Climate of Class Rule

Climate of Class Rule: Common(s)er Revolt or Common Ruin

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Counterpunch, 9/7/2018

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

– Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848

 “A Level of Criminality Almost Hard to Describe”

The great orange dumpster fire Donald J. Trump’s part in the reigning United States media-politics horror show is to distract the populace from the lethal pillaging of the commons behind the scenes. The leading left thinker Noam Chomsky put it very well in an interview last March:

“Trump’s role is to ensure that the media and that public attention are always concentrated on him. So every time you turn on a television set, it’s Trump; open the front page of the newspaper: Trump…. So every day there’s one insane thing after another and then, you know, he makes some crazy lie….and the media looks at it and says “No, [not true]’…But meanwhile he’s onto something else and then you go to that…”

“And while this show is going on in public, in the background the wrecking crew is working…systematically dismantling every aspect of government that works for the benefit of the population. …In the case of global warming, it’s almost indescribable. Not only has the U.S. pulled out – uniquely alone in the world – from the international efforts to do at least something about it. But, beyond that…the Trump Administration is going out of its way to increase the threat. Listen to his State of the Union Address, the only phrase about global climate was to talk about ‘our beautiful clean coal,’ the worst polluter there is…The new budget that’s coming out …sharply cuts research and support for any kind of renewable energy: more subsidies and support for the most polluting, destructive things.”

“And, it’s not just Trump, it’s the entire Republican leadership. So, if you look at the 2016 election, at the primaries, every single candidate, not a single exception, either denied that global warming is taking place or said ‘Maybe it is but we shouldn’t do anything about it,’ which I think is worse. They were called the moderates, like [John] Kasich. If you look at Trump himself, or say Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, they know perfectly well that humans are causing global warming. In fact, Trump has golf courses all over; he hasn’t built a wall in Mexico yet but he’s building walls around his golf courses to make sure that the sea level doesn’t destroy them.”

“Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil – since the 1970s scientists at ExxonMobil have been – we now know, they been made public, forced to be made public – they’ve been producing severe warnings to the leadership about the effect of the use of petroleum on destroying the environment. So they all know about it but they’re not doing anything about it, which is a level of criminality that is almost hard to find words to describe. I mean, here are, you know, educated well-off rich people, upper elite, who know that what they’re doing is destroying the prospects for human – organized human life – and do it anyway because they make more profits tomorrow. Can you think of an analog for that in human history? I really can’t” (emphasis added).

“Not a Wake-up Call Anymore”

Jump a half-year ahead to the late summer and early fall of 2018. Fully  17 of the 18 warmest years since modern record-keeping began have occurred since 2001. Numerous record-setting heat and related deadly weather (wildfires, droughts, rains, flood, mudslides etc.) events have occurred, as predicted in the (supposedly controversial) climate models produced by scientists  who have been trying to warn the world for many years about the eco-cidal consequences of burning fossil fuels on a mass scale. One headline I recall this summer announced that 2018 was the year in which global warming went from being a future “threat” to a lived “menace.”  As the New York Times’ climate correspondent Somini Sengupta wrote last August:

“This summer of fire and swelter looks a lot like the future that scientists have been warning about in the era of climate change… In California, firefighters are racing to control what has become the largest fire in state history. Harvests of staple grains like wheat and corn are expected to dip this year, in some cases sharply, in countries as different as Sweden and El Salvador. In Europe, nuclear power plants have had to shut down because the river water that cools the reactors was too warm. Heat waves on four continents have brought electricity grids crashing…And dozens of heat-related deaths in Japan this summer offered a foretaste of what researchers warn could be big increases in mortality from extreme heat.”

“ ‘It’s not a wake-up call anymore,’ Cynthia Rosenzweig, who runs the climate impacts group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said of global warming and its human toll. ‘It’s now absolutely happening to millions of people around the world.’”

“For many scientists, this is the year they started living climate change rather than just studying it.  ‘What we’re seeing today is making me, frankly, calibrate not only what my children will be living but what I will be living, what I am currently living,’ said Kim Cobb, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at the Georgia Institute of Technology…”

As I started writing this essay, Tropical Storm Gordon was gaining strength in the overheated Gulf of Mexico, where the temperature was 87 degrees Fahrenheit – too warm for a swimming pool.

Extreme weather and its collateral damage are only tips of the melting iceberg, semi-metaphorically speaking. The real climatological shit hits the eco-exterminist fan when we can’t grow enough food, find enough water, and keep ourselves cool enough to survive – and when global warming combines with collapsing social and technical infrastructure to bring pandemics that  wipe out much of an increasingly thirsty, under-nourished, and over-heated human race . . ."

https://www.paulstreet.org/climate-of-class-rule-commonser-revolt-or-common-ruin/