Looking back at centuries of warfare across Europe and, indeed, the World, the question is bigger, can there be a commonality between all people? Can we unite? We have experienced five or six thousand years of class society. Layers of social strata measured by individual access to the essential ingredients for sustaining life: food, warmth, shelter, safety, companionship (if not Love). Ever since the production of a surplus we have been separated by social class, private ownership and the associated power to control the masses.

The lottery of birth based upon DNA kinship and early years survival rates, geography, ecology and climate meld together to determine our life chances and longevity. Spreading over us all, like a quilt cover on a cold morning, has been the handed-down culture of our Clan. Recognising the matrix of birthrights and birth rites requires acknowledgment, from whichever ethnicity or creed we are part of, that we are born into societies where some people have more than others. More access to the means to survive and prosper, to learn and grow.

Protestant Christians may insist this state of affairs to be their God’s Will and that we should accept our place in the scheme of things, but Marxists would condemn all inequality and the injustices that flow from Birth privileges: exploitation, oppression, enslavement and incarceration. Oh, and for good measure, inherited wealth. All humans should be born equal. Importantly, social class relations are human-made and can therefore be dismantled by humanity.

In my naivety I have never fully understood how people put-up with the class relations that I’ve lived through, let alone the far worse injustices of peasant, agrarian or newly-industrialising societies. The common feature of all permutations of class society has been the absolute violence of the ruling elite in putting-down and administering pain against all and any who challenge their power and privilege. If ideas are generated that may challenge the status quo they will use Church and State to damn the dissidents. Ideas matter.

Civil war, not just inter-clan war, is the common experience of class society. Civil war usually goes hand-in-hand with nation-on-nation warfare. Crucially, war requires those waging it to conscript many others to their Cause. On the Eve of the 100th commemoration day of the Armistice that ended the First World War, the example of millions of people born with little or nothing, placed on two sides of an imaginary contour to stab, dismember, explode or maim their peers across the way, offers a singular imagery for exploring class society.

That war was waged between a few families (mostly interrelated) of the super-rich. There was a “band of warring brothers” impatient with each other’s counter claims on their birthright inheritance of land, wealth, power and peoples, ready to unleash material hell on tens of millions of fellow humans. In one sense it was down to who owns land where oil could be sucked up from below. In another, it was the pure avarice of people born and raised to believe they had a God given right to do whatever they wished with anything and anyone in the material world.

At the bottom end of the stratified society of each arbitrarily drawn “Nation State” of Europe and Russia, those born into slums, devoid of proper nutrition, sanitation, fresh water, warmth, opportunity or longevity, were told by their “betters” to go to war. And they did. Yes, the Rich sent their sons too, such was the power of the propaganda. But the rich, the very wealthy and even the tiny strata of aspiring middle classes had reason to go to war, at least in the hope of picking up the spoils of victory – Wealth and Power.

The poor and the working of the working classes had nothing to gain. Just more misery.

Contemporary political discourse insists that the working class gained materially from the plundering, pillaging, raping and genocide of Britain’s military against people’s of the East, the South, Asia and Arabia. But such analysis only compares like-with-like, not what could have been. Had there been no war, had instead the Great Unrest of 1912-14 – where workers joined together and rose like lions against the tyranny of Capitalist exploitation and poverty – won through, a very different world would have been created, based upon equality, peaceful and just trade and common wealth.

When standing in silence to commemorate the war dead, today’s Establishment will be sure to hide the fact, the Truth, that the First World War ended because of working class revolution. The rich and powerful families of Europe, self-proclaimed as divine Monarchy, did not complete their battles. Neither side won nor lost, hence the second world imperialist war was rekindled in 1939. Revolution, spreading from Russia to Germany and even Britain from 1917 saw army conscripts rebel against not only their captains and generals but the ideology of the war. Revolution stopped the War.

The scales fell from the eyes of those rotting in blooded mudbath trenches, threatened with either death for mutiny or death from battle, led by plum-tongued autocrats exuding class privilege and absolutist power. There was no justice, no benefit, no reason for the working man to shoot other working men of another Nation State, itself a contrived set of arbitrary boundaries determined by the power and avarice of it’s self-serving rulers.

In 1917, we, workers of the World, joined together and rose up against our common international enemy. Capital. That tiny class of avaricious humans set upon accumulating ever-increasing private wealth and power from the eternal immiserisation of the masses.

We fought the revolution for Peace, Bread and Land. Ideas of freedom, fraternity and sorority, emancipation, equality and self-determination. Class war spread and continued throughout the 1920’s. Fourteen imperialist armies were needed to invade Russia, assisted by Western Capitalist-funded White Army counter-revolutionary armies from within to break, smash, slaughter and defeat the Russian Revolution. The revolutionary ideas as well as social organisation across the world were ruthlessly crushed by the 1930’s.

Private-not-public health services ensured that millions would die from pestilence and influenza through the ‘20’s – more than ever died in the First World War. And speculative greed of the Rich on the scale of the 2008 banking crisis ensured the Crash of ‘29 and the destitution of the many as a prelude to renewed conscription in ‘39.

Despite the ghastly poverty of the 20’s and 30’s – lending a lie to the notion of western workers benefiting from the bosses plunder of resources from the Global South – workers were once again prepared to go to War for their Bosses. The lessons of the First World War appeared ignored or forgotten. Well, not quite.

The class-based Battle of Ideas was once again vital to war preparations. On our side, workers crossed national barriers to join in the fight against fascism across Southern Europe, seeking to protect democracy and any semblance of workers rights. Bosses, scared of workers power, were happy to allow totalitarian thugs to take control of their State machine in order to protect and even enhance Capitalist exploitation.

By the mid-thirties the arguments were well advanced inside the Ruling Class – the majority of the British Royal family sided with their cousins in Germany in supporting the power of the Nazis – Hitler’s fascist Party – in waging war to quell the power of the working class.

Many German workers were bribed and fooled by hopes of the end of Austerity and a new and peaceful millennia. The groups of German workers who fought against fascism were divided and crushed. The British working class weren’t about to give-up what little democracy they had fought and died for in order to return to totalitarian barbarism. They knew their bosses wanted to plunder, using the sacrifice of the workers to win new territories, natural resources and oil, but at the same time knew that a defeat at the hands of the Nazis would mean even worse servitude.

We had no choice but to sign-up once again. This time not for the absurd notions of patriotism, xenophobia and nationalism that had broken working class resistance in 1914. No, this time we died in our millions for ideas of Freedom and Social Justice. We also recognised the lies and propaganda of pretend-democrats. By 1944 the mutinies against the genocidal orders of the ruling class generals had begun again across the armies of both sides. In Britain, the Etonian senior Tory MP, Quintin Hogg, warned in 1943, ‘If you don’t give the people social reform, they will give you social revolution.’

For a while the ruling class acceded to offering limited reforms – a limited National Health Service, affordable democratically owned and managed council housing, nationalised utilities offering water so cheap it could not be charged for, and towards full-employment. By the 1970’s the international Boss Class had reunited, more or less, to complain amongst themselves that their profit rates were declining whilst the common wealth of the people was improving. This signalled creeping socialism, not competitive Capitalism. Something had to be done. They clawed the reforms back, finding a myriad of ways to extract the cash from the Tax Purse back into their private pockets. Legislation for privatisation and Austerity was imposed by their brothers in the State machinery to demand total freedom for competition and accumulation – a Free Market.

The far-right economics of Neoliberalism was perpetrated not through outright warfare but slight-of-hand propaganda, identified as Glasdnost in Eastern Europe and Russia, and the equivalent “opening-up” of “equal opportunities, a reduction of formal oppression, in the West. The price of such Freedom would be “Perestroika”, restructuring the State and the economy to dismantle the social safeguards and infrastructure that regulated and restricted exploitation and private accumulation of wealth.

So here we are in UK 2019: the return of rickets, schools scrabbling for books; millions in homes unfit for human habitation and overcharged by exploitative private landlords; a re-privatising NHS unable to manage the demands of a working class made sick by poverty and unsafe working practices; the exclusion, persecution and scapegoating of people of non-white skins and minority cultures; the rehabilitation of commonplace domestic abuse. Exploitation and poverty on levels not seen since the 1930’s.

So why aren’t we all joined together in common revolt against the very obvious, and historically informed, injustice and inequalities of 2019? Well, the Ruling Class are trying to use nationalism, xenophobia, sexism, racism and religion to once again bind us to their side and their ideology of privilege, power-and-control. The current rage at their Austerity exploitation is as an open revolt in many countries, and seething and bubbling inside the working classes across Britain. Should we appear to be getting seriously organised against the Ruling Class, as we were in 1912-13, 1917-19, 1926, 1936-8, 1943-46, 1973-4 , 1982-4, 1997-2001, 2011-13, they will revert to their absolute power-tool of open warfare both home and abroad.

There is no understanding of today’s world without an understanding of the history that made it. As Karl Marx observed, the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle. We cannot talk or dream of a better tomorrow without learning the lessons of what came before. And it is impossible to look at our society without recognising that the benefit and indeed survival of one class is entirely determined by the detriment and sacrifice of the other.

The interests of the Capitalist Class, the owners of natural resources and all production, are diametrically opposed to the interests of those who toil in their offices and factories to turn those natural resources into the products they design in order to extract the maximum in profits. They wage a class war against us daily, sometimes cleverly but often through sheer brute force.

There is a continuous battle of beliefs and ideology. The class struggle includes the battle of ideas. Working class consciousness has to become clear and collective once again. We have to finally understand that we must unite as a Class, bury our false divisions in order to fight for our children and grandchildren, take over the means of production for need not profit, sustainability not climate collapse, and wage Revolution.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/xlyy91r9arr46sn/wwi.devon.bbc.mp4/file

(Strikes in the First World War in Devon)

Part of the onslaught of post-World War Two western capitalism has been the privatisation of the individual. By the 1980’s, consumerism, managerialism, post-modernism in academia and neoliberalism in politics and economics provided a three-dimensional onslaught against notions of collectivism and community. In the United Kingdom, the Great Miners Strike of 1984-5 provides a useful historical fulcrum as the point of the turn of society away from commonality and shared welfare. Prime Minister Thatcher’s declaration summed-up the ideological assault: “there is no such thing as society”.

The People of the UK were the subject of a test-tube experiment for a specific model of neoliberalism. Whilst in Germany, the Berlin Wall was to fall and the consequent reunification required continued State investment in health and welfare, and in France the expectation of State-funded infrastructure stayed strong, In the UK the demolition of the Welfare Principle was the order of the day and the far-Right dogma of “small State” fast-tracked privatisation.

Privatisation not only of all utilities, transport, housing, social care for the elderly and drip-by-drip marketisation of the National Health Service, but privatisation also of the People. The State may still help “hard-working people” but would give no succour to the “underserving poor” or self-abusing sick, now to be vilified by a fearful population. You are now alone, your welfare and destiny completely down to you.

You may have had the luck to buy a house but in your old age would have to sell it again to fund your care. You may have worked all your life but would be stuck in your house, isolated and alone through your final years unless you had paid heaviy towards a private pension – the State Pension would become the lowest (by far) in Europe.

Little wonder that mental ill-health increased and society became defensive, wary of others and deeply competitive for scarce resources. Of course, we sought the natural experience of joining because humans are gregarious by nature. The clan of the football match would unite for 2 hours and then disperse. The music festival would allow for a manic celebration of being together “en-masse” but as a testy and wicked exception to the rule of privacy and reserve. The rapidly expanding gap between rich and poor would ensure a deeply polarised social life with no chance of shared community.

Today we are certainly not “all in this together”. One significant outcome of this has been the fragmentation of ways of seeing. History, politics and philosophy heavily censored inside the school curriculum and segregated to ensure no holistic understanding. Consequently, people have become more self-reliant upon how they interpret the world around them. This apparent freeing-up of thinking belies the reality of deepening confusion and anomie, or in Marxist terms, Alienation. We are less in touch with or coherent about our relationship to the natural world, the people around us, and our inner selves.

A meeting last night highlighted this for me. The guest speaker offered a method for understanding why the climate emergency is happening, from a perspective of historical materialism: to understand the human world today we have to understand the history of how we got here. The audience of 25 had, almost to a person, a seperate and individual interpretation of human history. Each had a different idea of both the cause and the solution.

One person felt passionately that only when each individual reattuned to Nature in the heart could we solve the climate crisis. Another blamed the Abrahamic religious books that had falsely interpreted human being’s relationship with Nature fo the past 5,000 years. Someone else was certain that the crisis would end-up with totalitarian autocracy controlling all humanity, and yet another suggested that people with Autistic Spectrum Conditions were most likely to be right-wing individualists ready to undermine any collective response to the Climate Emergency. (I must add that these description are each a shallow summary of the more complex statements they offered, each too long to give full credit to here).

My observation was that we were mostly wallowing around struggling to make some sense of our current society. Our privatisation, the individualist doctrine of the Age, had led us to fester in our own living spaces behind closed doors, making-up patterns of thinking devoid of much debate or scrutiny. Indeed, the meeting was stultified in terms of open and confident debate and shared discourse. We’ve lost the confidence to argue as well as to listen openly and be ready to think again. This is not a criticism of the people in the room but an example of how detached from one-another the prevailing ideology of individualism has made us.

I was reminded of the Practice Nurse who I had chatted with in my doctor’s surgery. I was in for an innoculation, it being the chest infection time of year. She prepared the needle whilst arguing against all forms of immunisation, not only on the basis that the ingredient lubricant, aluminium, would cause me to have Alzheimers in later life, but that vaccines were part of a corporate conspiracy to control the population.

This was not the first debate we had enjoyed over the years, knowing each other of old as politically vocal. She had long-ago declared herself a Flat-Earth protagonist and we had oft-debated whether the moon landings were real, humans beings controlled by a lizard-race, or whether the NHS was of benefit or a curse upon the working class.

Me, a Marxist, she a right-wing libertarian, would find little to agree upon. As the needle pierced my skin, she injected the fluid of the “Night-Watchmen State” she despised, but felt no pang of hypocrisy in earning her pay from the taxes she deplored. We all have to earn a living. Because the human mind is so complex it is quite possible to think anything you like. There is always a battle of ideas in any human society.

By the end of last night’s meeting my head was in a spin about how we can ever unite such dislocated minds back together sufficiently to act in unity to prevent our own extinction. Thatcher’s anti-social Post-Modernism, originally Althussar’s concocted thesis against Marxism, has done it’s job. We only have individual narrative from which to live. The collective experience is irrelevant. And in their wise revolt against the oppression of closed Party ideologies and dogma, individuals have shredded any shared method for interpreting the world around them.

In the climate debates I remain amazed at how many people feel earthly salvation an impossibility to the point of resignation to the End of Humankind, the Will of the Universe or their chosen God, and their private descent into small worlds of close horizons and numbing palliatives. The privatisation of the individual under neoliberal Capitalism has demanded we despise ourselves.

I reject such hopelessness as both unnecessary and uninformed. As I said on the night, all 24 of us in the room were keen enough to seek understanding of the world around us, so why should we, for one moment, think that the rest of humanity isn’t. All human beings think, question, wonder and seek answers. We talked as mass revolts continue across the world: Chile, Catalonia, Porto Prince, the Lebanon, Iraq, Hong Kong. And seven million people had taken action to protest the inaction of the climate emergency throughout the last month. We can unite and fight with common cause.

We have to reconnect. We have to rebuild community and commonality. There is more that unites than divides despite our tendency to make-up an infinite variety of interpretations of the reality we experience. In the end we live in one world, divided by a ruling ideology that demands we see human nature as competitive, avaricious, violent and individualistic. But that’s just how those who choose to live like that have raised us to think. We are not all Earth-killers, those who are just want us to think we are. As Karl Marx wrote, the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. It stands to reason.

The General Election campaign begins across the United Kingdom today. It is already the most acrimonious, divisive and vicious public contest since the Second World War. Little wonder. The divisions are not simply, not even, party political. The divide between rich and poor is so vast so as to be almost unfathomable. The levels of racism have been whipped into mindless frenzy. The deniers of any climate emergency taunt and threaten we who have concerns. And the tribalism of support or disdain for the European Union suggests a level of political illiteracy difficult to comprehend.

But Britain wants to be calm again, say political commentators. Dr Thereza Kapelos, a lecturer in political philosophy at Birmingham University, explains the tensions by the observation that we are more allowed to express our emotions these days. Yet the emotionality is dismissed as irrelevant to the scientific objectivity of political debate. Voters are tended to be treated as if they are children having tantrums. Politicians, including the last Prime Minister, are able to make outrageous slurs, slanders, accusations and threats whilst dismissing anger amongst the working classes as mere “hysteria” or “mob mentality”.

In truth, our grievances, the worries, the concerns and the anxieties are there and need to be acknowledged. There is a depth of division, falsely symbolised by the Brexit “crisis” but more fundamentally detailed by the social and economic divisions – in other words, social class, privilege and poverty. It is palpable on the street, in neighbourhoods and clubs, shopping centres and charitable food banks. This is an uptight society showing every sign of potential explosion.

But Britain wants to be calm again, say political commentators. This may sound benign if not charming, but can hide a very real threat. What could be meant by “calm” other than a return to the status quo? A re-acceptance of the old doctrines of “know thy place”, “keep your head down”, “do as you’re told”, “be thankful for small mercies”, and “count your blessings”. Oh, and “Keep Calm and Carry On”, that absurd First World War slogan reinvented at the start of the Tory Government era from 2010 to now.

Why should anyone be calm after 10 years of Austerity policies and zero wage increases despite above zero inflation throughout that time? How can we count our lucky stars when the national health is in crisis, systemically, emotionally and physically? Why should we allow the very fragile and superficial amount of political suffrage ever afforded us to be taken away and replaced by an unaccountable oligarchy of born-rich elites? And then what are we to do about our fears for the future, for our children and grandchildren, in the face of climate chaos and societal collapse?

In any case, what does it mean to be “allowed” to express our emotions these days? There is no natural state of human consciousness that remains calm in all circumstances. Anger is an essential emotion for survival and when suppressed is self-destructive at best, homicidal at worst. Love is essential for survival too, for the wellbeing needed for procreation and child-rearing. And all emotional stops in-between are life-affirming expressions of what it is to be human.

To have emotionality in any way denigrated or or denied is an abuse. Of course it is generally better to manage our emotions well enough for them to be productive, but there is nothing superior about actions based on cold-hearted “objectivity” rather than subjective empathy and compassion. Indeed, many observe Capitalist society as a dictatorship of the psychopaths, the sociopaths who cannot and will not care for those around them.

The sheer level of bile projected through every medium at the moment is producing a level of emotional discord comparable to the mass anxieties of a period approaching the declaration of war. Whether war between nations is on the horizon or not is debatable. But at home there is already a war of attrition between individuals, family members, neighbours, workmates and strangers.

The rising hatred is doing a job for those in power: the masses, the lower classes, the mob, are fighting each other, not them. In fact, we are eating each other alive. It is difficult to see how, exactly, the commentators propose to “put the Nation back together”. In reality, the best interests of the two opposing classes, Capitalist and Worker, are diametrically opposed.

We are, and have been for centuries, finally divided between those who produce the wealth and those who own it. Redistribution of wealth requires one side to give-up something – and the working class has been “giving” more of its meagre share up to the powerful elite 1% ever more generously over the past 4 decades. The very real and essential need to redistribute back downwards is the real but hidden cause of the emotional distress and tension of the day.

The power of Capitalist class and their political classmates, able to control the media discourse, sack workers at will, determine the spending power of the currency and threaten the wrath of God against dissenters, is altogether awesome. It rules with such force that we feel powerless in its shadow, and, in desperation either give-in to hopelessness or seek to exert what little semblance of power we have over those nearest to us.

Many mimic the ruthlessness displayed by theirs rulers in the vain hope of some control over their own destinies. Others join in the song-and-dance of the elites in just as hopeless a gamble of having some crumbs of power and wealth drip down onto them. But there has been little social mobility across the entire history of capitalism, and absolutely none in Britain through the past 40 years. Hoping for a government of national salvation is the cruellest of all electoral illusions.

However gut-wrenching it may feel, we have to organise to join together, to share our common class interests rather than focus on our differences, and to redistribute our common frustrations, fears and failings out of our homes and on to those who are truly responsible. Collective mass action to demand redistribution of wealth and power is the only solution to this emotional climate. It is quite possible. After all, we are the many and they are the few. At the start of 35 days of infuriating electioneering we must remember that.

An independent journalist published an in-depth piece of focussed research as a radio programme on the BBC yesterday. On the surface it was about the building of a greater democracy into the school curriculum. Secondary school students from a variety (read “diversity” of class and ethnicity) of city schools were offered a chance to decide what key lessons they want as 14 and 15-year olds.

There was a bias and undercurrent to the journalistic thesis, finally admitted to but only with a sense of defeat. The journalist was conducting her research on the basis that this generation faced greater educational pressure, competition and more uncertainty about their future than possibly before the Second World War for UK citizens, or perhaps “ever before”.

It’s hard to compare generations when social standards, scientific understanding and global communication is all so different today. But there is no doubt that, whether it is because we are more aware, or more able to report, or less resilient than previous generations (suggested, but highly doubtful), our children are exhibiting far greater emotional disturbance, discord, alienation and ill-health than was ever previously recorded.

The journalist clearly had a predilection for a specific outcome, the prediction that Climate Change would be the children’s top priority. It is, after all, in the News. A menu of syllabus topics was offered up to a vote after informed discussion and debate. Young people were interviewed about their hopes and fears and interests and habits. They were forthright in the main, thoughtful and able to express themselves (at least, that is, those who got through the edit and onto the published programme).

The result shocked the journalist. Rather than any votes for a programme of teaching on the climate emergency and what to expect in the coming years, the school students voted overwhelmingly for classes on Life Skills. Life Skills: budgeting, getting a job, domestic maintenance, finding housing, cooking, and relationship stuff like mindfulness and issues of intimacy. They appeared wholly self-interested.

These weren’t a new brand of 1968 student rebels, all chomping at the bit to tear-down the Old and build a New World. They simply felt heavily ill-prepared to manage the very basic day-to-day tasks of life, never mind any macro-Big-Picture politics of the coming catastrophe – we’ll simply all be in that together when the time comes. Right now, we need to know how to live day-to-day and prosper while we still can.

There was something grossly conservative and pro-Capitalist about the voices. Where they were was “how it is”; “it is what it is” as the current over-used throw-away remark says. The implicit acceptance was not only that the way society works now is to be taken for granted, but that it is silly to hope for more or anything different. Just try and work the best you can to sustain what you have and derive what comfort may be sought in your individual space. Get a job, get on in it, find a partner – palatable if not perfect – and bunker-down inside your own comfy living space.

It is hard not to conclude that this programme was just another State-sponsored propaganda exercise by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The numbers of school students involved in the 3 days of school strikes this year have been historic by any comparison. The protests by Extinction Rebellion have involved young and old alike, but largely the younger, and gained blanket publicity for the issues and concerns. Surely the programme misrepresented the real minds of the young?

The human mind is so complex, best understood as a three-dimensional tension of opposites. Conflicting thoughts and emotions all vying to gain hegemony and determine the next thought, the next action and the general consciousness of the whole being. We all carry contradictory ideas with us all of the time. We may know one thing for sure but feel quite the opposite way about it, hoping its not true.

Why, for example, would you want to immerse yourself in the science of global heating and acknowledge the coming social convulsions when your entire body yearns for identity, value, love and the experience of every sensation produced by fun and laughter? At the same time, why would the fear of catastrophe be a motivator towards action and revolt rather than be simply disabling? We just want to get a life!

In the macro, the collective space, the System has long sought to pacify the general population and have us obsess about the sensuous, focus on the immediate and enjoy instant gratification. We are fed a myriad of opiates to suppress and obscure perceptions of inequality and injustice – our own and others’. Above all we are required to be not just individuals but individualistic, the centre of our own unique universe rather than a star in the vast collective firmament.

Little wonder that a large proportion, perhaps the majority, of young people today are urgently seeking individual solutions to the huge challenges humanity faces. And therein lies the dynamic contradiction. The pacification has bred a sense of unpreparedness rather than passivity. The young still want to be prepared as the active agent of their own destiny. They still desire self-determination, however complacent and compliant the education and legal systems seek to mould them.

In the micro we have to question why the modern day school curriculum alongside the nuclear family has left young people feeling so ill-equipped for Life and living, at least in the advanced industrial capitalist western world. And we must accept the feelings of young people who crave the independence of action and tools to “achieve” inside the Capitalist world, on the System’s terms. Accept their ambitions even tho’ we know that most will suffer a sense of failure to achieve the Capitalist Dream.

It is the very core human drive for self-determination that continuously offers hope for a better System, for rejection of the way things are, and for the creation of a sustainable world. The emotional challenge of the fight against alienation and low self-esteem certainly defeats some and renders many to make self-effacing compromises, but it does empower more than a few to outright revolt. And when the scale of revolt reaches a certain critical mass and offers a vision of a better future, the rest will follow, not least through a sense of pure self-interest.

The top headlines across today’s media cite the extraordinarily fierce fires across California alongside the damnation by a Public Inquiry of the London Fire Brigade for suggested failures in the ghastly Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 that killed 72 people. In both stories, there are fire-fighters risking their own lives to save other human beings. In both stories there is the cash-strapped emergency service reliant on inadequate resources and caught-out by the unforeseen ferocity of fast-moving flame. And in both stories there are the poor, inadequately protected, uncared for and left with nothing but tragedy.

It is as if this is a morality tale of our Age. The images of survivors, of ashen pallor, wide-eyed and numbed by the horror, slowly stumbling over words to explain their experiences and mourn their dead relatives, demand empathy and compassion. The blackened skeletons of their homes, the bones of chimneys or steel girders pointing skywards as if reaching in agony upwards from the charred earth, symbolise death and destruction.

Any possible sense of pathos is neutered by the irony of Halloween. Today’s “Celebration of the Dead” (or is it a commercial con for the sugar and toy industries?), will see children Trick or Treating around the safer neighbourhoods after tonight’s dusk. The costumed ghouls and masked devils will put to waste some millions of pumpkins to enjoy an evening of scares and thrills and all the tingles of safely contrived horror.

I much prefer the Celtic festival of Samhain which comes from the Old Irish for ‘Summer’s end’, livestock in from the higher pastures and a sufficient number slaughtered for the winter. A warming vegetarian meal (for preservation’s sake) sat around a roaring hearth. But perhaps this more modern, Christian-based Halloween is a useful rehearsal for times to come. Specifically, the climate catastrophe.

There will be more environmental fires, less ability to fight or prevent them, and far less public funding available to rehouse and re-establish the lives of the displaced. And far more death and suffering. Such a future doesn’t look like its going to be a walk in the park or a symbolic stroll with friends and family. Because, just as with California’s forests or England’s plastic-clad Tower Blocks, there has been little or no preperation for the coming conflagration.

On the surface, the Grenfell fire and the California fires appear to have nothing in common – one caused by Corporate failure and cost-cutting, and the other by global heating creating tinder conditions in the environment. The links become more obvious the more we look. Firstly, it is the poor of the world who are most vulnerable. They will continue to be the most affected and the soonest affected by environmental degradation. Secondly, the global economy based-upon the entwined dance of private accumulation and Debt (with a capital “D”) will ensure cuts to social infrastructure and the inevitability of social collapse as extreme weather events and their impact on human habitats become ever more frequent.

Thirdly, and not so apparent is the current Ecocide: the degradation of arable soil; emptying of ancient aquifer suppliers of water for agriculture; the mass extinction of pollinating insects; the destruction of the C02-capturing forests; the acidification of the seas. Halloween images of walking skeletons portray a very scary prediction.

Halloween came early for Extinction Rebellion, the mass March of the Dead on Saturday 12th October parading skeletons and coffins naming the recently extinct and predicting the end of humanity. It was a more powerful sight than any procession of giggling and growling trick-or-treaters tonight. We will see more street theatre depicting death and destruction in the coming months and years, alongside more mass tragedies as today epitomised by the California fires.

“We are all going to have to come together or we will end up slaughtering each other”, says Roger Hallam, an XR Founder, with the vision of the need to go “beyond politics” to act now against the threat of mass starvation. Certainly, the psycho-political understanding of the dynamics of climate change begins with the fact that global heating is a universal threat, not restricted to some nations or regions. It is the Truth that some regions will starve, many drown, and some burn.

Images of the dying on the TV and internet will render Halloween masks distasteful if not outlawed. Suffering will be widespread, the latest predictions being that at least 750million will be forced to migrate by sea-level rise alone by the year 2100. The displaced shanty cities with the flimsiest housing will be most vulnerable to early destruction. The forest fires and tinder-dry drought-ridden city suburbs will continue to burn. Indeed, the sea will set itself alight with the methane released from its clathrates. But the real experience of hellfire will be those watching it happen and knowing we could have done more to prevent it.

So now we know. There is to be a UK General Election in December. It may be a forlorn hope to expect that either War or the Climate Emergency will be of any priority on the highly toxic and grossly manipulated newsfeeds and combative broadcasts. This will be known historically and somewhat hysterically as the Brexit Election. Any larger global issues, including the prospective catastrophe of either climate collapse or nuclear war, will be airbrushed from the debate. Perhaps they’re deemed too emotive to be discussed, despite the anger, nay rage apparent for and against UK membership of the European Union.

Nevertheless, It has been to the credit of the socialist Left in Scotland that no discussion of Austerity or Brexit has recently taken place without at least a mention of Trident Replacement. Even the SNP are vocal about the issue. After all, they have nuclear weapons at Faslane, some 30 miles from Glasgow, and that NATO base is a huge bargaining chip with the UK Government in London.

Maintaining the campaign against Trident nuclear weapons has not been at anywhere near the same level in the Labour Party or other Left groups in the rest of Britain. There can be little doubt that the Corbyn compromise, leaving the pro-nuclear policies of Blair’s Labour Party in place, has taken focus away from Britain’s nuclear weapons.

Four years ago the polls showed that more than 70% of the population were against the replacement of Trident, the nuclear weapons system based in the UK but owned and controlled by the United States of America.

Back then, Trident was part-and-parcel of anti-war campaigning and common reference was made in any anti-Austerity speech, the cost of Trident replacement having shot up to over £205,000,000,000. Just the preparations, the research and development at the weapons establishments at Aldermaston and Burghfield, have been eating-up at least £2billion a year since 2014. The sheer cost, let alone the implications of new nuclear weapons, excited furious opposition.

No doubt Brexit has had an impact against retaining the focus. And the dramatic and welcomed cacophony from the climate protests of school strikes and Extinction Rebellion has all but drowned out the Anti-nuclear campaigns. Indeed many inside the environment movement still consider nuclear power to be an essential ingredient in the drive to carbon-zero in time to stop catastrophe. This is despite Chernobyl and Fukushima, the 10-year-plus build-time of new reactors, their absurdly high cost compared with renewables, huge carbon emissions in construction, thousand-year-plus environmentally toxic and carcinogenic waste, and direct relationship with nuclear weapons. The arguments against nuclear power are vital and worthy of their own blog entry separate to this, and should be discussed everywhere in the climate movement.

The even deeper political problem is that wars across the world are increasing and President Trump has done a great deal to increase the risk of the use of nuclear weaponry. Whilst we are all aware and appalled that Trump has pulled-out of the Paris Climate Agreement and opened up more drilling for oil, there has been far less focus upon his nuclear decisions.

It is not just that the USA broke the nuclear arms agreement with Iran, ramping up the threat of further and most deadly warfare across the Region. Trump has also pulled out of the bilateral INF Treaty with Russia and in so doing unleashed a new nuclear arms race. The New START Treaty talks aimed at reducing the current 13,000+ nuclear warheads in the world (more than enough to destroy all life on earth five times over) were due to begin in 2022 but are likely to be dead before then, by Trump’s intention.

We have seen a bonfire of nuclear treaties and a revitalised commitment to use nuclear weapons alongside new and very deadly tensions between rival nuclear-armed states. This is not just an aberration caused by Trump’s wreckless premiership, but the USA’s long-standing imperialist drive to protect its position as the world’s number one power. Obama had already shifted focus from terrorism to the “revisionist powers” of Russia and China, building new nuclear silos in North East Asia as a direct challenge to China from Guam, Okinawa and Japan.

The stated strategic plan remains for a network of “theatre nuclear weapons”, coldly described as “low-yield” being “only” the explosive size of those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Modern nuclear warheads are generally ten-times that power. US-owned intermediate range nuclear missiles are being stationed across Europe, potentially including UK mainland where we will need to build the same scale of opposition symbolised by the Greenham Common protests that forced the withdrawal of US Cruise Missiles in the 1980’s.

Trump’s recently announced “Space Force” echo Reagan’s Star Wars boasts of the 1980’s but is now harrowingly possible, the technology having developed to make the militarisation of space possible. The addition of the temperamental but tantalising use of Artificial Intelligence is fast-tracking development of nuclear-armed drones with algorithms allowed to determine threat and discharge bombs automatically without needing authorisation from a human.

The risks from military New Technology require that arms control is strengthened, unlikely without widespread public exposure and opposition. The brutal “tactical-use” of a nuclear weapon is once again being considered as a winning gambit. No longer the Mutually Assured Destruction of Cold War defence, the military hawks believe that detonating a couple of nuclear bombs over a few hundred thousand people could once again scare the world into surrender and fast-track regime change.

The one consideration that has held them off so far, and still does, is public upset – the threat of anti-nuclear protest destabilising and even threatening regime change at home. Current levels of civil unrest across the world certainly warns military strategists of the threat from the “Enemy Within”. For their side it is best not publicise any plans for use of nuclear weapons before they’re executed; for our side, and indeed our survival, it is vital that we keep the opposition to nuclear weapons (and their infrastructure including nuclear power) very much alive and active.

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, bringing together 29 countries under the domination of the Unites States, has a nuclear first-strike policy. Please read that twice. If and when deemed strategically essential, NATO would sanction the launch of nuclear warheads before any could be used against a NATO country. The old lie of nuclear weapons being a deterrent that ensures they’ll never be used was always a myth, and the “first strike” policy demolishes such nonsense once and for all.

Yet President Trump’s visit to England to join the NATO international Conference in London in December 2019 has very little publicity around protest action compared with his previous visits. Previous NATO Summits have seen huge and violent protests when sited in mainland Europe but are unlikely to be replicated in London. A Counter-Conference has been organised by Stop the War Coalition on Saturday 30th November together with a protest on Tuesday 3rd December when Trump arrives. These should be precisely the type of events for anti-war and environmental protesters to join together, en masse.

The open threat of nuclear war is once again overt and restated. Tensions are mounting in previously nuclear-free South America, where Brazil’s Bolsonaro has two nuclear power stations (first procured by Lula in a deal with France), off-line but producing the agents required for weapons, and the continent’s first nuclear-powered submarine is on order, a precursor to talks with Trump about the possible siting of US nuclear weapons. The threat to Venezuela, and by implication, non-compliant States across the region, is obvious.

The escalating conflicts in the Middle East include the continued use of depleted uranium, having the secondary value of spreading radioactive isotopes into the environment and thus obscuring the difference between the pollution from conventional mega-weapons such as Daisy Cutters and the radioactive residue from “low-yield” nuclear weapons, if and when used. Going nuclear is becoming an option in a world where one definition of the Anthropocene is the global coverage of human-made radioactive isotopes as a geological layer produced since the Second World War. “What difference does it make if a few nukes are exploded?”, is a question voiced by right-wing nationalists.

It is to the South China Seas that most observers look to predict the likeliest escalation in the next few years. In the Autumn of 2019 the UK carried out military exercises as part of the “Five Powers” in East Asia, identifying disputes in the South China Sea, concern about North Korea, and tensions with China, seen as the greatest threat to the USA in the long run. The US is requiring the upgrading of Japan, Australia, USA and India (The Quad) because NATO was never extended here after the independence struggles of the region.

The UK has been building links between NATO and the Quad. From December’s NATO Summit we are likely to see increased budgets and commitments to military control of the area of the South China Sea. Britain remains a Pacific power, and the “close relationship between Trump and Johnson can only assure Britain’s direct involvement in any nuclear tension – after all, we have Trident nuclear-armed submarines in the area and they are only of use as first-strike weapons.

The USA tested a nuclear-carrying new intermediate-range missile in mid-August 2019 weeks after breaking from the INF Treaty dating back to the Cold War era. The new rockets are designed for regional warfare, separate from the inter-continental ballistic missiles still very much in place. The USA is no longer an unrivalled power in the world, and the rivalries are re-arming into a super-charged arms race. Hence Trump boasted that the budget commitment to spend two and a half trillion dollars re-equipping the US military is a statement to rivals that they’ll take on all opposition, everywhere.

Officially, China has reaffirmed commitments to “no first use” whilst pushing forward with new weaponry. North Korea has also signed-up to no first use, as has India, despite its’ stand off with nuclear-armed Pakistan over Kashmir. Pakistan has not signed. Then we have the current tension in the immediate area of nuclear-armed Israel and the tensions with Iran which has restarted nuclear research and development.

The European Union is not to be outdone. Brussels has clearly indicated that they are driving for the military integration of all European States, using the EU Constitution as its rationale to use the EU to its full potential as a world power. The Lisbon Treaty includes the European Defence Treaty and a capability and armaments policy for EU militarisation, with PEScO (The Permanent Structured Cooperation in which 25 of the 28 national armed forces pursue structural integration) seeking funding, currently at €25billions, to be increased by 20 times the existing cash. The EU is on a trajectory towards having its own nuclear weapons independent of the USA. The EU’s Galileo satellite tracking system has been developed as a military answer to the USA being able to switch off its GPS in the event of hostilities.

Whilst Denmark and Ireland are seeking to opt-out of EU militarisation, France and UK have the bilateral “Tuetates” Nuclear Co-operation Treaty of 2010 to work together on nuclear weapons, the USA being in the background, with Aldermaston and Burghfield linking with their co-sites in France. This is likely to continue whatever the outcome of Brexit, Britain looking both ways at once and strategically placed as on the front-line wherever the geography of war may require placement of naval power with nuclear armaments.

Britain is also a central party to Trump’s Space Force. The construction of three space ports, at Sutherland and Prestwick airports in Scotland and one at Cornwall alongside the Newquay airport, places these military guarded sites close to existing nuclear weapons sites. Satellites will be launched with small weapons able to interfere with the satellite systems of other countries. The militarisation of space is accelerating, with India testing anti-satellite weapons whilst Trump has spoken about putting nuclear weapons in space. Israel, USA and UK have consistently abstained or voted against the U.N. Prevention of Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) motion.

In the history of humanity no two nuclear armed nations have ever gone to war against each other and yet we are closer now to that event than ever before. Members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which organises the Doomsday Clock, announced in January 2019 that “the dangers of the world are being normalised, including climate change and nuclear war”. On the scale of a 24-hour clock of risk, the world is at two minutes to midnight, the closest it has been to so-called Armageddon since 1953 when hydrogen bombs were being tested by the US and Soviet Union as the Cold War began to simmer.

It is not difficult to surmise that rival Capitalist nations will drive towards nuclear warfare well before climate catastrophe engulfs the world. Indeed, the competition for food, water, land and resources caused by sea level rise, glacial melt, endless drought and soil deterioration will inevitably be a major catalyst of wars both minor and major.

Global heating is not a single issue amongst many, the threat of climate collapse encompasses all other campaigns from Austerity and anti-racism to Democracy and Peace. But so does the nuclear issue.

Some of us have made great headway this year in building the XR Peace contingent across all Extinction Rebellion protests. We have also linked the climate and anti-war campaigns to those against racism and border controls. Socialists joined with XR Peace protesters in direct action against the Arms Fair in September. The campaign group, Stand Up to Racism has exposed the racist blaming of Muslims for the succession of wars started by the West and still causing tens of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees.

Environmental activists and socialists should use the General Election, not only to challenge Austerity and the gross inequality that has forced more than 14 million people into poverty in the UK, but push for action to prevent Climate Catastrophe and Nuclear war. We have to demand specific consideration by prospective MPs of the just transition of jobs away from building the new generation of drones, new nuclear submarines and nuclear weapons infrastructure including nuclear power plants and the dumping of nuclear waste on land and at sea.

This is far from easy. In the South West we have joined and helped campaigns against Hinkley C nuclear power station, and lead and won campaigns against permanent nuclear dumping in Plymouth. The planned military Space Port alongside Newquay Airport in Cornwall from where armed military satellites will be launched will offer the next target for action, linking climate and nuclear issues once again. To win we have to ensure mass consciousness of the real and present dangers, and demand policies against environmental catastrophe, against war and against nuclear. Time is short.

Global Heating, the recently revised term for what is happening to the Earth’s climate, is accelerating at an unpredicted rate. Not only had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to include acceleration in it’s 2018 forecast of a 1.5degree rise in global temperatures, but the best scientific modelling has proved to be decades out in its predictions of fires and floods.

This week alone we have seen three super-hurricanes form and develop at the same time, historically unheard of. Dorian caused storm surges, floods, widespread death and devastation across the Bahamas. At the very same time, uncontrollable fires blaze across all corners of the globe, not just the Amazon but the Arctic, Africa and Australia. 

Anyone watching must experience at least a passing surge of anxiety. Anyone directly involved will be experiencing trauma, with lasting effects. There is no peace from the recurring memory of a firefighter friend dying fighting a fire, a neighbour drowned in a building collapsing under water, a relative trapped in their car.

Now consider what it is for a child or young person perceiving these events. With the rest of their lives spanning a length difficult to perceive when young, the image of global heating excites a fear and despondency equitable to the feelings of youth in the late nineteen thirties or during the broadcasts at the time of the Bay of Pigs. 

We face a catastrophe. Many in the know suggest we face extinction. School students have taken strike action and will, once again, in 26 countries and over 1,000 cities worldwide on 20th September. This time the school refuser and environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, has called on adults for support. We can’t leave the future to the kids.

We can stop the coming Climate Catastrophe, but, as detailed by Extinction Rebellion rather than the IPCC, we have to go to a global war footing and diminish all use of carbon-based fuels towards zero emissions by 2025. This requires such a radical transformation of production and consumption that only mass mobilisations of millions of humans worldwide can ensure politicians and corporate bosses are forced to comply. 

The question of the hour shouts out; have the People the emotional resilience to take part and sustain system change? Will the repeated images of horror caused by human-made “Acts of Nature” become too awful to watch or too numerous to evoke any emotional response? Like civilians in a war zone, will we be rendered powerless? Like soldiers on a battlefield, will we become dehumanised and heartless?

There is a great need to speak the Truth about climate change. An essential ideological battle to be won, here and now, against The Deniers. But in so doing, the individual trauma faced by each of us as we perceive the coming catastrophe has to be openly acknowledged and managed.

We have to talk about global heating. We must feel we can do something, such as offering solidarity to the flooded of the Abaco Islands and those driven by flames in New South Wales. We must link arms to challenge the unnatural anti-human, anti-environment, anti-science nonsense of Trump and Bolsonaro.

We must challenge the Great Denial in all its forms. And to do all this we must acknowledge the emotional impact of our times, manage our inner pain, and offer solace and support to each other in this unprecedented tense and anxious emotional climate.

6th September 2019

The Extinction Rebellion group is at its centre linked to a not-for-profit company called Compassionate Revolution, set up by activists who had been involved in the Occupy! Movement. XR now has groups in at least 28 countries. The organisation’s “civil resistance model” seeks to create the essential social tension required to create change. 

It is the focus upon entire System Change that marks the maturity of the XR movement when compared with many previous environmental campaigns which have based themselves on highly moralistic admonitions against the polluting behaviours of individuals. XR is building towards a critical mass of activism, recognising the need for the inclusion of many millions in each nation, not a few stunt heroes martyring themselves for the Cause.

There are many debates taking place inside the Movement, not least about the appearance of participants as White and middle class. Symbolism is to the fore and as such, the visual messages are vital. When the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom derides us as “crusties” it rings a bell with those who have to any extent bought into the System, tried hard to behave in a way that obeys the rules and receives the pay-off of a manageable income and reasonable life. 

The portrayal of XR activists as Middle Class is quite absurd from my experience. The elders include many State pensioners (living on the lowest pensions in the developed world), the middle-aged are generally out-of-work (perhaps with a private income, perhaps not) and the students are in-betweeners, probably subsided by parents to a bare extent but not assured of achieving a professional salary. 

True, most of XR are well-educated, but the definition of middle class doesn’t really include nurses, teachers or most caring professionals anymore – they’ve been “proletarianised, and given 6-months without a salary they’ll be on their uppers. Only the top 20% of society earn money that allows for savings and security. And only the top 10% earn over £50k a year. Ideas of a huge and burgeoning middle-class are illusory, and politically motivated. In reality, however we choose to fool ourselves, the actual Middle Class with a vested interest in the current System are a very, very small strata of society.

At the other end, the at least 14 million who live in significant poverty in the UK have a right to feel particularly detached from messages of crisis and coming catastrophe. When you’ve lived hand-to-mouth for years the horizon closes in, too painful to remember too far back in time, and certainly too hopeless to look to the future with any hope. 

Cries of “don’t use plastic”, “go Vegan”, or even “give-up your car – use public transport” are most likely to fall on deaf ears or produce immediate and deep resentment amongst those who have nothing, scrimp to manage a main meal each day, and dream of becoming a successful owner of one of those super-fast cars the subject of one-in-three TV advertisements. Using the privatised and cash-starved public transport these days is an experience of frustration and discomfort. Don’t preach to me!

Then there are the workers, a disparate layer of around 32 million people in Britain. Whilst the average annual wage is around £28,000, about two-thirds of workers earn less than that (such is the falsity of averages compared with means and medians), the figure being more representative of entire pre-tax household income. More than 5 million workers rely upon government welfare top-up payments in order to survive. We all recognise this as the tax-payer effectively giving hand-outs to the employers who pay the worst wages.

Around 6 million of the working poor can be described as “the precariat” with serial part-time, low-income, hire-and-fire vulnerable work. Employment tends to be repetitive, boring, tedious and impersonal, viciously overseen by the supervisory and managerial classes disproportionately paid and driven to force productivity through inhuman relationships based upon unaccountable power, bullying and threat. 

Most workplaces run on fear. Most workers live with a constant negative piquance of stress about the payment of the rent or mortgage, heating and fuel costs, kids clothes, and the weekly food shop. Few if any can afford to challenge the Boss, show political dissent from what they produce or the way society works. 

The bottom 50% of UK society share 8% of all the wealth produced in Britain each year. Women overwhelmingly bear the brunt of low wages, part-time precarious work, and the stresses of household management. People of Colour, anyone non-white or with a surname that may be considered on paper as “ethnic”, experience barriers to opportunities from a very young age and sense their treatment as “different” from their White friends. 

Black people (the political term for all non-White skinned) are disproportionally prevalent in the poorest quartile of the population irrespective of ability or belief in the “Capitalist Dream”. From unemployment to stop-and-search, the visibility of being Black in a racist society requires you to walk hood-up, head down and without a sound. The Police, representing the Power, the System, Babylon, are not on your side.

Austerity, a political tool to refund the finance sector after the gross-corruption of that industry caused a global crash in 2008 for which, world-wide, only a handful of people were ever punished, has deepened inequality exponentially. More Billionaires at one end, far more homeless at the other. And poverty has a job to do for the Government: it creates the fear that keeps people from protesting.

After the Universal Credit website has demanded you stay on-line for 35 hours a week to prove you’re looking for work or lose your entire £60 a week income; as you walk home after being on a final warning for having been minutes late for work in the last month; when you’ve just juggled cash to ensure the kids are fed and clothed and you’ve put-off replacing your own leaking shoes for another month; the idea of the End of the World could almost feel like a blessed release. 

Little wonder protesters were kicked and punched by commuters whose train to work had been held-up. Inequality has produced a social tension quite perceptible on the streets. There has been absolutely no social mobility in the UK for the past 35 years. To demand a no-Growth economy false on stones ground where those who have lived such Truth can either laugh or sneer at such irrelevance. Money goes to money, the rich protect themselves, they have complete power, we have none.

Climate protests have to focussed, understanding and compassionate. It is not in the power of the ordinary consumer – few of whom can ever afford luxuries rather than necessities – to change the world through their individual methods of consumption. The terrible Truth of the Climate Emergency is that the politicians have to own the crisis, and the producers – the Capitalists who own the means of production – have to change the basis of production. If both or either fail in the very near future, they will have to be removed. Citizens Assemblies can organise social infrastructure, workers can organise the methods of production. It will take a world revolution.

Environmental activists have to understand not only how society works but how it feels for the majority. The vision of system change requires links between all elements of drive for social progress – for civil rights, for decent wages, for affordable housing for all, for access and inclusion for all, for diversion and against discrimination, and so forth. We will only mobilise the millions we need if we begin from how they see and feel the world, not any high-minded impatient demands of our own.

I was talking with self-professed revolutionaries the other night. They were clear if not outspoken that revolution will not be fermented let alone succeed through any semblance of compassion. It will be civil war, indeed world war, based upon the class hatred that comes from outrage at the inequality and repression of the Ruling Class. Revolution requires the working class to be empowered and full-voiced.

I wanted to agree but with a cautionary caveat. Humanity shows so much compassion, day-to-day, across all societies that caring has a vital role to play. We are moved daily with care and concern for people less well-off than ourselves: the child receiving a drug for Cystic Fibrosis after years of State rationing; the migrants asphyxiated in the backs of lorries or drowned in the Med; those burnt to death in California or the Congo; the Kurdish children of Syria. Notions of “counting your blessings” are unhelpful here, being pacifiers rather than mobilisers. But putting yourself out for others does appear to be part of our nature. 

Indeed, most climate activists are fighting for the rights of future generations, not our own. On the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the first example of where workers took over a society (even if it was finally crushed by invading Capitalist armies), we should not think for one moment that system change is impossible. There are currently uprisings around the world, mostly against poverty and repression, the climate protests being relatively small and passive by comparison. 

A Compassionate Revolution is indeed possible. We have to stand with the poor and the oppressed, we have to understand the experiences of the majority of whom we are a part. We have to challenge and repress our own prejudices and high-minded morals that betray empathy and compassion. The revolutionary socialist journalist, Paul Foot, once wrote, “there can be no Revolution without Love”. I agree wholeheartedly.

Most of all, we have to build the collective power of the working class in the workplaces. Today’s images from the million-plus march in Chile against Austerity and State corruption shows the potential strength of workers. The concurrent images of State Police beating and brutalising unarmed civilians, mostly the young, highlights the tension in the phrase, “compassionate revolution”: exactly how does non-violent direct action respond when the ruling class shoot us, incarcerate and torture, “disappear” us and drive tanks over our camped-out bodies? We will need the compassion of the majority to come to our defence.

Saturday 26th October 2019

Did the October Rebellion ever happen? I walked the streets of the centre of London last Saturday to find little or no sign. By midday, the lawn at Parliament Square had new protesters and organisers testing the giant screen and sound system readying themselves for a different protest. The centre of Trafalgar Square was all but dead, the XR tents and banners all gone. Instead, passing by from the West came an endless procession of well-clad humanity, tight-packed and stern, waving blue banners emblazoned with rings of golden stars.

One million people were marching to Westminster, not to protest the inaction in the face of catastrophe, but the inaction of Parliament over Brexit. These were “Remainers” in the main, and my crowded train journey home found them overwhelmingly white, middle class and self-protectionist. The European Union, albeit flawed, was their hope for the future, whatever the science of global heating might predict.

I was attending a conference on the other side of Westminster Bridge about war and nuclear weapons, and used the lunch hour to observe the parade. The Conference debates rang in my ears; detailing the new AI assisted industry producing “useable” nuclear weapons offering low-yields of destruction of “theatres of war”. The current computer-aided militarisation of Space adding as great a threat to our future as the looming climate catastrophe. And, thoughtfully, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament resolving with great clarity the need to address the conjoined relationship between climate and war.

There is no doubt that climate breakdown will produce more wars, and such general conflagration will precede the global climate catastrophe. It is with us already. The endless wars for Oil have dominated the twentieth and twenty first centuries, decimating civilisations and destroying countless millions of lives – human, animal, insect and plant. This month’s invasion of Kurdish Syria by the Turkish State has an oil pipeline as a backcloth, and the Saudi genocide in Yemen displays the vulnerability as well as the power of Oil. The devastated proxy battleground of Syria symbolises the battle for resources in an era of environmental collapse. 

The President of the most powerful nation that the human world has ever seen is increasing expenditure on military hardware whilst denying discussion, let alone development, of adaptation to avoid climate breakdown. And the total energy and efforts of up to seven million protesters across the world shouting out “System Change not Climate Change” across October have appeared to have no resonance with those who hold the Power. What will it take?

Observing the Big Picture, it would appear that the centre cannot hold. There is such tension in the human world, huge protests in Sudan, Ecuador, Haiti, Iraq, Egypt and Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Catalonia and even London, that the forces of power and privilege are being laid bare for all to see. The State repression, Police guns, grenades, beatings and prison-cell torture, all signals of a frightened and cornered ruling class determined to smash opposition before it starts.

On the other side, the searing inequality burning the flesh and consciousness of the poor of the World is producing the inevitable resistance and challenge, humans hurling themselves at the authors of such injustice. This is a time of passion, the cry for action, the sacrificial charge for change. The centre shall not hold. But the ruling class will use all means at their disposal to cling-on to their power and privilege. War will precede climate breakdown and hasten it.

Saturday’s million-march of the Remainers was motivated more by the conservative wish to stay the same, for defence of the Status Quo than it was a demand for progress. Of course, there are no absolutes, and the Left contingent marching for Europe, self-labelled “Another Europe is Possible” would condemn and decry me even suggesting they’re for more of the same. Yet even their adaptation of the banner of the Movement of Movements, “Another World is Possible”, exposes their reformist reserve against whole-System Change. 

In a world falling apart, the defence of a system that is knowingly raping the planet and denying access to those fleeing war and climate collapse, the idea of the EU as potentially progressive is pie-in-the-sky. I’m not blaming them for marching. I am questioning why the superficial issue of Brexit appears more important than the fundamental challenge of global heating. In or Out of the EU, we will have neoliberal governance in denial about the requirement for no-growth, zero-carbon economies.

Unlike Saturday’s “March to Remain” (oh, the irony), most uprisings, those riots and mass protests, the global spread of festivals of the Oppressed and Exploited, are demanding Another World. Peace and Social Justice. There is a growing and deepening divide apparent between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction. These are the signs of a global civil war in embryo. The revolutionaries are going to have to grow faster and larger than the forces of reaction and stasis if we are to have any hope of survival. The Centre must not hold. 

Wednesday 23rd October 2019

As the October Rebellion struggles through the second week of action, the usual Establishment lackeys cast their slurs. The latest sponsored polls of public opinion purposefully opened the flood gates for the bile from deniers and reactionaries to pour out, damning the protesters for our very existence. At the same time, Police used s14 yesterday to ban all Extinction Rebellion (XR) activities in London and use Stop-and-Search (a bludgeoning tool of unaccountable power usually focussed upon Black people) to further muddy the public’s ability to differentiate between protester and terrorist. 

It’s not as if we weren’t warned. The XR creed includes acceptance of law-breaking in order to ram home the point – we knew we’d face the wrath of the Establishment. Greta has repeated herself by tweeting today, “if standing up against Climate and ecological breakdown and for humanity is against the rules then the rules must be broken.” We have fought the Law and the Law has fought back.

What is more disturbing, and quite unnerving for quite a few compatriots in XR, is the apparent public hatred of us. The trolling is vicious, only to be expected, and XR activists are more than able to discern the rant from the real opposition. But there are far fewer vocal supporters. The usual “lefty” celebrities have gained notoriety, from anti-War Jane Fonda to wildlife’s Chris Packham, but it is hard to see any groundswell of popular support. More vitally, there is little sign of defence of our tactics.

Is it that people don’t want to know, that the message of the 6th Great Extinction and coming Climate Catastrophe is too scary? Or is it actual disbelief? We have always suffered from the false news of the media ideologues, painting all things as the best of all possible worlds. Yet this has never prevented revolt nor indeed revolution when the conditions are met – polarised society, economic hardship of the masses, flagrant opulence of the Rulers. It would appear that there is sharp political opposition to the notion of climate change that is gaining ground despite our best efforts.

Humanity has been warned of the coming human-made climate crisis for a very long time. Svante Arrhenius calculated the cumulative effects of human-induced climate change back in 1896, getting very close to predicting what is happening right now, if expected to occur in “a few thousand years”. In 1898, Thomas Chamberlain summarised his research into the rising carbon emissions as returning the planet to a climate similar to the Middle Tertiary Age, with sea extension and climatic intensification.

In 1964 I was part of a classroom project on climate change in my primary school. Pollution may have been the focus, but global heating was on the curriculum. And 50 years ago today, in 1969, scientists formally warned President Johnson (no relation to Prime Minister Johnson) of the calamity predicted from increased C02 emissions by the year 2000: sea acidification, extreme weather, arctic melt, etc. Why, in the same year, Joni Mitchell even wrote songs about pollution and the extinction of the bees.

We have had 30 years of international political lobbying to stop greenhouse gas emissions. 20 years since the USA Vice President, Al Gore started spouting about the need for industry to clean itself up quick. The amazing growth in computer technology has offered 20 years of more and more accurate inspection of environmental conditions across all geographic areas, and the resultant modelling has produced extraordinary detailed predictions most of which have come to pass, just much earlier quicker and with greater severity than the micro-chips could imagine.

There is a hint of despair present. When humanity chooses so blatantly and aggressively to discount the facts, the warnings, the science and the vocal minority pointing at our own imminent extinction, what’s the point of fighting for survival? In my view, it is the enforced passivity and resulting sense of powerless of the majority that renders them hostile to the actions of the rebels. The fear, the anxiety, the emotional energy required to confront the facts and resolve to act all feel too great a challenge. And in such a condition of paralysis the human being has a tendency to resent those able and active around us.

The antidote to this is simple. We need a sufficient shout, a loud enough wailing, a critical mass of active protest calling-out in a single combined voice: Act Now! The October Rebellion must be seen as just a start, as a small-scale rehearsal for the Real Thing, indeed, as a polite whisper of concern before the cacophony of revolt to win-over the doubters and cast-aside the deniers. The Establishment should quake – they have been warned.

Thursday 17th October 2019

As the October Rebellion struggles through the second week of action, the usual Establishment lackeys cast their slurs. The latest sponsored polls of public opinion purposefully opened the flood gates for the bile from deniers and reactionaries to pour out, damning the protesters for our very existence. At the same time, Police used s14 yesterday to ban all Extinction Rebellion (XR) activities in London and use Stop-and-Search (a bludgeoning tool of unaccountable power usually focussed upon Black people) to further muddy the public’s ability to differentiate between protester and terrorist. 

It’s not as if we weren’t warned. The XR creed includes acceptance of law-breaking in order to ram home the point – we knew we’d face the wrath of the Establishment. Greta has repeated herself by tweeting today, “if standing up against Climate and ecological breakdown and for humanity is against the rules then the rules must be broken.” We have fought the Law and the Law has fought back.

What is more disturbing, and quite unnerving for quite a few compatriots in XR, is the apparent public hatred of us. The trolling is vicious, only to be expected, and XR activists are more than able to discern the rant from the real opposition. But there are far fewer vocal supporters. The usual “lefty” celebrities have gained notoriety, from anti-War Jane Fonda to wildlife’s Chris Packham, but it is hard to see any groundswell of popular support. More vitally, there is little sign of defence of our tactics.

Is it that people don’t want to know, that the message of the 6th Great Extinction and coming Climate Catastrophe is too scary? Or is it actual disbelief? We have always suffered from the false news of the media ideologues, painting all things as the best of all possible worlds. Yet this has never prevented revolt nor indeed revolution when the conditions are met – polarised society, economic hardship of the masses, flagrant opulence of the Rulers. It would appear that there is sharp political opposition to the notion of climate change that is gaining ground despite our best efforts.

Humanity has been warned of the coming human-made climate crisis for a very long time. Svante Arrhenius calculated the cumulative effects of human-induced climate change back in 1896, getting very close to predicting what is happening right now, if expected to occur in “a few thousand years”. In 1898, Thomas Chamberlain summarised his research into the rising carbon emissions as returning the planet to a climate similar to the Middle Tertiary Age, with sea extension and climatic intensification.

In 1964 I was part of a classroom project on climate change in my primary school. Pollution may have been the focus, but global heating was on the curriculum. And 50 years ago today, in 1969, scientists formally warned President Johnson (no relation to Prime Minister Johnson) of the calamity predicted from increased C02 emissions by the year 2000: sea acidification, extreme weather, arctic melt, etc. Why, in the same year, Joni Mitchell even wrote songs about pollution and the extinction of the bees.

We have had 30 years of international political lobbying to stop greenhouse gas emissions. 20 years since the USA Vice President, Al Gore started spouting about the need for industry to clean itself up quick. The amazing growth in computer technology has offered 20 years of more and more accurate inspection of environmental conditions across all geographic areas, and the resultant modelling has produced extraordinary detailed predictions most of which have come to pass, just much earlier quicker and with greater severity than the micro-chips could imagine.

There is a hint of despair present. When humanity chooses so blatantly and aggressively to discount the facts, the warnings, the science and the vocal minority pointing at our own imminent extinction, what’s the point of fighting for survival? In my view, it is the enforced passivity and resulting sense of powerless of the majority that renders them hostile to the actions of the rebels. The fear, the anxiety, the emotional energy required to confront the facts and resolve to act all feel too great a challenge. And in such a condition of paralysis the human being has a tendency to resent those able and active around us.

The antidote to this is simple. We need a sufficient shout, a loud enough wailing, a critical mass of active protest calling-out in a single combined voice: Act Now! The October Rebellion must be seen as just a start, as a small-scale rehearsal for the Real Thing, indeed, as a polite whisper of concern before the cacophony of revolt to win-over the doubters and cast-aside the deniers. The Establishment should quake – they have been warned.

Wednesday 16th October 2019

Extinction Rebellion suggested that 30,000 marched in central London yesterday. We had worked hard to build support for a coach from Plymouth to the protests, the one-day turn-around being a significant barrier to mass support. 6 hours there, 4 hours marching then 6 hours back again on a cold and rickety charabanc isn’t enticing. As XR says, if we are to stop global catastrophe then some sacrifice will be required! 

Yesterday was heartwarming amidst the constant rain. 

The Saturday protest was mid-way through the October Rebellion and largely London-based. Plymouth and Portsmouth activists made efforts to attend where others outside the Home Counties didn’t, with trade union activists seeking to build the embryonic links between environmentalists and trade unionists. 

A trade union rally in Trafalgar Square managed 3-400 people before marching together to join the XR march for the Dead. Remembering the recently extinct animals alongside the indigenous peoples devastated by invasions and capitalist incursions, street theatre offered symbolic coffins and skeletons alongside mourning marchers and red and green spirits of Nature, life and death. 

My purpose was, as part of the political recognition that real power lies in the workplace, to help encourage trade unions to embrace the climate action. Most of the roughly six million trade unionists in Britain are far from being convinced that there is a Climate Emergency, or that we face a catastrophe in short-time. Nor, indeed, that there is anything that could be done were this to be true. 

My imagination runs rampant each time I think what could be done if trade unionists gained the knowledge shared between most of the 20,000 environmentalists yesterday. We climate activists all tend to study the climate science and clench our gut to read the latest observations, such as this week’s methane fountains in arctic lakes spewing global heating gases 24 times as destructive as C02; the California fires now coming into the cities, shooting soot int the stratosphere, collapsing homes and leaving at least a millions without electricity; and the super-typhoon that has flooded large parts of Eastern Japan causing tens of deaths and hundreds of millions of pounds worth of destruction.

These are serious times according to all scientific predictions. In many areas of the global climate system, tipping points have been reached and passed, and there are many still to come. The very fact that, this year, meteorologists have had to add a grade to the measurement of hurricanes and typhoons in order to describe their strength is singular evidence of the developments in extreme weather. Once-in-a-hundred-years events are now appearing yearly. 

The feedbacks between different climate systems are accelerating warming exponentially. So a regular exclamation from various climate commentators is “this is happening far faster than we predicted. David Attenborough, a darling of the British Broadcasting Corporation, popular environmentalism and natural history programmes, offered such a fresh exclamation only this week. Strange, then, that the BBC chose not to report anything of yesterday’s protests. Instead they cheered the passing of Typhoon Hagibis so that a world championship rugby match could go ahead!

It is difficult for the general population to recognise and understand the undoubted crisis we are already immersed in whilst the major news distributors deny or distort the events. A call went out to swamp the BBC with complaints in order to ensure coverage. A BBC spokesperson is reported to have suggested that a sufficient number of complaints would force them to respond. They simply need the feedback.

The absence of honest discussion is certainly one explanation for the increasing hostility being voiced against Extinction Rebellion. From the mother screaming at our bicycle protest last Friday, shouting from behind the wheel of her car that we are frightening her child, to the cars and bikes revving and jolting forward as if to run into the marchers of Regent Street, their anger is as real as their denial. It is, I’m convinced, more a symptom of the deep and deepening polarisation and tensions in society than just response to climate change, but nevertheless a serious challenge.

On the interminable journey there and back again, as if acting-out these divisions, the environmentalists sat at the back of the Plymouth coach and the trade unionists sat at the front. We travelled separately together and on arrival the XR activists went to Marble Arch and the TU activists went to Trafalgar Square for separate events. The divide was explicit and total. And yet the subsequent two marches converged in Oxford Street, uniting in shared shouts of System Change not Climate Change. 

In November 1999 my sister and her family joined the mass protests of 40,000 in Seattle against Climate Change and the World Trade Organisation’s anti-environment policies. Anthea, 53 at the time, stood on the front line against hostile and armed Police using CS gas and rubber bullets, the protesters of every hue protecting each other.

The protests were historically unique marking the first attempts at the unification of Turtles and Teamsters, that is environmentalists and trade unionists in common cause. The policies of environmental destruction were also destroying jobs and livelihoods. The shared interest was obvious. Clearly, little progress was made and the relationships failed to last.

Twenty years later we find circumstances far worse and the social divisions re-cemented. Yesterday the largest industrial trade unions in the UK – Unite and the GMB – intentionally boycotted the protests and threatened to discipline any of their employees who attended. The “official” policy commitments to a Just Transition away from carbon jobs are yet to permeate through to honest acceptance of the Emergency and the need to Act Now.

And, just as negatively, any acknowledgement by the environmental movement that we could sure do with the help and support of 6 million organised trade unionists is shallow and secondary at best. I belong to the tendency which recognises that the fusion of environmental concern with the concerns of the organised working class is essential. 

Societal transformation to green jobs, carbon-neutral housing, low-emission integrated mass-transport systems free at the point of use, localised production and distribution, re-enfranchisement through citizens’ participative workplace democracy, will all make life better for the mass of the working class. The shitty carbon jobs, the filth of coal and oil, diesel carcinogens and plastic particulates can all be eradicated if production is re-organised. 

Global heating means nothing can stay the same and the coming catastrophes mean nothing will stay the same. We, the working majority with little or no resource to hand other than our bodies and minds, have got to unite to protect ourselves and survive. It is the collective power of the organised working class that is essential to beat the deniers. 

The non-violent direct action of mass strikes can shut down the polluting industries far more certainly than any mass protest. The democratic decisions of mass union meetings focussed on the necessary industrial re-boot have far more immediate clout than any Citizens Assembly however constituted (to be clear I’m not advocating an either-or approach). The unity of environmentalists and trade unionists can produce the critical mass required for fundamental system change.

Right now, both “sides” need to listen to the others’ feedback, and come together. 

Sunday 13th October 2019

I’m not sad to see that Greta Thunberg has failed to win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, and I do hope she is not disappointed either. Greta has many years of noble activism ahead, and, characteristically, say’s she is not looking for accolade or stardom, just action to prevent the coming climate catastrophe. Whilst climate action includes action for Peace, it has not been her primary argument.

It is also the case that this year’s winner, Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister has done a resounding job for Peace with Eritrea after 20 years of war. The Swedish Nobel group say Ahmed spent his first 100 days as Prime Minister “…lifting the country’s state of emergency, granting amnesty to thousands of political prisoners, discontinuing media censorship, legalising outlawed opposition groups, dismissing military and civilian leaders who were suspected of corruption, and significantly increasing the influence of women in Ethiopian political and community life. He has also pledged to strengthen democracy by holding free and fair elections.”

That’s not a bad record, although it’s clear that Ahmed is no revolutionary seeking to end world Capitalism. Ethiopia is in debt to China to a tune of $12billion, and has accepted huge grants that ensure China a stake in the country’s economic governance. This is true of much of Africa now, the Atlantic island nation of Cape Verde now finding the Chinese aid has come with a price tag of handing over one entire island for a Chinese military base. Arguably a precursor to more conflict and war, not less. 

It is hard to grant the Nobel Peace Prize much credence in any case. President Obama received it whilst sending more troops to the genocidal war in Afghanistan and maintaining Guantanamo Bay. Henry Kissinger, architect of the genocide in Vietnam, won it, as did the Zionist militant, Menachem Begin. Perhaps the idea is that giving gongs to warmongers encourages them towards seeking peace. 

At best it’s a symbol of Liberalism, balancing accolades for war-mongers alongside active peaceniks, and doing nothing much for the gross inequalities that infect and distort all human life. The fact that the campaign against nuclear weapons, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), won the Peace Prize offered our side a much needed boost in this period of renewed proliferation, but has not influenced Trump’s decision to withdraw from anti-nuclear weapon treaties for a ingle moment.

Today’s announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize will be tomorrow’s forgotten news. It does, however, offer a chance for reflection over what we mean by Peace. In our day-to-day lives, we think of quiet, sitting, perhaps silence and stillness. Politically it is generally recognised as the absence of War and conflict. In truth, world peace means far more than that.

Studies and experiences of domestic abuse – an escalating epidemic in the UK at this time – recognise that the absence of violence does not represent peace. Hidden threats and messages that undermine confidence are also mechanisms of conflict. The human-on-human behaviours of coercive control evoke sensations of subjugation, fear and powerlessness that are very similar to the emotions described by those living in a war zone, if less intense. 

Thinking Big Picture can transfer these individual experiences of repression, oppression and exploitation into institutional and societal behaviours. In essence, employees in non-democratically organised workplaces experience significant coercive power-and-control from business owners and their managers every day. Bosses rule over us – we do not have any control over the means-of-production nor what is produced. This is a significant problem for we who demand fundamental changes to production in order to save the planet.

At the same time, Governments, largely everywhere, dictate limits to acceptable behaviours and attitudes of all citizens (and non-citizens) according to their desired outcomes for political and economic continuation. Threats of imprisonment or worse are laid bare in Acts of Law, many of which are made not in the interests of humanity or peace, but of the ruling class. Churches aligned with the values of the State also control thoughts and behaviours by threatening eternal damnation for being non-compliant. 

It is hard to find any individual peace if you disagree with the political or religious regime you find yourself living within. It is hard to find individual Peace if you have insufficient resources to live securely. In short, it is hard for a People to live in Peace if they feel insecure and under threat. 

And this is where the threat of climate catastrophe comes back into the discussion. The very threat of societal collapse evokes not only personal disquiet but also social conflict – the struggle for resources, self-protection, shelter and survival.

Greta Thunberg’s call for Non-Violent Direct Action is not the same as a call for Peace. It is a recognition that we have to make a noise, and more importantly use “force of numbers” to force politicians and corporations to “Act Now” to end carbon emissions. Protest is not Peace. There is a requirement to use methods of power and coercion to influence those who coerce from a position of enormous power. This is a condition of conflict. And at its heart, class conflict between those with and those without.

In parallel, the position of Extinction Rebellion to be “Beyond Politics” does not represent a condition of being non-political. The demand for zero-emissions by 2025 is deeply political. The demand for Citizen’s Assemblies to exert power within formal politics is, in Truth, a highly political demand. It changes society’s basic constitution. CA’s (as we have come to call them in this era’s horrid dissent into acronyms) will, by definition, act in tension and sometimes conflict with the Political Class and Corporate CEOs. Perhaps, even, class war.

Living in a sustainable and ecological balance with Nature, protecting the environment and reversing the current ecocide is a noble goal, one we share and believe is possible. The no-growth stasis we seek offers sensations of equilibrium and calmness, harmony and peace. But there shall be no Peace until we prevent Climate Catastrophe. Greta, as one amongst us all, cannot yet claim the Nobel Peace prize with much evidence, nor should we want her to.

Friday 11th October 2019

Yesterday’s Rebellion included the XR Peace mobilisation protesting outside the Ministry of Defence. There were four arrests. The focus was, naturally, that just as climate chaos will force millions to migrate, so it will cause wars. War for liveable land as our soils become barren, wars for water rights, and wars for food as shortages increase. And military violence to repel migrants from national borders.

The invasion of Kurdish territories inside Syria on the same day gave an heady resonance to the cry for Peace. Whilst protesters in Trafalgar Square held a period of mourning for the lives already lost through climate change and the billions yet to prematurely ended through war, drought, disease and famine, the very real theatre was being enacted across the Middle East.

Predictably, by today, there are pictures of the fearful faces of mothers and their crying children hurriedly packed onto the backs of pick-up trucks and queuing along the desert escape roads away from Turkish guns. Hundreds of bombs dropped on civilians, tanks crushing shacks, troops on the ground trampling the vulnerable crops.

These scenes have become so familiar and commonplace since the first Gulf War in 1990, that after 30 years they are all-but routine on our screens and we are at an emotional impasse. 

There is a premium on empathy these days. So many sights and sounds of suffering that a Googlemaps 360-degree spin around our conscience is enough to numb all senses for sheer self-protection. The scenes of local poverty are everywhere, with cardboard mats in doorways now part of any shopping expedition. The human degradation of drug addiction clearly mapped upon a passing  face on an urban street, and the dishevelled elderly shuffling painfully through the Pound Shop are all too familiar.

Most of us have only so much we can give, rationing and then running-out of pound coins in purses and pockets to give to the street beggar, and drying-up the emotional compassion we can offer through our warm eyes and words. In the end we are forced into a condition of self-protection, fending-off any guilty conscience through symbolic acts of individual penance. After all, we’re not responsible for the housing crisis or barbaric wars. At least we recycle and re-use. And we, too, wish to survive.

Taking-in war atrocities really does demand strength and resilience. They’re happening far away and to “other people”, however you perceive and digest that description. Similarly, putting ourselves in the shoes of migrants is a challenge the minute we have a home and an income. And then there’s climate change.

The super-typhoon about to hit Tokyo can only be the stuff of imagination or Hollywood disaster movie to those of us in calmer climes. The endless drought in California might engage emotional resonance from those days of scorching heatwaves at home or on Mediterranean vacation, but living in it, with it, for the foreseeable future? Can you imagine?

Being suddenly engulfed by flames from a forest is all but unimaginable even for those in woodland homes, but having our living-room inundated by floodwater inside one minute has become the experience of near-neighbours here in Britain. We are in receipt of so many sensations of the potential climate catastrophe heading our way that it’s becoming harder to ignore. Even the Rugby world championships have been disrupted! The premonition of becoming overwhelmed is very real. It evokes  a near-constant state of anxiety. 

It is being reported that people are visiting their doctors to complain of significant bouts of anxiety and depression the cause of which, they suggest, is the current debate over Brexit and resultant uncertainty over the future. Perhaps this is media hype, but should such a phenomenon be in any way real it would be easy to understand why people cannot address the climate emergency to the extent necessary to prevent catastrophe. It’s all too much.

Today’s Extinction Rebellion core discourse has been on the subject of Global Justice, with assemblies in St James’s Park (just before the Police forcibly cleared us out) and beyond considering the issues facing the Global South in particular. War is on that agenda. And it is unnecessary to disentangle the assault of the Turkish State upon the Kurdish people in Syria from the dislocation caused by climate breakdown. The ragged trail of fleeing refugees are the same in both cases. The cause and effect have coalesced.

There is an oil pipeline from Iran to the West runs through Turkey. China would like to have influence and partnership with this buffer state between East and West. Indeed, every State and every corporation wants to be the best of friends with Turkey. Who cares that its a Police State, threatening to free the captured religious fundamentalist soldiers of the war in Syria and send them North to destabilise and destroy. 

The Kurds will be the latest collateral damage of this endless war for Oil. Endless, that is, until we force system change for a zero carbon economy and full-on global justice for all. Destabilisation from conflict is with us and just as threatening to the future of our societies and economies as climate change. The two are, indeed, intrinsically linked. And non-violent direct action is needed against both. Stop the War – Save the Climate!

Thursday 10th October 2019

There is no hypocrisy in non-violent direct action. Nearing one-thousand protesters have now been arrested, such is the sacrifice and commitment coalesced inside the Extinction Rebellion. More of us are joining each day. And internationally the Movement is burgeoning, holding together the very powerful principles of non-violent direct action and self-sacrifice in common cause.

Every day, new reports unfold about the current impact of global heating on climate and the ecology. And every day the criticism and disparagingly clever comments increase. By fair means or foul we are called-out as hypocrites.

In our local protest this week, as we held a banner across the pelican crossing spelling out Extinction Rebellion in pretty and colourful pieces of scrap fabric, a bloke driving a van called out, “bet you used acrylic paints on that!” Hmmm…Clever. 

Across the country people comment on the images of our tents in Hyde Park or Marsham Street, decrying the protesters for leaving rubbish. It has to be said that the rules of engagement with XR are no alcohol, no drugs and no littering, the protesters being particularly obsessive-compulsive about the latter. But the opposition are keen to portray as as “dirty”, “uncouth”, and ultimately indecent. 

There are many slurs shouted from passers by and printed in the media. A favourite is the transport we use. “Ha, they’re taking a diesel coach to London – hypocrites!” 

“There you go, they’re drinking coffee – think of the world’s resources used to make that! Ha, hypocrites!”

“Bet they’ve been in an airplane…hypoc…”

“Bet you’ve got a TV!…hypo..”

“Why don’t you cycle everywhere? Hyp…”

“Your electric bike has rare-earth metals in the battery – hy…”

“Your cycling helmet is plastic so how dare you protest!”

Today’s right-wing Daily Mail reports seeing XR protesters inside a McDonalds burger bar – probably using the toilets because the police had confiscated our paid-for and provided portable toilets. But hey, why not just shout out, “hypocrites!”

In the name of Love which we espouse against Hate, the opposition is understandable. We are disturbing the equilibrium and that always evokes anxiety. The responses are defensive in the first place. Of course there are those who vehemently reject our arguments or come from a political standpoint of opposition to collective emancipation, but in the main the retorts are clever-defensive, batting-off the omni-present question posed – “why don’t you join us?”

Extinction Rebellion says no more Business as Usual, quoting Greta Thunberg, “I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is!” Taken at face value, that is a very threatening statement. The less confident amongst us, and those who suffer anxiety and depression will probably find it unnerving. The best response is to push it away or make light of it.

We say the house is burning and they kick back.

We have to eat our own exasperation at the responses. The house is burning. I run into your flat and try to help you save your baby. You start to complain that I didn’t take my shoes off at the entrance. The house is still burning. The fire brigade arrives and you send them away fearing water damage.

And how easy it is to point out that we who believe the world is on fire are still in the house. The only way we could leave would be by committing mass suicide – not a recipe for preventing global catastrophe. And so we live within the existing society, yes, picking-up our litter and changing what we can of our personal polluting ways, but in the main we are obliged to manage as best we can with what is provided: public transport, electricity, communications – all based upon carbon fuels and single-use plastics.

In fact it is the scale of the enterprise that is the most threatening. Those who have faced-up to the scientific facts and observable degradation of the environment and eco-systems are living in a very Big Picture. It is very disquieting and often overwhelming. We come to realise that, as individuals, we have very little influence over the System. The size of the global economy is mind-boggling, the essential change to zero-carbon emissions by 2025 all-but inconceivable, the devastation caused by a global temperature rise of 2, 3 or 4 degrees centigrade compared to pre-industrial times quite paralysing. Even imagining the demise of the bees befuddles belief. 

So we can quite understand the put-downs. We are living above and outside the superficial aspects of day-to-day life. Ours is global vision because global heating raises demands about the base of society not just the superstructure. Everything must change. 

Using a plastic bottle, eating a burger, using carbon-generated lighting are all side-issues when the house is on fire and there is no escape. We have to focus on putting the fire out, now. Of course that means we don’t waste or pollute anymore than we can help, but such individual actions of contrition don’t add up societal change – it is the global politic, economic model and methods of production that have to change.

In a state of despair at the sticks and stones of throwaway snide comments this week, one protester wrote with sarcastic wit: “Until we see a Movement comprised of people with implacable good manners, faultless political analysis and exemplary consumption habits, I’m afraid we’ve little choice but to support the unfolding political and environmental catastrophe.” And someone else added, “…and even then we’ll probably be busy that day…”

“You can’t get people on your side by causing disruption”, is the final damnation of our side. But, clearly, the Status Quo is not benign. The Status Quo is killing the planet and its people. Disrupting such an indefensible normality is essential. In the process of protest we are undoubtedly gaining ground, more people becoming involved with the issues if not the actions themselves. 

The cry of hypocrisy does, nevertheless, identify one final and indisputable reality. There will be those who, come what may, will actively defend the System that is so palpably indefensible. We will not convince everyone, and the forces of the status quo will continue to weaponise them with everything from slurs and cries of “hypocrite” to active and organised violence against us. These are the early days.

Wednesday 9th October 2019

After 24 hours, 320 people had been arrested in London for playing their part in the October Rebellion against Extinction. The purpose of the rebellion is not to “take power” or overthrow Capitalism, or even become decision makers. The stated aim of Extinction Rebellion is to put sufficient pressure on Government and Corporations for them to take the action needed to save humanity and stop the accelerating ecocide. 

The plan is to raise consciousness of climate change and thereby force economic and political action through sheer force of numbers. Clearly, despite more than 8,000 activists putting themselves on the frontline in London yesterday (oh, and 8 million across the world just two weeks ago), the protests are not having the desired effect on our elected political leaders or their courtiers in the Press. 

Boris Johnson, the latest rabid Prime Minister of the 7th largest economy in the world has made light of the roving shut-downs of central London and his beloved Westminster. He has called us “uncooperative crusties” and gone further in demanding the protesters should abandon their “hemp-smelling bivouacs” and stop blocking roads. 

Establishment toadies lambasting the protesters include the always delightful Toby Young of the chatterarty, showing grim determination to be yet more abusive despite calling himself a classical liberal. “I was sceptical about the necessity of returning to a pre-capitalist, agrarian way of life if we want to tackle climate change, but having now been prevented from crossing Westminster Bridge by a group of protestors doing yoga I’ve completely come around, obviously”, he tweeted.

The general media response has been far smaller than the issue should command. It has also been negative. Our local “newspaper”, the Plymouth Herald, chose to headline “7 protesters in Plymouth” rather than the 50 in London, and carefully choose words and images to denigrate rather than report the facts. It is a small long-haired section of smelly middle-class hippies who are predicting extinction, the 99% of climate scientists staying unheard and unconsidered.

Channel Four News managed to find a young man in workman’s garb who believed “hotter summers and colder winters will get me more work – what’s not to like!” Clearly climate change will be a boost for self-employed plumbers everywhere, for a while.

There is a serious challenge here. Not only that, as we have always known, 50 people out of a city of 250,000, or 5,000 people out of a country of 50 million do not represent the critical mass needed for system change. Extinction Rebellion can be ridiculed and dismissed on current size alone, but also as unrepresentative of the ordinary citizen.

This is a very serious charge. In the constant quest for the divide-and-rule tactical advantage, always so effective for any ruling class of any society, the accusation of being a middle-class drop-out is particularly effective. Johnson’s script-writers (yes, it’s true, his every word is orchestrated) know that opposition by the worker who has been held-up from getting to work can be amplified and consolidated by officially labelling the offenders “middle-class”, with all the privilege that implies.  

After a lifetime of building protests and picket lines, I have grown impervious to passing insults of “get a job” as well as “get back to Russia”. After 43 years of full-time employment I am only too aware of the grinding and tedious repetition of getting to work in the morning and holding back my emotions and thoughts until the following weekend. For most workers there is a tendency to think anyone not working flat-out is a loafer or a privileged ne’er-do-well. Why is my life so shit compared with “others”?

There is a powerful emotional sensation of ire, of rising bile and anger, that accompanies thoughts of social class position and comparative disadvantage. For this reason, anyone with the modicum of consciousness required to perceive that they are, indeed, working class – that is, will be on the streets and homeless inside six months if they lose all employment and use up their scant savings – has more than a fleeting sense of support for anyone fighting the System. In this we suffer a clash of consciousness, easily manipulated and perverted by the Media.

So it requires a period of thoughtful reflection to truly understand what the accusation of “being middle-class” actually means. It was once thought that bank clerks were middle class, or that house-owners were middle class (those with fat mortgages included), or that nurses and teachers and social workers and other Council workers were middle class because they were professionals.

It simply doesn’t work like that today. The social care professionals have been thoroughly proletarianised. Whilst two-thirds of workers earn less than the average wage (that’s the law of averages – it is skewed by the fat incomes of the minority of salaries that are above average), the professional practitioners are not fat cats. The average is distorted by the high-paid manager-class above them. 

The truly middle-class in UK society – those actually owning their properties and sheltered by assured inherited wealth that will protect them through the lean times or even economic collapse – are small in number and certainly not above 20% of the population. Yes, they are the well-educated, or at least they are those who have had easy access to discover art and culture and history and travel, but they also have a sense of investment in the system as it stands, and stand to lose if the system is levelled-out and the wealth redistributed.

It then stands to reason, or fact, or the Truth, that precious few of those in Extinction Rebellion are truly of the middle-classes. Indeed, those around me are poor, not from choice but from the fragility of youth employment and erosion of well-paid work. Certainly the numbers needing help to pay for transport to London in order to protest, for donations from the XR Hardship Fund to help pay the fines, and seeking secure if shared housing, condemn the accusation of being “middle class” as a complete fabrication.   

In addition, Extinction Rebellion has a set of self-aware value statements for those wishing to associate with the Movement. A significant strand includes detailed examination of White Privilege, fully recognising the horrific scale of inequality between rich and poor, not only in terms of class but because of racism, sexism and the mix of discriminatory values ensconced in Capitalist society. 

The fact that Black people in the UK are far more likely to be arrested, imprisoned, stop-and-searched, harassed and targets of violence is beyond doubt. So accusations that XR is full of the middle-class privileged whites has that horrible kernel of Truth that upholds such a Great Lie. The reality is people of colour in the West are wary of the call to stand up, stand out and “get arrested” because they know they’ll be the first whether offering themselves up or not, and their treatment will be harsher. 

The deeper reality for the average environmentally aware activist is that Climate Change will devastate the People’s of the Global South, Africa and Asia, first and most powerfully in the short -term (an aside is the recognition that the vast majority of historic warming gases have been emitted by the predominantly White North-West). So institutional racism is an active component of the impact of Climate Change.

It doesn’t take a middle-class eduction to understand this. The majority of working class families have been, over the decades, influenced by migration. We are an hotch-potch of inter-cultural (the old so-called mixed-race) families. Irish navies and African seamen meeting-up with Eastern-European Jewish migrants and Caribbean wage-slaves to intermix with remnants of the Anglo-Saxons and Celts to produce the modern army of factory and office workers. 

It tends to be the real middle classes, the rural landowners and medium-sized business owners, who have sought to maintain the myth of racial purity and kept their heritage “White”. So the idea that it’s “middle-class” to be anti-racist or anti-sexist (or accept LGBT+ when so many working class families have at least one gay, bi- or gender-uncomfortable relative) is wholly absurd.

Just as absurd is the notion that its middle class to have an allotment (think about it – they’re provided by local Councils as an affordable social outlet for those without land). Given the history and size of the Ramblers Association, this too is a wonderful example of the widespread working class appreciation if not actual worship of Nature and the Environment. 

In truth it is the real middle-classes who are put-out by the October Rebellion and most vocal against it. Workers may make the occasional sly comment, mirroring the defensive culture of banter and sarcastic commentary that is part-and-parcel of the alienating and competitive workplaces we suffer, but underneath we care about the Planet, the Future and Survival. We love our children too.

The issue of Class is always on the Agenda. Today it is the likes of Johnson-of-Eton (grandson of one of the last interior ministers of the Ottoman Empire government who was usefully assassinated in 1922 during the Turkish War of Independence) and Young (son of Baron Young of Dartington and descendant of Admiral Sir Robert Moorsom who fought at the Battle of Trafalgar) who call upon the working classes to condemn the climate protests as Middle-Class. The irony and hypocrisy couldn’t be greater.

It is for this reason that we working class socialists are hoping to engage the organisation of the working class with XR to lay bare the lie. We know it will take the organised appearance of working class trade unions on the streets, hand-in-hand with  besmirched “tree-huggers”, to defeat the attempts at division and imposed isolation.

At the height of the struggle across the Western World for Civil Rights and Peace it was the students, mostly children of working parents, who occupied Paris in 1968 and led the cross-continent revolt for social justice. At it’s height, as the Police moved in with ferocity and armed violence to break the Sorbonne, the organised workers from trade unions across France downed-tools and marched in to join the Youth and prevent the carnage. 

That is why we are building for trade unionists to join in a day of action on Saturday, coming from across the country to join Extinction Rebellion in Trafalgar Square and march on Westminster. It is the dispossessed, the poor and we who are dependent on next month’s wages or paltry pension income to survive who will suffer first and worst from the impact of global heating. It is the working class who have the most to gain from unity with Environmentalists and complete System Change.

Tuesday 8th October 2019

The body has plenty of Adrenalin to be excreted whilst sitting down. Excitement and fear, courage and anxiety can all be evoked by the passive observance of the sacrifices of others. Armchair activists, those chained to employment routines, co-conspirators responsible for family maintenance, all collaborators in kind, those of us with reasons for not joining the front line, can and do share the emotions of the “arrestables” whilst not being amongst them.

This morning’s scenes at the start of the October Rebellion, overnight arrests in London, police hard-handling of elderly sit-downers in Sydney, children and young people joining workers and pensioners in more than 60 cities across the world, the banners, the scaffold towers, the perilous gluing and chaining of limbs and bodies to block main arteries and business openings, all, all, evoke sensations of arousal and, dare it be admitted, Hope.

Extinction Rebellion now has over 4,500 affiliate groups across the world, and the next two weeks will see more. The eight million people who joined the 20th September global strike will be added to by millions more drawn into the campaign by loud and accurate messages of scientific Truth and anger at Establishment intransigence.

Whilst the BBC chooses to all but ignore the protests, most media outlets are broadcasting fascinating and though-provoking images and interviews of human ingenuity and peaceful collaboration. The artistic expressions of environmental distress and human desire are manifold everywhere. 

Protesters risking their lives perched painfully atop flimsy stilts, others locked to hastily erected and beautifully adorned scaffold towers, people chained under vehicles, together present images of commitment, humility and sacrifice designed to provoke changed awareness and new thinking.

By the end of the first day of the next 14, more than 200 people have been arrested in London amidst the cold and wet English Autumn. Police on 12-hour shifts, bussed in from across the country and highly briefed are acting-out well-rehearsed roles to produce systematic cautions, clearances and convictions. The “arrestables” are throwing themselves at the Law to break the log jam, the impasse, the Status Quo that insists Business as Usual.

The Climate Emergency must drive immediate structural change if we are to survive. There can be no more business as usual in politics, business, behaviour, thought or emotion. The rebellion is designed to arouse. Whilst the rebels formally and earnestly apologise for the disruption caused they know this is nothing compared with the devastation we face from economic collapse.

If the drivers and commuters become upset, angry or even abusive they are to be understood, empathised with and engaged wherever possible in quiet discussion about the threats we face now, tomorrow and for the rest of our lives. If today is not the right day for forcing the change we need in order to survive, then when? 

If non-violent direct action is not the correct method to evoke change, then what is? We have tried, and will continue to attempt, the ancient “legal”, respectable, non-disruptive methods of political lobbying, propagandising, participation in elections, letter-writing campaign and all. But, in the last 30 years of trying, none of these have produced a fraction of the public education and political pressure that the past 6 months of direct action has achieved. 

We who are not, salute the arrestables. As the days progress into months and years ahead many who have not yet defied the Law will find ourselves up against it. The forces of short-termism, both the politicians limiting their horizons to the next public vote and the shareholders unable to focus beyond next year’s dividends, will have to be forced to understand that their way cannot continue.

Their Way, the established way of doing things, has to end. Profiting from the destruction of people and planet, gambling on the destruction of the Amazon, investing in Ecocide in all its myriad of forms, is all illegitimate. In very practical terms, their actions are against the Law…of Nature. 

And if the rich are expected to sacrifice much, so be it. So are we all. The poorest have suffered and survived or perished in the next-to-nothing left-over after the vanquishing Capitalist expropriators, privateers, carpet-baggers and military-industrial gangsters. The global South has been ravaged and cannot care for the weeping and wailing of the Northern privileged wealthy calling for calm and collaboration.

Today’s responses from London workers inconvenienced by the barricades has been heart-warming and encouraging. The man missing his desperately needed hospital appointment offered full support. The woman late for work compared the delay to her routine experience of cancelled trains and poor public transport and suggested that, at least this time, she was delayed with good reason. 

The postal worker said he didn’t min working an extra hour to complete his deliveries if he was helping save the planet, the baker brought free bread and cakes to those sat on the cold and wet tarmac, the ex-Police Superintendent placed himself in position to be arrested – again!

The practical scale of this week’s protests will still be far smaller than the critical mass required to force change. Government spokesmen (they are men), have been quick to condemn and to say their parties are doing enough and should be given a chance. But back in the homes, where tonights evening news flashes on-screen images and half-heard spin-lines, people everywhere will feel something. 

We are spreading the word – we face climate catastrophe and must be heard. No-one should feel guilty for not being on the front line. No-one should rush out and join the array unprepared, untrained or unclear. We are all learning and feeling our way forward. Like the build-up to inevitable war, we are preparing for huge change and disruption, the size of which will dwarf the best of any protest action we can imagine.

The sooner we end business as usual the better. I have done the training, I have felt the passion, and I’m off to protest right now. 

Monday 7th October 2019

Today begins a week of chat about mental health in the Western countries of Europe and the USA. It is Mental Health Week. It is also the beginning of the October Rebellion where environmental activists across the same set of countries will be sacrificing themselves to discomfort and arrest to protest the inaction of politicians and corporations over climate change.

The two political poles of attitude towards youth have already been voiced in the media. On the one side, the old cry of the Establishment has been offered to decry the too-fast growing-up of the young, mimicking Victorian concerns about teenage suffrage and self-determination, particularly of the poor and working classes. 

On the other, there are calls for revolt, more school strikes, and law breaking. In all this debate there is a fact that remains unstated. We live in a world dominated by the free-market economics of neoliberalism. The thinking behind neoliberalism is for unbridled capitalism. Such desired acceleration of accumulation of wealth by the super-rich continues to exaggerate the already unfathomable and illegitimate divide between rich and poor. 

The neoliberals always expected mass protest as they purloined the infrastructure, essential utilities and social services. Laws were put in place, Reagan and Thatcher being the most offensive, and early organised protests put-down by force – the US Air Traffic Controllers and UK Miners being historic examples. And then water, heating, health care, adult social care, housing and education were privatised by stealth and resolve. Profits for the rich increased whilst cuts to services (and associate jobs) ripped the notion and reality of welfare to shreds.

Mental health services, especially for children and adolescents, have been all-but destroyed. One-in-four of our children experience periods of depression and anxiety. One-in-ten need significant mental health support and face waiting lists of months or  years, in either case negating the original diagnosis. The latest reports identify the distressing fact that one-in-four adults in England and Wales are currently in receipt of psychotropic prescription drugs.

The Marxist anthropologist, Professor David Harvey, has detailed the design of neoliberalism in great detail. Amongst many plans laid by the Capitalist academics working after the Second World War, all engaged and well-paid to organise the breaking of the mixed-economy of so-called Keynsianism, was the requirement to infantilise the population.

Infantilisation – the persistence of infantile characteristics or behaviour in adult life. – would be essential to break the predictable opposition to deep inequality. The plying of social opiates, from consumer-durable games to drugs (both legal and illegal) fed the nineteen eighties social disorientation, isolating and marginalising campaigns against unemployment and privatisation. The first bosses offensive succeeded and the corporate lobbying of governments ensured the total political sign-up to the neoliberal plan. 

Individuals and families were fully privatised by policies requiring self-responsibility and hard-working family life. The reimposed division between the “deserving” and “undeserving” ensured competition between the poor for resources and legitimacy. And meanwhile, Clinton and Blair ensured the official Left promoted the free-market and the so-called Third Way amongst the middle-classes, offering a sufficiency of crumbs from their tables. The imposition of competition over social-cohesion permeated every aspect of life in the USA and UK.

Education has been the primary vehicle for building hegemony of competitive behaviour and belief systems. In both countries, firstly, the teachers unions had to be smashed by the end of the 1980s. Then national curricula (or in academy strategy, corporate sponsorship of school learning plans) ensured individualist competition in the next two generations of children. 

Universities spewed-out post-modern narratives to replace and deny fundamental truths about social organisation, mutual support and collective society, let alone the structural inequalities of social class, the enemy being any notion of socialism or tax-funded safety-nets. We could openly discuss and condemn one-to-one oppression – sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia – but exploitation and the privilege of class were all-but outlawed. 

Those wishing to take-up professions in social welfare were targeted most – the teachers, the social workers and the health workers were force-fed new notions of self-determination through personal choice that were designed to individualise and privatise access to care. 

This worldwide political push was exemplified by the Glasnost and Perestroika in Russia where individual social behaviours were released from political restraint whilst working hours and productivity were hiked to new levels of exploitation, the rights and voice of workers in the workplace dulled and channelled into collusion with the profiteers. 

The globally pervasive falsehood of individualism – The Capitalist Dream – was resisted best, although by no means effectively, in Scandinavia, France and Germany. A particularly brutal and painful model was enforced in the UK as a specific target for action against our historic development of collectivism and multiculturalism. 

The result of this test-tube experiment for fundamental social change has been a partial success. Despite all appearances, public protest, trade union organisation at least in the public sector, and the echoes of historical socialist belief-systems, have force the neoliberals to go far slower than they wished and to have still only partially completed the transformation (the word itself now a political term coined by their new paradigm). 

But there have been huge casualties. Children are now children at Law until they are 18 years old, despite having an age of criminal responsibility at 10 and being able to join the military at 16. We are told they cannot think for themselves, most are far too soft, over-emotional and inexperienced to have a vote or be taken seriously. 

The gaming machines and zero-tolerant school regimes have straight-jacketed acceptable behaviour into a passivity and conformity. At the same time the media images of sex and violence fantasies coupled with endless shows of competition from baking to beat-the-family quizzes have dominated consciousness. The responsibilities of adulthood have been taken away and displayed as unpalatable, remaining adolescent in thought and action far preferable to citizenship and participatory democracy.

The overwhelming result has been a tendency to fear and self-loathing. A sense of loss and detachment despite all the distraction and palliatives. Fear of others set against desire for acceptance and inclusion. Aspiration and desire negated by economic competition and lack of resources. The top 1% have doubled their super-wealth since 2008 while the bottom 50% of the population, some 33 million of us, have lost. 

The wealth of the richest 10% is 315 times more than the poorest. 1 in 3 children live in poverty, 14 million households are officially poor (including 5 million where at least one adult works) and more than 1 million households have to turn to food banks for charitable sustenance each year. Most work is repetitive and tedious, servile and alienating, the life-chances (not least the continually rising pension age) near-to hopeless, and the continuous all-pervading propaganda for never-to-be-attained designer-homes and flashy fast cars wholly dispiriting. 

Depression is an epidemic. The second Bosses Offensive – Neoliberal Austerity – has ensured a blank cheque for the rich and a grinding and deepening reality for most of us. And most of all, the sense of powerless, over our own lives and towards any influence over our own futures, is paralysing. Little wonder we turn, en masse, to living off-world – shutting down while at work, coming home to fantasy films, hero-gaming, drugs and alcohol, cheap white sugar and heart-warming fatty foods.

Throughout this week of spotlighting emotional health, most of the above will not be spoken of. We will hear sanitised plastic debates between the “protect childhood innocence” neocons and the “build individual emotional resilience” post-modern professionals. In practice, two-sides of the same neoliberal coin.

More darkly, we will also hear cries of “abuser” towards those encouraging the young to protest against environmental destruction and global extinction. Of course, the best way to defeat pessimism and depression is to do something to shoo away the Black Dog of enforced passivity. To talk about the anxieties and recognise their basis in reality. The only way to build hope is to break through the barriers erected to prevent emancipation and fulfilment.

We have to defy the promoters of infantilism and passivity. Children and young people have to regain engagement and co-operation with each other. Working class youth have to regain trust in each other. The best thing the commentators and professionals can do to celebrate (or is it commemorate) Mental Health Week is to join the youth on the streets. Shout out “Extinction?” and respond with “Rebellion!”. Feels better already!

Sunday 6th October 2019

Trump’s formal speech to the United National Assembly this week was a work of almost pure fiction, tho’ applauded by his far-right peers. His demand that “nations look after their own”, proselytising in favour of tight immigration controls, nationalism and protectionism to defend his racist America First manifesto had deeper echoes in the religious creed by which he was raised, and his electoral appeal to the Evangelical purists of the USA. 

A radio programme about “The Rapture” then reminded me about the Millennialists. Evangelicals around the world, and particularly in the USA, subscribe to a belief in notions of Armageddon and the Rapture. Their overtly emotional church services seek to produce sensations of elation and euphoria to emulate the sensations of everlasting rapture in the presence of Jesus Christ.

Like all religious beliefs, the Rapture was originally conceived of and written down by a mortal human being. In this case an Anglican Priest in Ireland, John Nelson Darby, developed the idea in the 19th Century. In short, it is one particular prediction of what might take place in the “End Times” of the material World, allegedly predicted in the Christian Bible should you care to be extraordinarily selective of text and verse.

In Darby’s vision, “True Believers” will be spirited away by Jesus Christ at the point of Armageddon, also known as “The Tribulation”, to enjoy The Rapture whilst those of us left on Earth will suffer seven years of pain and horror. After this, the True Believers will come back, inherit the Earth and enjoy one thousand years – “The Millenia” – of unbridled Happiness by God’s Grace.

There is a difference of opinion about exactly when Christ will return to save the Righteous. At the point of “The Tribulation” – a dramatic event from which it is obvious that the “End Times” have begun – some believe Christ will be on Earth to lead the righteous, others that he will return after the thousand years of happiness. This offers some the opportunity to proclaim themselves as the Son of God Returned, but that’s a side issue more useful in an essay on mental health.

Those who follow notions of Armageddon believe that the Bible is literal, conveys human history accurately, describes what is yet to come, and that the future is pre-determined. For the vast majority of us who feel little or no power or control over our own lives, the pre-determinist idea that “it’s meant to be” feels deeply reassuring and is easily accommodated to detract from the far more disturbing notions that our lives may be being horribly exploited, oppressed and confined.

People have always sought reassurance about The Future. In addition, the very experience of being a sentient human being demands that we rage against our own mortality. Life feeds a desire for everlasting life, even if we’re suffering the pain of subsistence. Surely, after all our travails there must be something more than this? 

In historical periods of huge social upheaval where the future appears unwritten, such as the current evidence of a coming Climate Catastrophe, predictive texts about potential salvation become particularly reassuring. The common sense of powerlessness certainly invokes notions of “what will be will be”, “it’s just how it is”, “the Universe is speaking”, and “the Earth will readjust itself irrespective of us”. It is easy to resign ourselves to Fate and the passivity of predestination.

The Book of Revelations in the New Testament relate to the prophesies of the Books of Daniel andEzekiel in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. Together they offer readers ideas about what might happen in the Future, and ultimately to humanity. 

Of course, belief systems are thoroughly impregnated and determined by the individual person’s emotional condition and consequent interpretation of the material world. We believe what feels right at the time, which is why beliefs can and do change, not least because of material changes to our circumstances. As the socialist, Karl Marx, suggested, social being determines social consciousness. 

The Millennialist, John Nelson Darby was a far-right wealthy Conservative with links to the high-Tory anti-democratic dynastic families the 1800’s. He was a strict Protestant Calvinist believing humans are born in Sin, shaped by God-given inequality, and can only achieve salvation and life everlasting through Jesus Christ. He interpreted the coming End of Times according to the turbulence of the period in which he lived – the 1820’s to 1890’s. He emigrated to the USA during the barbarous American Civil War, following the turbulence and the new technologies to where his ideas would be best admired by those opposing change and progress.

Throughout Darby’s life, Bourgeoise Democracy was beating back the privilege and autocratic rule of the old Aristocracy and land owners as the influence of the French Revolution spread. Capitalism was maturing, Feudalism decaying and Industrialisation was enhancing scientific understanding, within which the Christian churches were having to face and come to terms with deep challenges including Darwinism, the theory of evolution that contradicted the Bible in so many ways.

This very apparent destruction of the Old Order was seen by Darby and many of his ilk as the work of the Anti-Christ and a forewarning of the imminent End of Times. The world was now in the period prior to the Millennia, requiring an understanding of how believers should prepare, a creed of “pre-millennialism” as it became known.

Evangelicalism felt besieged in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. Darby formed his own pre-Millenial Movement in preparation for the Second Coming, The Plymouth Brethren (so-called because up to a thousand people took-up his Church in Plymouth, England as the largest congregation through the 1830’s). They crucially believe that there will come a period of time where God will offer a dispensation to the true believers, in line with the Book of Revelations. 

Darby’s ideas were later included in the Scofield Reference Bible published in 1909. Scofield was a Confederate Army veteran in America who became an evangelical Minister and simplified Darby’s annotated bible to a minimal populist tract. 

Scofield‘s Bible has become highly influential amongst the huge evangelical population of the USA and sold in the tens of millions. President Trump was raised in a family loyal to Scofield and in June this year Trump paid a formal visit to the McLean Evangelical Church to stand with a reading from Scofield’s Bible.  

The essence of this Fundamentalist belief system is that righteous mortals cannot truly understand God’s Will and should simply submit to it. The righteous will be scooped-up by God and find salvation. We should certainly not be swayed by material evidence of science or proponents of supposed Truth. To suggest we know the Truth is to defy the Lord.

So to Hell with the climate scientists. God is testing you when he allows us to find dinosaur bones that scientists suggest lived long before God created the Universe, so must be untrue. Likewise, God is testing you when extreme weather destroys your home and community. Should you submit yourself to living with and through such tests, your belief in the Eternal uwavering, then you will receive dispensation from God in the hour of Judgement. Innocence is Godly, every life ends in failure.

As in any religion, it gets complicated. Evangelicals believe all biblical writings are literally true. Darby suggested there are two messages in scripture and divides The Word into two tracks stemming forward from Abraham, one towards Judaism and the other Christianity. Whilst the Bible cannot contradict itself there are two messages in all scripture – one for Israel and one for the Gentiles.

For Darby, Biblical prophesy and especially the various offers of dispensation point towards the return of all Jewish People to Palestine to create a Jewish kingdom of Israel. This was well before the construction of Zionism. Lord Shaftesbury, the architect of British Imperial policy in the Middle East, was deeply influenced by Darby’s testament and this assertion of the destiny of the Jews. 

Darby’s “True Believers” were not followers of the Christian Churches which they condemned as too politicised and in fact were not supposed to have developed. God’s Will had been, according to Darby, that all humanity should embrace Jesus when he first came to Earth in which case no Christian Church would have been necessary. It’s development was a failure of humanity and not God’s intention. 

For these Christian Fundamentalists, the crucification of Christ drove a rift in time, getting in the way of the prophesies as a temporary aberration best exemplified by the development of the Christian Churches following the various Apostles as false prophets. Israel is God’s true intention, and at the time of the Rapture (Armageddon on Earth) the Apostle’s Churches will be judged whilst the true believers will sit beside God in judgement from their base in the State of Israel in Palestine. 

Sometimes, intellectual understanding is very hard, and the paragraphs above may take a moment of reflection before seeping into our emotional intelligence. The defence of Israel and in the final battle at Armageddon is a driving force in global politics today. The belief in the Rapture and indeed, emotional Hope for the End of days, may well be influencing politicians and their supporters to hurry it along.

And so we may better understand Climate Denial in this context. We are seeing global heating, extreme weather events, permanent droughts, pestilence, mass famine and mass migration because it is God’s true intention. After two thousand years of missed opportunity, now at last we are nearing the Rapture. To act against global heating is to act against the true will of God.

To shout out the word, “Hallelujah” is to almost inevitably feel a sense of elation. To truly believe in righteous and everlasting life is the most addictive of sensations. To have such an emotional high challenged or even dampened by assertions of material reality is nothing less than a call to arms. 

And so it is. The Climate Movement is, whether we want to be or otherwise, facing a civil war across all humanity. The Evangelical Movement in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, much of Africa and growing elsewhere, is a mass Movement is of reaction to earthly intervention towards our own salvation.

Following the logic of the text, perhaps the Rapture could be helped along, the Tribulation be brought forward, the horror be invoked, by the dropping of multiple nuclear warheads. Perhaps that’s God’s Will in the minds of our evangelical leaders. Perhaps not. 

Darby’s ideas came to have some basis in the real world. Every Great Lie has to include a kernel of Truth in order to be believed. After all, very few humans are truly stupid. Darby imagined, at the very height of the British Empire, that it would be defeated (almost unthinkable at the time), that the United Kingdom would break-up and Ireland become independent, that the UK would join a United States of Europe with it’s own currency, a clear sign of the Anti-Christ and portent of the lead-up to the Tribulation. 

These predictions have been used and updated time-and-again to offer proof that the Millennialist creed if factual. In the same way, various individuals have been condemned as The Anti-Christ at various points in the history of the twentieth century and beyond, usually those who publicly disagree with these fundamental truths.

But the references to the Bible  are particularly questionable. Darby and Scofield searched very many short sentences and obscure references in tiny tracts across the Bible to construct an evangelical Army of God, to prepare for and be empowered at the Rapture. To be brief, shortly after the Tribulation, in their vision, a specific individual will come down to Earth as the Anti-Christ. Jesus Christ will face the Anti-Christ in fierce battle to protect the true believers. At the same time the Anti-Christ will form an alliance with the developing Nation of Israel only to betray them, persecuting Jews, desecrating the temples, and demanding to be worshipped as God, his believers being tattooed with 666. The true believers who were taken up in the Rapture will now return to earth as the invading army of Jesus Christ to defeat the Anti-Christ. 

It was Scofield who identified and coined the exact place for the Battle of Armageddon he prophesied, the town of Megiddo in Israel, the site of biblical battles in 606BCE. The term Armageddon is used only once anywhere in the Bible and was purloined by Darby and Scofield in their construction of this super-fiction that has permeated world consciousness and infected world politics. Indeed, Apocalyptic novels and films are everywhere. 

Dispensationalist Pre-Millenialism, the technical term for Darbyism today, holds strong influence in the high churches of Christianity. It has come into the cultural and political mainstream. Howel Lindsey’s, “The Late Great Planet Earth” has more than 20 million copies, and the “Left Behind Novels” has sold 65 million copies and been made into three films. Hollywood routinely distribute top-selling movies with the underlying message of Zionism and the coming Rapture.

This cultural normalisation can explain the fervency of support for the State of Israel despite its’ occupation of the State of Palestine, and for the enormous campaign against alleged anti-semitism in the Labour Party despite it’s anti-racist Leader. 

As with Darbyism, the construction of Zionism as a political and quasi-religious tract was similarly written by a man. Theodore Herzl wrote his evocation to build a movement to ensure the return of the Jewish diaspora to Israel, or Zion, as it is referred to in the Old Testament. In terms of the quest to construct a Nation of Israel Zionism is a political movement yet for many it has become a religion, with significant and apparent overlaps between its selective references to the Old Testament, and those of Darby and Scofield. 

This, in turn, explains much of the fervent support for Israel by Fundamentalist and High Church Christians who believe in the Rapture and all its parts: Presidents Bush (both of them, obviously), Trump and his aides including Michael Pompeo (ex-CIA Director and current US Secretary of State) and Vice President Mike Pence, and ex-Prime Minister Blair amongst them. The belief that the Righteous must prepare for the final war, the Holy War, the war to end all wars, God’s war, may go some way to explain most of the wars of the past 200 years. 

There is indeed a hidden world of people in high places who follow Darby’s ideas. His complex writings and reference to historic and biblical scholarly tracts have impressed and impregnated scholars and intellectuals. In the 1990’s ,the prestigious and influential Regius Chairs of Divinity at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and comparable academics at Sheffield university and Queens’ University, Belfast, were all held by people who were either current or former members of Plymouth Brethren.

It should not be underestimated, the extent to which Christian Fundamentalism stands in the way of real progress towards minimising the very worst impacts of global heating and ecocide. The deepening crisis, decline and failure is explained away by Derby’s fundamentalism and not in a way that demands we act now. Darby was resolutely anti-democracy and anti-State, today offering a false-radicalism to populist libertarians. Dispensational pre-Millennialism is strong within the new Political Far-Right and has re-energised their movements worldwide. Darby and Scofield would be the first to cry, “know thine enemy”, and I think we need to be able to do the same.

Sunday 29th September 2019

The Prime Minister of Australia has condemned Greta Thunberg for creating “needless anxiety” amongst young people. His statement makes me feel very angry. Following Thunberg’s angry address to the United Nations, the Establishment and it’s lackeys have gone overboard to vilify and dismiss her rather than address the challenge of global warming.

“16-year old Greta Thunberg is too young to make her own mind up and has been groomed” argue exactly the same people who condemned the 15-year old British Muslim, Shamima Begum, for knowing exactly what she was doing in offering support to Islamic Fundamentalists, and ensured she was punished for her beliefs and actions.

You’re only too young when they want you to be. 

It is the same political agenda. When Scott Morrison, Australia’s Right-wing, religious conservative, coal-supporting, anti-migrant political leader, suggests the children should be given “context and perspective” he means they should adopt a specific ideological belief. Belief in Capitalism.

The United Nations has heard a raft of particularly right-wing world leaders so far this week, and Morrison will back them up, Trump, Bolsonaro et al, when he addresses this power-group tomorrow. Theirs is the creed of competition and accumulation of wealth, exploitation and oppression.

Clearly, Greta is getting in the way. And “belief systems” have always been at the heart of the struggle in any human society based upon class. Karl Marx, an early socialist, observed human history and suggested “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force..”

It stands to reason. If the majority of a society disagree strongly with the ideas generated by the ruling class and it’s outlets in the media, schools, universities and churches, then that elite can no longer rule. So long, that is, as the ideas of dissent lead to mass action.

I would suggest that ideas are born as much from our emotions as our intellect. An age old adage is that, whilst we can be told by politicians that “we’ve never had it so good”, when the final-demand bills for fuel and rent come through our letter box, our senses, heart and stomach tell us very powerfully that not all is well and we’re not in a good place. If we can’t pay the bills, all the Establishment propaganda in the world can’t convince us that the System is good and we’re fine as we are.

And so it is with the current emotional climate. Already the media of the global ruling class is shutting down and minimising the science and impacts of global heating, whilst their politicians are spouting denial at every opportunity. We’ve never had it so good!

It is those with strong vested interests in the current Capitalist System who are quickest to anger and denounce the climate protests. Their emotional response, seeping into a condition of hatred and quest for retribution, belies their condemnation of Greta and the youth Movement as over-emotional and immature.

Being “above politics” should not mean we take no notice of the statements of the Political Class, nor that we are “outside” of political debate. “Politics” being “of the People” by definition describes each and every human interaction that combines or disunites us. All our thoughts, feelings and actions are political by default, as they are only given context and validity by the response we receive from those around us. 

Those responses come from a political base. To demand System Change is to evoke feelings of support from those who have little faith in the System, and feelings of opposition from those who feel the System as it is works for them. We are not all on the same side, nor can we ever be, because System Change means those with abundance, privilege and power will have to give up too much. 

Greta should be on a roll. The Capitalist System has never worked and is certainly now not working for the overwhelming majority of people in every society across the world. And the System is very obviously destructive. Yet many, with illusions in the Capitalist Dream, choose not to believe the Climate Emergency, and are driven by hope for a better personal future to maintain trust in the current system and the status quo.

The Extinction Rebellion Movement, the School Strikes and other initiatives have not yet broken through. Despite the record size of current protests, only a tiny, a minuscule number of human beings are involved at this time. At the same time, the whole world is watching and waiting to be convinced.

This is why the leaders of nations are standing-up, one after another, and denouncing Greta. Some, like Trump, take the piss out of her. Others, like Bolsonaro of Brazil, challenge her head-on as he rushes to destroy the Amazon. And others still, like Morrison of Australia, belittle and seek to infantilise Greta and the youth strikes she has invoked. Their responses expose their anxiety.

The Climate Movement is engaged in an ideological struggle for hearts and minds, deep and divisive as it undoubtedly is. Putting forward ideas of democracy and mutuality – the Citizens Assemblies being just one manifestation – is of vital importance in our challenge to the power and domination of our current ruling classes.

The ruling class has the overwhelming control of communications worldwide – newspapers, internet servers, radio, TV, telecommunications in total. But history has proved that all the ruling class ideas in the world cannot convince us emotionally.

We can maintain beliefs contrary and independent to theirs and break their ideological stranglehold. To do so we must have our own media in order to publicly answer the likes of Morrison, Trump and Bolsonaro. We have to use all means to spread the facts, the scientific evidence and the call to action. And ultimately, to remain convinced, we must own our honest anxiety.

Wednesday 25th September 2019