drastically slash our carbon emissions immediately and there is literally no evidence our current (extractivist) capitalist order can exist without burning cheap fossil fuels.
Drawing the picture further into focus is the knowledge that scientists have been openly studying the relationship between carbon emissions and what we now call climate crisis, for a very long time. One can perhaps be forgiven for being unaware of studies published by early twentieth century conversationalists, but these ideas (and supporting evidence) had worked themselves well into the public sphere by the 60’s. This fact is easily demonstrated by the reality that this time period also saw the origin of the larger environmentalist movement (particularly in America) and the beginnings of the fossil fuel companies’ now recorded quest to hide the real danger carbon emissions presented to our planet.
Every U.S. President since Kennedy has received classified briefings on climate catastrophe, but we’re also talking about just under sixty years worth of increasingly accurate and gloomy scientific papers and predictions that would have been common knowledge to business leaders, media organizations and other politicians working on behalf of the ruling classes all across the Pig Empire. I could of course write an entire essay about the exact timeline of what science knew, when the ruling classes would have been informed and at what point the process of obfuscating it turned into aiding and abetting an upcoming genocide, but for the purposes of simplicity let’s just say that by the late 1980’s, or early 1990’s at the latest, it would have been impossible for the ruling establishment not to understand that climate catastrophe is real and intrinsically incompatible with either capitalism, or a planet that supports billions of humans being sustainable.
In other words, the ruling classes in America (and beyond) have known for well over forty years, that billions of innocent people are going to die on a boiling planet unless our capitalist societies stopped burning fossil fuel, which in turn could not be done without rendering the most powerful corporate actors on the planet impotent and unprofitable. Over that same time period, the ruling establishment as a whole has responded to this knowledge by lying about the severity of the problem, obfuscating the danger of fossil fuels, working tirelessly to render human labor obsolete for the purposes of wealth acquisition, refusing to cover climate catastrophe in corporate media until very recently, building doomsday bunkers, stockpiling weapons and survival resources, deregulating both the economy and environmental exploitation, and dismantling democratic systems across the entire Pig Empire.
I don’t think you need to be some kind of brain genius to realize that this behavior has nothing to do with solving the climate crisis and looks a lot more like looting the collective piggy bank before the apocalypse kicks in. The wealthy oligarchs that control much of our society obviously know full damn well that capitalism is not compatible with a planet that supports billions of happy, healthy humans and they have chosen profit over people, even if it means enabling a genocide. One might of course be tempted to doubt this conclusion, despite all available evidence because as many public relations campaigns conducted by wealthy mass murderers have reminded us, the billionaires have to live on this planet too, but that largely represents a childish understanding of precisely what climate crisis is going to look like. It is highly unlikely even the worst geo-hell predictions for our planet will result in the death of all humans on earth, and the immensely wealthy ruling classes have the power, influence and resources to ensure they can outrun the consequences of climate apocalypse for a very long time and in relative safety compared to the rest of us schleps.
Not even the rich however are high enough on their own bullsh*t to genuinely believe as many as seven billion some odd people are going to go gently into that good night to protect Jeff Bezo’s vast fortune and status as Earth’s reigning Lex Luthor whackjob. They know they are committing a genocide in slow motion, eventually this will be exposed, and the people doing it will be highly unpopular. The affluent intimately understand that their ill-gotten profits are the legacy of man-made climate crisis and that the victims of capitalism are going to demand a return of those profits to save the planet sooner or later. Most importantly however, deep in their hearts they know the one damn thing the world does not need is billionaires and a predatory capitalist class. When it dawns on “the people” that it’s capitalism or life on earth, the folks are going to pick life – and then they’re coming for the wealthy and their money.
This then answers our key question if we’re looking to understand what material factor has changed and why that change might result in a shift away from (rigged) liberal democracies and towards fascist rule; it’s literally the end of the world as we know it unless we ditch capitalism, and the capitalists have no intention of doing that. If your master plan is to frog-march the vast majority of humanity into an agonizing death to protect capitalism and the ruling classes at all costs, how dangerous is it for you to leave even a rigged “liberal democracy” intact? Would not the climate apocalypse represent precisely the kind of existential threat that might unite the ruled classes in solidarity and cause them to overthrow your social order as part of a demand that their governments act to save billions of lives?
In that scenario you cannot allow the people to have even a little power, a little room to organize against the capitalist death cult, or even the necessary public discourse to educate ourselves about what’s going on, because if we get organized, we’re going to end capitalism to save life on earth; it’s just what we’re going to do, it’s literally a biological imperative. There is an obvious reason capitalism is choosing to evolve away from even a rigged democracy and into a fascist form at this time; it’s because they’re scared – rich people know that we’ve run out of planet and it’s only a matter of time before people start asking “how to do we fix this and who is gonna pay?
That’s why it’s happening, and that’s why it’s happening now and that’s why it’s happening not just in the United States but in western allied countries like India, Brazil, and Turkey as well. The fascist movements we’re seeing rise and even seize political power all over the so-called West are the product of billionaire tech bros, international financial institutions and affluent organizers among the bourgeoisie; the billions being spent to fund this project is certainly not coming from the hyper-exploited proletariat in these countries. You ask me why now? Well there is your answer; climate catastrophe and the end of the world as we know it. That’s why there’s a fascist movement, backed by rich guys and exploiting ultra-nationalist sentiments designed to allow a genocide in slow motion to continue, in literally every fucking country in the Pig Empire.
We’re out of planet. Capitalism goes or we do; and since the ruling classes have clearly decided to allow billions to simply die, they’re actively working to alter our political systems into a form that will allow that to happen – fascism. They mean to kill us all and they know we aren’t going to vote for that, so our society as a whole will have to evolve into post-democratic authoritarianism, and likely as the process continues forward, full blown fascist totalitarianism.
Fascism is the next frontier in the ongoing class war and the very planet we live on has dictated a rapidly approaching day of the final reckoning. The rich intend to win that war once and for all, and liberal democracy (even such as it is) now represents a barrier to that goal – the only way to make people march willingly to their own extinction is to install a death cult, which at the end of the day is what fascism really is. That my friends, is why.
I never said the answer would make you happier.
– nina illingworth
