The Left and the Cliff
[Originally posted here]
The Great Plains of North America are a very dry place. Horses and riders leaving one source of water must make straight for the next, and make good time, or risk dying of thirst.
During the decades of mounted warfare on the plains between different tribes and against encroaching anglos this harsh environment served as its own weapon. The fearsome Comanches had many ways of killing their enemies, but the simplest was to just take their horses in the night. The plains would do the rest.
Our current political moment is like being lost somewhere on those huge harsh dry plains, and unsure whether water is even within reach—but absolutely sure it won’t be for much longer. We must move or die.
Most leftists1 and many others agree that yes, we are speeding toward a cliff, in regard to both fascism and climate catastrophe. But few act as if that’s really the case. I see deep parallels with religious believers who profess stunning reasons to live devoted and generous lives—but turn out just as shallow and selfish as the rest of us.
“Very few people believe in God,” he replied.
I didn’t see how he could deny the obvious. “Of course they do. Billions of people believe in God.” The old man leaned toward me, resting a blanketed elbow on the arm of his rocker.
“Four billion people say they believe in God, but few genuinely believe. If people believed in God they would live every minute of their lives in support of that belief. Rich people would give their wealth to the needy. Everyone would be frantic to determine which religion was the true one. No one could be comfortable in the thought that they might have picked the wrong religion and blundered into eternal damnation, or bad reincarnation, or some other unthinkable consequence. People would dedicate their lives to converting others to their religions. A belief in God would demand one hundred percent obsessive devotion, influencing every waking moment of this brief life on earth. But your four billion so-called believers do not live their lives in that fashion, except for a few. The majority believe in the usefulness of their beliefs—an earthly and practical utility—but they do not believe in the underlying reality.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “If you asked them, they’d say they believe.”
“They say that they believe because pretending to believe is necessary to get the benefits of religion. They tell other people that they believe and they do believer-like things, like praying and reading holy books. But they don’t do the things that a true believer would do, the things a true believer would have to do. If you believe a truck is coming toward you, you will jump out of the way. That is belief in the reality of the truck. If you tell people you fear the truck but do nothing to get out of the way that is not belief in the truck.”2
Turning from God back to our material world, we lefties say a truck is coming. And we are right. But we’re doing almost nothing to get out of the way.
Our situation has a stark logic we need to grasp. We have maybe 10 years to pull back from fully blighting our planet and our future. Given the way our capitalist system runs on greed and growth and oil this can happen only with fundamental change to our economies and societies. But given the recalcitrance of people in power, now as always, fundamental change can come only through long serious struggle and all the courage and sacrifice it requires.
At present we are not doing anything like this, aren’t ready to do it, and aren’t moving toward readiness. We cannot launch the revolution tomorrow. But we desperately need to start working toward it, today. It’s true that the most aggressive immediate efforts would be sure to fail. But just as sure to fail and much less heroic are cautious and prudent approaches that might work in 20 or 30 or 50 years—long after we’ve run out of time. However foolish it is to charge out of the trench right now and get mowed down it is simply insane to instead make plans that might succeed in 20 years, when the last climate tipping points3 will pass within 10 and fascists could be rounding us up within 5. What’s needed is neither immediate hopeless action nor eventual perfect plans but immediate serious work toward the near-term radical struggle that is our only hope, and toward the skills and virtues and networks and numbers such struggle would require.
Many leftists are paralyzed by the very real possibility that we cannot win. I don’t deny this possibility.4 But I’ve come to see it in a way that might help us avoid that paralysis and get and stay in the fight.
Maybe we will lose. Maybe we have already lost. But I see no way to be certain of that. So let’s consider the possibility, however small you think it is, that there is some path still open to us that at the least avoids the very worst climate destruction or the very worst fascist carnage.5 It could be a long shot. It would be a long struggle. And for a long long time it might look indistinguishable from the many paths to failure.
That possible future success would involve actions we are not yet taking, ideas we do not yet have, strengths and skills and virtues we do not yet possess. It would involve individuals and groups and organizations learning and changing and growing in manifold ways over months and years. It would involve crucial successes that come only on the back of long repeated failure. It would involve the crumbling of structures that seemed eternal right up to the moment they collapsed. It would involve leaders and thinkers and saints and martyrs, incredible people doing incredible things—most of whom only became what they were and became capable of what they did through long years of mistakes and mediocrity.
This hypothetical future should shape how we view the present. Nothing we do in the present will itself fend off fascism or save the biosphere. Just as someone trying to lose 50 lbs or build a house or earn a PhD can do nothing in the present to achieve that. The only path forward is to do in the present what seems likely to contribute to that possible future success. The goal simply cannot be reached now. But if that’s taken as a reason for despair or inaction then the goal can never be reached at all. The best chances of success come from devoting yourself to the concrete present actions that appear most likely to contribute to eventual success. Immediate action is essential. Endless analysis and understandable pessimism can delay action indefinitely and make failure certain.
Failure is also certain if we expect a smooth and direct journey to the goal. The task is to act now on the best information you can gather and the best plan you can make—while fully expecting to get more and better information and change the plan again and again. Expect to waste substantial effort and fail many times before eventually reaching the goal. Or better yet see this dynamic from the start, so that even those frustrations and failures can be embraced as integral parts of the struggle. Expect to strive and suffer and persevere and learn and grow and keep failing forward. If you expect a waltz it will be miserable. But if you expect a war you can soldier on. And you might even find comrades and courage and defiant joy along the way.
This means immediately throwing yourself into working and training and connecting, and expecting great messiness and frustration with no great results, while seeing that as a feature not a bug, as learning to crawl before you walk before you run, as slowly gaining strength and maturity and capacity as individuals and collectives.
The process will be slow—but it cannot be too slow. Growth takes time, and we don’t have much time—and we must stay very clear on both these points. Expect and accept a progressive process. But progress as fast as you can!
Learn to cook, learn to garden, learn to hunt and shoot and lift and fight,6 get better at resolving conflicts and cooperating on projects and forgiving assholes and persuading normies,7 connect with leftists and non-leftists and people with skills and people with needs, build relationships and networks where you live and wherever else you can, get better at learning and teaching and communicating and listening, become a more reliable and generous friend and a more fearsome enemy.
Mother Georgian in Tbilisi. She’s got a bowl of wine for her friends and a sword for her enemies. Here’s to sharper swords and bigger bowls.
Move beyond merely reacting to present harms of capitalism and toward becoming and building what could confront and replace capitalism.8 Stop expecting purity or perfection from individuals or groups, and severing yourself from all those that fall short. Instead see a broad spectrum of partial and potential comrades and allies. Learn to work across differences and disagreements and deep disappointments. Don’t expect others to take exactly your view for exactly your reasons. Instead look for where our differing views support the same actions, or overlapping actions, or complementary actions. Whatever you see as the perfect beliefs and motives and strategies and actions stay circumspect and expect neither agreement on that vision nor equal progress toward it. We all need to grow, and all growth, all partial progress toward perfection, should be celebrated for what it gains and what it gives rather than attacked or resented or rejected for what it still lacks. If you want to follow what you see as the perfect path, in a group of dear friends with pure hearts and perfect ideology, you will contribute nothing to our actual urgent messy struggle. Instead look to work and fight alongside shitty people you disagree with on nearly everything. Because that’s all we’ve got. Wake up from any dreams of making all leftists or all Americans into exactly what you think they should be and instead work to see clearly and treat charitably our real diversity and disagreement, to cooperate in serious work now, and to form a united front against fascism and extinction ASAP.9 Stare down and prepare for the very worst outcomes. And fight ferociously alongside whoever else will fight to avoid them.
I’m not sure we can do it. But I’m sure we should try.
Notes
1) I’ll be speaking of the left not as many conservatives do, seeing anyone to their left as the left, and so making an incoherent jumble of a huge range of diversity and disagreement, and often using their negative perceptions of any to slander and dismiss all. Instead I mean socialists and communists and anarchists and antifascists and anticapitalists—still an incredibly diverse range of views, but ones bearing at least some resemblance in thinking our capitalist system can and must be fundamentally changed.
2) From God’s Debris by Scott Adams who sucks.
3) Tipping points and feedback loops are some of the simpler and scarier parts of climate science. A positive feedback loop is when some change has effects that bring about more of that initial change. Starting to spin leads to spinning faster leads to spinning even faster. A little panic sparks more panic sparks general panic through the whole herd or whole city. Two frightening feedback loops in our planet’s climate system are ice sheets and permafrost. Bright white ice and snow reflect most of the sun’s energy back out into space, while the deep blue sea soaks up most of that energy. So as we’ve warmed the planet and shrunk the ice caps we’ve changed the surface of the planet to absorb more energy, which makes it warmer still. That additional warmth causes additional melting, which makes earth’s surface more absorbent still, which makes earth warmer still.
It has now gotten warm enough that land in Russia and Canada and elsewhere that’s been frozen year round for thousands of years is thawing—a striking and worrisome change in itself no? But this striking change will cause more change, because locked in that permafrost is an enormous amount of methane, a greenhouse gas like carbon, but with 28 times the oomph. So when we warm the planet enough to melt permafrost we send methane into the atmosphere that warms the planet more. This melts more permafrost. Which releases more methane. Which warms the planet more. Which melts still more permafrost. Which releases still more methane.
When we’d only warmed the planet a bit we could have simply stopped warming it. But now this thing has a life of its own. Even if we take our foot off the accelerator—as we show no serious signs of doing—the forces already in motion will carry us forward a long way. And most likely in the recent past or the near future are some tipping points beyond which there’s no going back. For example coral reefs are essential foundations of huge marine ecosystems. But probably the choices we’ve already made have guaranteed that no matter what we change now the oceans will become warm enough and acidic enough to kill all coral. That strange and beautiful form of life and the wondrous ecosystems built on it are dead men walking.
Those ice sheets we talked about present another tipping point. Their melting and shrinking is not a simple linear thing. There are structural forces in play. As ice sheets shrink and get lighter and perforate with rivers of meltwater and crack under new stresses there are points where huge chunks break off and fall into the sea. This can happen with increasingly large chunks. And it can happen with the whole remaining ice sheet. If the day comes when for example Greenland’s entire remaining ice sheet gives up the ghost and slides into the sea that will not be good news.
Other spectacular collapses could happen in the existing currents in our oceans and atmosphere that heavily influence current climates of particular places, e.g. making winters across most of Europe much milder than winters at the same latitudes in Alaska or Canada or Siberia. The particular current responsible for that is the Atlantic Gulf Stream—which is already weakening and moving toward collapse.
4) The “I believe that we will win” chant is not my favorite. We need catchy protest chants about fighting without hope, or about Sisyphus being the happy man.
5) The threats of climate and fascism are intimately related. Fascism, like lesser forms of right-wing authoritarianism, would smooth the path for capital to finish gutting the planet, while the harms and disruptions of climate change scare and deprive and destabilize us in ways that steer many toward the false certainties and brutal protections of fascism. We saw this vividly as climate change destroyed crops, which raised grain prices, which contributed to misery and desperation and rebellion across the Middle East, which was suppressed with extreme brutality in Syria and elsewhere, which sent desperate refugees streaming toward Europe, which fed and fueled the far right across the continent.
Michael Robbins put it well: “I desperately want us to get our shit together. We could build a free society that doesn’t view the planet as a profit engine. I just really doubt that we will. Climate disaster, economic collapse, war, resurgent fascism and nationalism, assaults on basic political freedoms, mass violence: all these mutually reinforcing in a sinister feedback loop, the structural stresses of capital’s death throes accelerating ecological catastrophe and exacerbating reactionary forces, which in turn further stress the structure. The collapse won’t be a single event, but a slide into what the world-systems analyst Giovanni Arrighi calls ‘systemic chaos.’ Late-capitalist society is a coyote suspended above an abyss, believing he still stands on solid ground. We are in the interval before he notices he’s supported by thin air and plummets to the canyon floor.”
If both threats play out unchecked that points toward an awful future where the rich countries that caused climate change abandon any pretense of humanism or justice, raise the drawbridge, further fortify the borders, cling to any comforts they can, and abandon most of humanity to the very worst.
6) I write these sentences in the imperative with no illusions of having the right or the power to make you think or do anything. My intention, here as elsewhere, is not to just jam my views into your head, but to commend them to you based on things already in your head. My hope is to appeal to your present beliefs, exactly as they are, and explore ways they may actually turn out to point you toward the beliefs or actions that I’m describing. I am not pushing you to adopt my beliefs for my reasons, or without reasons, but rather for your reasons—as they stand right now, in the simpler cases, or in other cases as they could or should develop by their own logic or in light of other beliefs of yours. I think you might have your own good reasons to go in the directions I’m pointing.
7) Note that persuading and arguing are very different things. When you first stumble on a disagreement you face a fork in the road. You can immediately argue in the ways that come naturally, or you can start slowly and artfully working to persuade over time—but you cannot do both. Persuasion is a rare and beautiful thing that’s often not possible no matter what you do. But whatever prospects for persuasion do exist will be quickly extinguished if you attack with arguments. Because our beliefs are bound up with each other, and with our sense of who we are. We hold onto them like objects we own, we defend them like we defend ourselves. When someone does reject some of their beliefs typically this follows an extended process of reflection and of slowly unwinding logical and psychological ties to their other beliefs, their identity, and their community. What someone else can do to assist is to slowly, calmly, respectfully, charitably challenge those beliefs over time, while working hard to show that in attacking the beliefs you’re not attacking the person, and that by saying in one spot you’re right and they’re wrong you are not saying you’re generally smarter or purer or better. It takes time and effort and skill. When we just react in the moment and argue naturally we are pushing hard against beliefs that are still strongly connected to all their other beliefs and their sense of self, and we very easily come off as both attacking the person and claiming we’re better. So immediate natural arguing usually brings immediate natural arguing back, defending, counterattacking. It almost never changes their mind on the spot and usually weakens or kills prospects of changing their mind later.
8) Replace how, and replace with what? The how is prolonged serious struggle. Polite protest will not do it. Voting and calling and donating will not do it. Writing and arguing and shaming and scolding will not do it. Mutual aid and prefigurative spaces will not do it. Even the most radical or militant efforts may not do it either—but only they have any chance. Whatever chances we still have for winning fundamental change and avoiding the worst, they lie in that general direction. Something like increasingly aggressive and organized direct action, building toward serious economic disruption and confrontation, and serious readiness for community defense and even armed struggle. Any chances we have lie in that direction.
The floor for what that might mean is something like the Chilean model of months of widespread disruptive protest and confrontation. Other prospects look more like earlier events in Russia or China or Vietnam.
As for what comes after, I personally have no great faith in any particular alternative to capitalism. I’m not confident in the happy endings or paths thereto offered by various confirmed anarchists and communists, or of the goodness and replicability of precapitalist or prestate or prehistoric arrangements. But climate realities force my hand. I don’t know what might come next or what its best and worst qualities will be. But I know that our current system is blindly selling off the whole future of humanity and the whole beautiful biosphere only for the sake of making a few obscene fortunes even more obscene. So whatever alternatives we may or may not have we cannot continue as we are.
9) Human extinction could come through a virus released from melting permafrost, or a nuclear war set up by climate-caused privation and instability, but I grant that if we’re speaking only of the floods and fires and famines that climate change causes directly then yes, it seems more likely to decimate and immiserate us than to extinguish us completely. But all things considered, including the chance it does indirectly wipe our species out and the certainty it’s wiping out countless others, I think the phrasing above is fair. I feel similarly about talk of wrecking or killing the planet. It’s true that nothing we can do will stop our planet from being a planet, and nothing but all-out nuclear war has a chance of ending all biological life. So in some very minimalist sense the planet will continue and life will continue no matter what we do. But usually when someone presses this point they’re either deeply confused or deeply unserious. Because the continuance of rocks and roaches is not what we care about. We care about life roughly as we know it. The planet in roughly its present form. Filled with beautiful and useful and complex plants and animals and environments, with temperatures and weather patterns in ranges that allow them.
A much hotter world would not make life impossible here. But it would make life hard or impossible for all the creatures that evolved in and for different circumstances—including us. The response that earth has seen mass extinctions before is true but not comforting. Yes the earth has been through catastrophes as radical as any we can cause, and yes a wrecked and depopulated earth would slowly fill with new creatures shaped by and for its new realities. But I don’t think this makes it any less evil or tragic or senseless to destroy what’s here now. We are carelessly crushing wonders that took millenia to develop. We are stripping and selling the paradise we evolved in, and not from any grand need or principle, just profound greed and stupidity. We are snuffing out thousands of other species, and making the future of our own species immeasurably uglier and harder, for just a few more years of industrial luxuries and corporate profits. In order to cling to these habits we are cursing and crushing our whole future and whole planet. I don’t think this can be justified by the fact that new things will eventually evolve. That’s like noting that what is today a lawn or parking lot could in a few centuries become like an old growth forest—and using that to justify logging the whole Amazon and chopping down every redwood. Or noting that new forms of sea life will evolve over coming eons to justify turning our remaining whales into steaks and oil.
Many of us now see a dying planet everywhere we look. For folks at the opposite end of the spectrum who claim that everything is fine I would like to push in three directions. The first is to take a harder and humbler look at the facts, and the tangible and measurable and visible damage we’ve already done.
Read up on the once-every-1000-year disasters that come in greater numbers every year, and events like the Portland heat dome that fall outside even our most pessimistic models. Read up on unusual and extreme recent flooding from Pakistan to NYC to Zhengzhou to Australia to Germany and wildfires from Russia to California to Oregon to Portugal to Greece.
While it’s impossible to say with certainty that any particular event came fully from climate change it’s also impossible to say with seriousness or sincerity that these events together show anything but the arrival of climate catastrophe, which will grow steadily worse in coming decades due to choices we’ve already made, leaving us only the choice of whether in the next decade we plow past remaining tipping points and ensure the catastrophe becomes as bad as possible.
Think of the different ways we so easily and so often fool ourselves. Apart from the particular topic of climate we are in general quite skilled at ignoring bad news and sad realities. We shrink from painful ideas just like from physical pain. Sometimes that’s useful but often it proves devastating in the end. Surely you’ve seen this play out in connection with health, employment, addiction, relationships. Look for it with climate change too.
Last I want to question how much stock we should even put in any evaluation of present harms in the first place. How sensible is it to wait to act until we clearly see big bad things happening? It may not be sensible or even sane. Because the climate systems of our planet are huge and complex and slow-moving. Climate corners like an aircraft carrier not like a Prius. So there can be very big lags between our actions and inputs, their impacts on climate systems, and the particular tangible local effects of those overarching systems.
One useful analogy is rabies. Not that we as a species are behaving as if we were rabid, though that’s certainly true. I mean the timeline of how things develop, and the lag between a worsening underlying condition and the appearance of clear signs of that condition. You likely know how folks who get bitten by wild animals or stray dogs have to hustle to get rabies shots. But do you know why? It’s because of how rabies plays out in the human body. Initially it can be addressed with those shots. But there is a point at which they no longer work and the person is doomed to worsen and die. And dear reader, that point passes before the first symptoms arise. So someone infected with rabies could initially be treated. And for a while they’ll have no symptoms at all. Then come the first minor symptoms of fever or nausea, at which point the person wants help—but help is no longer possible. By the time you feel the first symptoms of rabies you have already missed your chance and are already sentenced to death.
These footnotes have said a fair amount to those who disagree with me on the threat of climate change, but not much to those who disagree on the threat of fascism. I might should write more on that soon. Meanwhile I steer you toward the essay Democracies Die, the book How Democracies Die, and the book The Jakarta Method.