I’m always elated when symbols of the far-Right get broken. The demise of predatory misogynists such as Weinstein, the end of South African Apartheid, the bankruptcy of the British National Party, the defeat of racist Trump – all moments in history offering me renewed faith in humanity and hope for the future.

Actually, they’re not moments at all but events in a continuous process. It took millions of women’s voices to shout out “Me Too” on the streets to have just one serial rapist jailed. The suffering through torture and murder of tens of thousands lead to the scale of global outrage and protest that finally dismantled the Boer’s white supremacist government. The thousands clashing with Police from Cable Street, through Lewisham and Welling to the mass campaign to defeat “Tommy Robinson”, many an Anti-Fa losing their livelihoods and opportunities for life through unjust arrests, altogether ensured that British fascism has never, to date, taken hold.

And Trumpism? There can be no doubt that the tens of millions actively involved in the Black Lives Matter Movement in the USA and beyond, the neighbourhood and community organising to expose and counter his cuts to Welfare and Health services, the teachers strikes for better funding for working class communities, and, not least, the millions on the streets challenging Trump’s Climate Denial, all built the foundation to Trump’s demise.

It is, therefore, simply not true that Biden has won the US Presidential Election, despite all the World’s media shouting the message out this morning. It is a victory, absurdly narrow and momentary, for the people who care so much as to put themselves out enough to build the vote, to campaign tirelessly and to hold their noses in support of another Billionaire figure of the very Establishment they are in constant struggle with. It was only a vote in a ballot, and a moment in time.

All these struggles continue, hopefully unabated, essential to be escalated. The process of seeking social justice for all appears still in it’s infancy given the scale and span of human history, and is certainly far from concluded: organised and institutional racism is still endemic; the scale of abuse against women is pervasive across all societies; and neo-fascism is rebuilding and growing fast on all continents.

This accurately labelled “descent into barbarism” is the product of the crisis of the system capitalism. Capitalism’s reliance upon Debt, corruption and more-than-all-that, exploitation of people and planet, ensures that we are subject to the most amplified and accelerating tensions on all fronts.

Trump’s defeat may offer us momentary pleasure but we can be excused for wondering why we still feel a tension and despondency in our hearts.

It is at this point, all issues, all paths, all fights must be informed by and focussed through the prism of global heating and the urgency of emissions reduction if we are to survive, let alone win the ultimate prize of Peace with social justice, self-determination and agency.

Biden will deliver absolutely nothing of this. My friends, family and co-activists are shouting with joy today that Biden has promised to have the USA sign up to the Paris Accord again, “on the first day of his Presidency”. We’ll see, but in any case the Paris Accord was woefully inadequate to address the threat of climate collapse projected in 2016 let alone in the light of the escalating emissions crisis since that time. It is a weak backstop brought to the fore in aid of Greenwash – the appearance of doing something whilst doing nothing. We should have no illusions.

Biden is a tried and tested protector of the status quo in an era when staying the same is a universal death warrant. For decades he has represented the Washington consensus crossing Party boundaries to protect the interests of Business. He was a backroom architect and ultimately vice-President through a period of the Democrats’ right wing “third way” policies: neoliberal free-trade agreements, huge tax-payers gifts to banks, “tough-on-crime” anti-working class legislation and militarisation of the Police, not to mention cuts to welfare spending and services. His President Obama waged more war with imperialist intentions than has Trump. The Black Lives Matter movement was forced into existence during the reign of a Black President!

His alternative Party of the Ruling Class, boastfully emulating moral and intellectual (as well as financial) superiority, appears to represent the middle class liberals, technocrats and professionals whilst really continuing the project of the financiers and Big Business Capitalists. If that sounds like an allegation from Trump’s populist base its’ because it is. Every Great Lie has to have a kernel of Truth for it to work.

Trump’s speeches this week maintained the Great Lie that his is the true voice of the working class. Biden’s persona of dignity and fair play only fed on the feelings of indignation and anger by a population largely without opportunity, effective healthcare or education. That’s why the vote was larger than ever before, and so many Black and working class people voted for Trump as to make “Biden’s victory” so thin.

Far-right populism isn’t going away, and neither will Trump’s army whether he continues as leader or not. And this climate-denying movement will offer Biden every opportunity to limit and water-down any measures against global heating emissions that could make a real difference. In other words, the two men symbolise the two-sides of the same coin – the continuation of the System that is destroying the world.

Just for this moment, we progressives deserve a well-earned sigh of relief that Trump has lost a second term as President of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. But, if we remain honest to ourselves we cannot feel joy or satisfaction. We can only gear ourselves up for the inevitable fights against the next President and everything he stands for. The demand has to be System Change, not symbolic change! Our existence depends upon it.

2020 horror? There are an enormous proportion of tweets and online posts offering the same antidote to this year’s challenges: “why can’t we just talk about positive things and stop all this negativity?”

My instant inner response each time is “Grow Up!”, although I’d never put that in print(!). I have often been left incandescent at the prissy call-outs to “be happy”, alongside what appears to be an all-but anti-human approach of “I know best”.

As far as I can surmise, such arrogance reflects a deeply reactionary self-consumed approach to life and society, a response to the current and ongoing global crisis that ultimately reflects far-Right “survival of the fittest” notions.

Of course, having my own blog allows me to vent and rant away without requiring anyone to listen, and publish my own observations upon the human condition for my own satisfaction. I need this outlet, and I guess that’s the same for others who similarly vent frustration and angst at anomie online.

Yet I can only observe the “Lovely, Lovely” approach to life as, not only deeply entitled, but twee. I perfectly well understand the mental health dangers of constant pessimism and hopelessness, but there is plenty to be pessimistic about, and, as a human emotion depression exists as an alert mechanism – a warning. To present otherwise is surely a descent into a different area of mental illness – asserting an emotional blindness to current challenges and the travails of others.

There’s a lot of such self-centredness around.

Just the responses to the outrageous levels of child poverty in the UK offers sufficient evidence of that. This week Parliament voted not to pay a paltry amount to feed children of poor families with a light lunch during school holidays. To a person, the self-centred spoke out to argue that State handouts create dependency and parents should struggle to stand on their own two feet, taking individual responsibility for their children’s diet.

The fact that more than 1 in 3 children in England and Wales live in poor households where one or more of the human necessities of life cannot be afforded is not to be acknowledged or dealt with. Ask why poverty is widespread, deepening, systemic, institutionalised? Instead, “why can’t they do what I do?”

There are similar reactions in responses to the Climate crisis, often by people who consider themselves progressive and even “Left-wing”.

Firstly, let’s be clear, there is no scientific argument. It is a matter of fact that the 16 clinically observed aspects of environmental and ecological degradation are at or past their respective Tipping Points.

To deny the scale of the challenge is to deny fact, yet the “Big Picture”, or rather, the holistic approach to campaigning to stop runaway climate change is most often neglected or denied.

The facts are too many to document in a single article, but just observe a few visions from the year 2020:

• the release of methane from ocean floors and Siberian permafrost;

• The loss of sea-life as the oceans acidify;

• the record-breaking high temperatures from the USA’s Death Valley to India’s Northern Phalodi;

• the equally never-seen-before scale of fires in California, Australasia, The Amazon and Syria’s Al-Suwayda Governorate; and

• the equally devastating floods in Rwanda, Bangladesh, Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia, Guyana, Italy, Indonesia, and the Adjara region of the country of Georgia;

not to mention the extraordinary pace of extinction of animal and insect life, and the evidence of never-before-seen in the last 3 million years environmental change, at a pace that dumfounds both the scientists and their computer models. This requires alarm, not comfort.

Yet, as an activist, I spend most of my time in online-meetings and reading tracts by well-meaning and equally well informed colleagues and comrades who seek to remain within the cosmetic spaces of day-to-day campaigning.

Each to their own, anyone doing anything is to be valued. I am not arguing that they should stop, only that the numbers who are actively challenging the System are far too few to be effective.

Neither am I arguing an either-or approach, demanding only revolutionary activity and damning all day-to-day reforms. I do both. I simply note that many of my friends and associates remain single-issue and defiant against calls for System Change, “doing” only the “cycling”, “rewilding”, “reuse” or “reduce use” single focus activities.

I don’t mind that it makes them feel better (I only wish they would do for me), but do mind when they pose their chosen hobby as “the answer”: “If only people would refuse to use plastic”, “People [the Others?] should be Vegan”, “oh, personally, I only ever use charity shops – consumerism is an addiction which I don’t have” (think about it).

Of course we need fewer cars, to walk and cycle more, to use less plastic and eat less meat, just as we need to buck the trends towards social intolerance and Fear of Others. But we have very little time in which to act before conditions ensure complete social collapse.

Historically, a deep social, political and economic crisis precedes revolution. This multi-faceted crisis, comprised of pandemic, economic and political corruption, extreme inequality of power and opportunity, war and climate collapse, is not going away.

This is our life from here on in. More of the same, and far worse, is on the way. But, as in all things, what we do matters and can shape the trajectory and outcome of the crisis.

It’s no good pretending. It’s the System! If politicians deny the climate emergency, either by word or inaction, they have to be challenged forthrightly, not politely requested to produce more cycle lanes or sow wild seeds, but to establish laws against global heating emissions, starting with the oil producers, arms manufacturers (the military are biggest polluters) and fossil fuel burners (car users being way down the list of targets).

To bang-on about re-wilding parks and pavements, rave about walking rather than driving, exude moral superiority for riding a bicycle, or pontificate about how nasty some politicians can be, may well be personally reassuring. I know I have my own pet passions. But none of these produce any real change, and certainly not the level of change needed.

As others document well, not least George Monbiot, the honest approach is to own the sheer scale and sonics of the challenge. Effective re-wilding is about ending industrial farming and transforming the management of areas the size of Dartmoor, the Lake District and the East Midlands. Planting tens of millions of trees.

By contrast, letting the football pitch at my local Victoria Park return to Dandelions, Lousewort and Yellow Rattle won’t make a heap of difference (except for the group of young asylum seekers whose use of the well-mown grass football pitch is a rare escape from the fear and tedium of imposed poverty).

Equally, ensuring homes are refitted to zero-carbon emissions will not be aided if the weeds (sorry, wild flowers) are protected and allowed to grow in the curtilages, walls and roofs with the ensuing destructive root damage and water intrusion to buildings. Flowers seed themselves everywhere. Fungus eats wood. We have to protect our homes, de-weed our vegetable patches, kill Russian Vines (the mile-a-minute Fallopia Baldschuanica) before they overwhelm us!

It is argued that these small-scale approaches offer education and patterns of change that add-up to large-scale changes. An oft-offered example is is recycling, now “normal” across the industrialised world. But look deeper and the majority of municipalities still burn or send to land-fill much of that which we have painstakingly recycled at home. Deeper still, smog-inducing tankers ferry our plastics to poor countries with no option but to dump our waste somewhere else. Recycling isn’t profitable enough as a money-making concern for the System to truly adopt it (but lets not talk about that).

Sometimes the twee moralism becomes anti-humanity in its holier-than-thou approach. “The World would be fine if only everyone else lived as I do”. Or worse still, “I hate humanity, the world would be better off without us!” Ugh, I can’t abide it! Humans may well be analogous to a bacteria, but there would be no life on Earth without such a marvellous mix of interactive lifeforms – especially bacteria! We are of vital importance to the Ecology!

Sharing the Planet with Nature requires that we offer management – of ourselves yes, but of other life forms that can be just as intrusive, rampant, predatory and destructive. There’s nothing benign about Nature, and whilst I’d want humanity to be as one with the metabolism of all Life, the notion of a “Return to Nature” is actually an argument for human extinction. We should not be apart from the Ecology, but as part of Life we should act upon it for our own survival.

So we need to be factual and scientific about what works and must be done to prevent runaway climate change. And seize the time. Stop playing around. It is the Capitalist System of production that exploits and destroys the ecology, and exploits and oppresses the majority of humanity in much the same way and towards the same extinction. Either it is ended or we end as a species.

These are Epic times. Why think small?

Practically, ending the domination of the internal combustion engine will not occur because we individually choose to give-up our cars but by laws that ensure oil and gas will, from henceforth, be left in the ground! And the biggest demand right now must be for the restructuring of the economy to produce millions of Green Jobs in this period of recession into economic (as well as emotional) Depression, which requires targeting Government and politicians, Corporations and businesses.

Why would we find happiness in living an illusion?

I’m sure I’m now seen as nothing other than an intolerant old man at these meetings, repeating the above endlessly and showing angst if not overt anger at the paucity of the debate and shallowness of aspiration. But so be it. The issues are of the future of human survival, not personal politeness.

Nevertheless I will now, once again, curb my ire and return to an online politeness in text and Zoom meet-ups. Only because alienating those around me is unlikely to encourage or build a movement of the scale needed for real societal change. Inside I am squirming and seething at the lack of proportionate response to existential threat: “shuffering and shmiling” as Fela Kuti would sing.

The human world is not a nice place in 2020 and isn’t about to get any nicer. Most of us (apart from the top 5% of the world’s wealthy few) are facing deepening discomfort. Rather than seek the soporific comforts of “feeling like we’re doing something”, we may as well make ourselves uncomfortable now and do things that really make a difference. That will require fighting for a different society, not just better cycle routes.

https://youtu.be/Y–5IlljO78

The current discussion is focussed upon mental ill-health caused by COVID-19. The focus is always upon the individual narrative. Radio and TV programs and newsreels constantly offer Vox-Pops of personal statements expressing feelings, focussing upon emotionality.

There’s much that is political propaganda in this. Immediately, I’m cursed for “reducing” or “denying” the serious impacts of pandemic related disease, sickness, bereavement, Lockdown claustrophobia, financial stress and debt, homelessness, domestic violence, social rage and deepening alienation.

Nope, mine is not a reductionist rant. It’s been months since I’ve felt able to write, the Summer offering some solace from gardening and cautious meet-ups post-Lockdown, but my stress and anxiety levels have been high, and I know I’m far from being alone in feeling alone and powerless. I am not one to minimise mental distress.

The problem with the focus upon the rise in mental ill-health is the dominant quasi-scientific approach of “biomedical psychology”. As my compatriot, Iain Ferguson identifies, there’s nothing wrong or abnormal with a response of anxiety to pandemic conditions – such emotions must be usual and collective human reactions to such stressful circumstances.

Yet the Capitalist propaganda machine identifies “Health”, mental and physical, as our personal and individual responsibility, even though viruses clearly require societal collective responses for mutual safety – masks, hygiene, sanitation, public refuse collection and decontamination, hospitals, ventilators, vaccines – little of which can be reduced to the level of individual production.

The response has to be societal. The current dominant cultural demands of neoliberal individualism and consumerism force us to believe we are at fault if we live in damp rented accommodation, its our fault if we can’t afford a low-fat low-sugar diet, its up to us to beat obesity by running each day, checking our steps and heartbeat on our Apple Watches.

The most scant and blurred check of personal and household income in Britain quickly proves that a huge proportion of us lack any choice in our living conditions, living in various degrees of poverty. Indeed, with the economic crisis stemming not only from COVID-19 but from the long oil-slick of the 2008 banking crash, around 4 million of our children live in poverty and over 1 million households rely upon charitable food banks.

That’s the stuff of stress and anxiety. Its not you. Levels of mental distress were high in this country well before COVID hit. Isolation, inequality, poverty, women’s oppression and racism are all structurally endemic in Capitalist society and each ensures fluctuating degrees of distress response.

The System, based upon judging people on their workability, condemns millions to lack of access, lack of choice, and resulting mental ill health, mostly encapsulating self-blame and self-hatred. It’s such ideology, and the corresponding media propaganda, that condones the cuts to mental health services to minimal levels.

One aspect of the current focus on mental health is now labelled “moral distress”, suddenly exposed and espoused by media from BBC 4’s Women’s Hour to “long-reads” in Guardian. I find it a fascinating revision of any consideration of political dissonance from the ruling ideas of the Capitalist Class.

Without seeking to clearly define this category of mental ill-health, it’s worth referring the outline concept to my friends, colleagues and comrades in the Climate Movement. The more we read the Science, we witness the extreme weather events and their aftermath for swathes of humanity (not to mention the mental anguish generated every time we project forward a few years in our imagination), the more “moral distress” appears to overwhelm us.

The moral distress of ecological and climate destruction leads us to the same self-blame and self-hatred borne of the powerlessness felt in other contexts. Such individualisation of the challenge, promoted by adverts from British Petroleum, The Sun “newspaper”, Prime Minister Johnson and those cleverly distorted journalists précis’ of Attenborough programmes, drives many activists into ever more alienated and pointless, self-denying activities.

It is claimed, falsely, that it is your plastic-use, your method of home heating, cooking, diet, attire, even breathing, that is the root of the problem. All this, despite the fact that you have little control over any of them (air pollution being a case in point).

In short, unless you’re an oil business billionaire (massive land-owner, corporate farmer or arms manufacturer), it’s not your fault! You didn’t create Capitalism. COVID-19 is a collective challenge and requires a collective, societal, pro-humanity response. So is Global Heating. Focus upon the methods of production that create deadly pandemics and emissions. Turn your pent-up emotions outwards, join together, and tear-down the System!

Yesterday, the latest Domestic Abuse Bill finally passed through the UK Parliament. We’ve campaigned for it for at least the last 5 years and should celebrate despite it having been mauled by misogynist MPs and neutered by the destruction of the Legal Aid system. Clearly Law-making is only ever incremental.

At last, the emotional coercion as well as physical and economic abuse and coercion of adults who are or recently have been living together has been addressed in Law. Children in households where there is abuse between adult family members are, for the first time, recognised as suffering from the same abuse.

The formal recognition of emotional harm caused by abusive behaviours, for example slandering the victim as “crazy” or abusive (known as “gaslighting”), is a valuable addition to the long list of how individual humans can control another and render them powerless. This comes at a time when reports of domestic abuse have more than quadrupled during the COVID-19 Lockdown.

During the same period, the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder by Police of George Floyd in the USA has raised the level of debate about Power-and-Control behaviours, both personal and institutionalised. The knee pressed on the neck until dead is a graphic symbol of illegitimate power, and allows us now to extend our exploration of the more subtle behaviours that restrict or deny our ability to breathe.

At a tangent, the debate about a “Woman’s Right to Choose” and abortion rights continues unabated, with the notion that an individual has the right to be in charge of their own body (and nobody else’s) still ludicrously contentious. Add to that the very loud arguments about whether Transgender people have the right to be recognised as women if they so choose, dividing feminists and misogynists alike, and all issues of individual liberty and human rights remain far from resolved.

We live in ideologically-febrile times, but probably always have. The divisions in the vast array of potential “ways of seeing” across all of humanity have constantly led to camps, ideological groupings, sects, parties and conflict. The human imagination that has empowered us to conceive of ideas, constructions and actions that raise us to the top of the food chain comes at a high cost.

We are able to love and hate, build and destroy, care and ignore. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, we can hear without listening, see without understanding. We are all able to abuse. We therefore have to control and manage ourselves. We simply cannot be free to do what we want, any old time.

This raises questions, not only about the limits to potential freedoms and self-determination, but of human entitlement. In the context of person-to-person abuse, domestic abusers (the vast majority being men) consider themselves entitled to control and manipulate their intimate partner, if not their entire cohort of family and friends, by virtue of their maleness.

Having spent much of my lifetime employed as a statutory social worker intervening in cases of domestic abuse, I have some understanding of the dynamics of power-and-control relationships.

I have explored, through personal experience as well as academic study, the societal mechanisms by which the behaviours of the controller and the controlled develop, accelerate, become enmeshed, maintained and amplified. Belief systems are developed and embedded in order to explain away and normalise the abuse. Crucially, the abuser learns to feel entitled to behave in that way.

I’m in no doubt that all notions of entitlement stem from societal norms and cultural requirements, not innate “human nature”. We are socialised into basic expectations of “acceptable” behaviour, and any scan of different societies can identify the rainbow coloured span of legitimate ways of living. There is no one normal.

So people appear to choose to live under threat and in fear rather than defy the prescribed social norms. At societal level, millions can live under brutal dictatorships for decades, surviving in the shadows enjoying secret symbolic acts of defiance or illegitimacy. Drinking during Prohibition, reading banned books, daring to seek prohibited sexual encounters. Small acts that assuage the death-defying demand to challenge the entire system.

Unequal personal relationships often include similar token defiance. The oppressed and abused mouth-off behind the abusers back, but know to don the false-smile when together. And the pay-offs, usually summed-up by “better the devil you know…”, keep the relationship going. Such co-dependency is a prominent form of dysfunctional relationships, a dynamic that answers the throw away question of “why does s/he stay with him?” The more thoughtful question should be, “what are the barriers that prevent the victim from leaving?

We become locked into habits, familiarities and dependencies however destructive, for fear of the unknown. In this example, in a male-dominated society, a woman leaving her abuser runs the gauntlet of economic hardship as well as isolation and social stigma. The stereotype of the passive, caring and emotional woman is proven by the converse societal damnation of her assertive and challenging alter-ego.

Humans are so fabulously expansive in our potential conceptions and behaviours that we have to learn how to behave in any given society, and adapt to do so. Racism is learnt. Sexism is learnt. Homophobia is learnt. Religiosity is learnt. Good and Bad are social constructs. A deeply unequal and stratified society has to necessarily teach inequality and the righteousness of superior over inferior human beings.

Our base drives, complex in their minute-by-minute execution, come down to the comparatively simple inter-relationship of identity and survival. What I have to do to feel valid and what I have to do to be safe enough. Perception is key. And the “pay-off” – the value of holding on to what is rather than escape into the unknown – keeps us placed in the most extreme and absurd of situations.

If society teaches me that, as a man I have rights over women, or my lighter skin offers me power over people of colour, then I can feel comparatively valued and secure. At least I’m better off than them. “Tuppence ha’penny looking down at tuppence” as my Dad used to say. By this adage we all learn our place in the scheme of things. The abused may well believe that its right that s/he’s abused, because society says so, even if it seriously limits the ability to breathe.

It is Society that invokes our preferred attributes, including any and all human rights and entitlements. There is nothing essential or inalienable about any of them. I am given the “right” to control my partner only if those around me allow it. I can get away with enslaving others for my own benefit, on whatever contrived and spurious grounds, until I’m prevented from doing so. My judgements of “others’ as better or worse than me can only be validated by a society that condones hierarchy and competition.

Which brings us to the horrid quandary of the degree of societal change essential to prevent climate-driven human extinction. It is the class-laden layers of entitlements, seemingly bestowed upon the people of those societies most hectic in promoting global heating emissions, that ensure we maintain abusive behaviours towards the Environment as well as each other.

At a societal level, the most CO2-emitting North Western countries bestow the “Right” to fresh clean drinking water, electricity, housing and health care upon its citizens in return to gross exploitation and oppression. The least polluting peoples, seemingly because they’re the least economically developed, are not entitled to these comforts, even tho’ it is the natural resources within their national boundaries that overwhelmingly provide the entitlements for the better off. Western societies abuse the Global South for our own benefit and at their victims’ abject expense.

On a personal level, the size of diamond displays the validity of his love for me, whatever shackles it also portrays or exploitation it requires before display. My car bestows my status, never mind its CO2 rating and lung-damaging pollution; my employment secures my place in the scheme of things, even if being a qualified aircraft engineer (after 5 years of hard graft for which I deserve recompense and acknowledgement) contributes massively to environmental destruction; the home temperature from my central heating system ensures my comfort, whether the use of fossil fuels is sustainable or not.

It’s difficult to argue that we benefit from carbon-based economies when they are destroying the environment upon which we depend for survival. But how do we end the current individual and collective buy-in to ecological abuse? Society says and structures life to proclaim that I need a car (despite its cost) and makes life harder without one. How can I be strong enough to walk away?

To lower emissions by the mind-boggling scale required to prevent societal breakdown and ecological Armageddon, we have to address and change all current notions of Human Entitlement. If we can challenge entitlements in relation to domestic abuse or white supremacy, why can’t we do the same to prevent environmental abuse?

We don’t need to exert power in order to feel safe and warm in an intimate relationship. Negotiation, empathy and sensitivity offer a far deeper, more enjoyable and rewarding partnership. Children who grow-up appreciating the value, including the true cost, of things tend to have a broader and more cooperative relationship towards everything and everyone around them. Perhaps we don’t need central heating after all.

Environmental destruction is the most powerful of all abuse because it impacts negatively upon all Life. Can an abuser change perception and behaviour? I can authoritatively say “yes” because I’ve seen it happen so many times. Individuals can and do learn, adapt and change. We can learn not to abuse.

By the same token, “survivors” are, by definition, the people who have stood up and walked away from the abuse. The most over-stated cry of the support worker is, “if he’s hit you, he’ll do it again and next time it’ll be worse still. You can’t change him, its time to leave.” The walk into the unknown may be frightening but generally not nearly as fearful as the day-to-day tremble of the abusive home environment.

Yet, through the past five decades the proportion of domestic abuse households hasn’t changed, no matter how many individuals have passed through therapeutic intervention to learn better behaviours. Hence yet another Law. It is clear from history that outlawing domestic abuse will not work unless male dominance as a norm is systemically challenged and unlearnt.

Whilst stemming from different root causes, the same goes for constructs of white supremacy, and indeed for acceptance of global heating emissions. Such abuse should not just be frowned upon, but decried, exposed and constantly challenged, as well as prohibited. But right now, those refusing to comply with the abuse, facing-up to the abusers, challenging and changing behaviours, are still derided and stigmatised by a society defending its’ entitlements.

Can humanity stop abusing the environment? The analogy with domestic abuse suggests not fast enough if left to the slow-burn of one-by-one learning. While one person has unlearnt the abusive behaviours another has just started to enact what society has taught. The bright red Emergency Stop button controlling the conveyor belt has to be pressed, hard.

Ending environmental abuse requires societal change. It probably does mean a period of discomfort whilst building a new normal. It will require strong laws against the abusers – in this case the Corporations who are currently protected in their psychopathy. And, as with the misogynist abusers, they’re likely to fight back against any and all personal liability or accountability.

Progress depends upon the joined-up force of all movements against abuse. At base, the societal conventions that legitimise exploitation and oppression sit alongside the tenets that allow ecological destruction. At all levels of society we must pursue demands for equality not supremacy, cooperation not competition, the prioritisation of sustenance over accumulation, sharing not owning, sufficiency over avarice. But mostly, the end of any provision of entitlement without responsibility.

My recent discussions around Climate, through this period of mass protest that “Black Lives Matter”, have been tense. Meetings and online forums appear to be spinning in repetitive circles much like the swirling weather fronts rumbling across the Atlantic. The impasse created by, on the one side, COVID-19 Lockdown and on the other, spontaneous and death-defying outrage at State murder of people based upon their skin colour, appears to have rendered the Climate Movement almost paralysed.

As a microcosm of all that I have become abrupt and over-assertive (I hope not abusive) during online meetings where the same-old-same-old is being proposed, completely disregarding the febrile and era-announcing social upheavals taking place. The political tensions are enormous and raise the spectre that the status quo cannot hold. We have to push.

Our side must put actions before words, and yet, little is happening other than cleaning plastic from beaches and scrawling names of wild flowers on pavements, the best to save them from Roundup’s toxic glyphosphates. The analogy works out – if we don’t push forward with mass revolt to save the Planet and ourselves, we’ll succumb to being gassed, too.

So below is my response to a well-meaning and honest reformist seeking to build political alliances with local politicians in order to win change: cuts to emissions and the move away from the carbon economy. we share the sense of urgency but my impatience got the better of me and caused upset. For that, I’m sorry.

“Oh dear. I am in a state of almost constant heightened awareness/alert about “things climate”. I’ve read too much, and keep on doing so. My ancient optimism and long-lived positive outlook has been so deeply dented that I have developed an impatience not seen in earlier life. Perhaps I’m simply experiencing the inevitable “Victor Meldrew” grumpy-old-man syndrome. Every reflective experience is one of “Groundhog Day” – how many times must we go round the same discussions and arguments that have failed so dismally for decades? Rather than patiently explain myself, I’ve become snappy, and I sincerely apologise for that. My time with the local Extinction Rebellion Group allowed a completely fresh approach, consciously recognising that “the old ways hadn’t worked” and demanding direct action in order to challenge “The Power”. Along with the school student strikes enticed by Greta Thunberg, they worked. So much so that the conspiracy theorist would argue that the COVID-19 Lockdown was made-up in order to quash the revolt. I don’t think that for one moment, and in any case, as we see with Black Lives Matter worldwide, (or the Hong Kong revolts, or strikes in China) it hasn’t worked completely. Rather, there is a distinct confusion of direction. The protests had their time, so what’s next. And, as someone informed by the Climate Justice group, a radical international organisation engaging India and Africa, and the World Social Forum, an all-embracing global Movement of Movements, I see the debate as testing the most hardened campaigners worldwide. No-one has the answers. As I said at our Zoom meeting, the unquestionable science is of an acceleration of the indicators of climate collapse far beyond the computer models. 12 of the 16 measurements of environmental stability have now passed their tipping points. We’re on the brink. At the same time, there is a worldwide crisis of democracy, rendering the People’s voice and wishes redundant. It is not irrelevant to the discussions in small UK town like ours that there is a huge rise in the number of far-Right governments, oppressive in many ways but united in their Climate Denial. Local municipal political bodies, such as UK elected Councils, are also steeped in corruption and political dogma…and ours is no exception.So I’m over sensitive to reinventing the wheel, repeating the mantra, revisiting lost ground, rehearsing ancient plays (when there is contemporary art full of new forms available), or rolling that boulder back up the mountain side even one more time. The issue for me is the powerlessness of the people, and I get most cross whenever The People are blamed for not utilising the Power they don’t have. The argument of consumer power is the most pernicious. Only those with sufficient independent resources can afford to choose what and where to buy or boycott. The vast majority of us have limited means, our essential requirements owned and controlled in a wholly dictatorial mode (rented accommodation, price of foodstuffs, rate of pay for the job or level of Universal Credit, access to education, even access to healthcare despite the NHS – long ago stripped of any democratic control). The lack of resource is astounding, rendering half the population unable to live outside the very “Now” of life – looking back at our own history is too painful, and looking forward equally distressing – the poorest amongst us just have to get on with coping today, living for today in tiny bubbles of close-horizons and scrimped diet. Best not to think at all about reality, history or generations hence – best live in a dream of TV and drugs. The bottom 50% of UK society shares less than 20% of GDP, the poorest 20% have a disposable income as a household (not person) of less than £13k per year whilst the top 20% average £70k. One in three of our children live in poverty with precarious access to diet, housing, education and health. In the Western end of our poor City, the unskilled working class man has a life expectancy 15 years lower than his contemporary as a skilled male 2 miles to the East .And then there’s the media lies and propaganda concoctions that dull and divert public consciousness away from the things that matter. For example, were we to put a Press Release out today about methane release, our words would evaporate in front of the heat generated by the death of Dame Vera Lynn at 103 years old. More than 80% of all our media (on-and-offline) is owned by 5 individual billionaires who control the messages, to their own advantage, of course. The resulting broadcasts, so dull and banal that most don’t even listen, meaning the small nuggets of fact and reason that we manage to get through the censor’s net often falls on stony ground. So your proposal for mapping where the power lies is, for me, very straight forward but very little to do with seeking-out individual councillors in a rotten borough where Councillors have no freedom of thought or action from their Political Party’s contrived message for short-term electoral gain. We’ve done it to death, tested it to destruction, and by all that is sacred, its a tattered corpse. I’m personally averse to trying again, although I recognise that each generation has to test out afresh and learn the lessons for themselves. I simply wish we could better learn from history. What’ll it take? A critical mass of bodies heaped into death-defying action in the face of overwhelming odds, in a reckless and selfless bid for the survival of humanity in some form? Well, I’m not quite so pessimistic, nor a nihilist. There are uprisings, there is a developing consciousness in a proportion of the young, worldwide, that offers huge hope. And they are tearing down the statues. No more status quo. Not going through the same old rigmarole. Right now the Establishment are trying to incorporate as many of them as they can before they send in the politically-driven Police to round-up the doggedly non-compliant, but there is a huge Movement afoot. I refuse to become oppositionist against anyone trying to do anything towards human progress. But we each have only so much energy and mine is waning. Let a million flowers bloom. I simply cannot have faith in turning or replacing at least 26 local Councillors into hardened environmentalists who recognise that we must cut emissions drastically enough to ensure global cuts to production that result by 2030 in all oil being left in the ground and zero-emissions soon after. With our little town in poll position? Really? I think we need to shout the facts of science and offer symbols of the terrible impact of global heating now, in every way possible wherever we can, in public and with drama. We need to link with an international Movement of Movements to a point where workers collectively take strike action and close down the polluting and carbon-emitting workplaces and transform society root-and-branch. That’s why I like XR’s “speak Truth to Power” although my experience of that organisation (as with most) is the difficulty in determining whose “Truth” predominates. I prefer Facts. Let’s push the facts. Let’s bombard public discourse with climate facts. There’s tons. And tear down the symbols of fossil fuels. The final analysis, tho’, is that Oil and Capitalism are intrinsically linked and inseparable, just as is the System wholly reliant upon the institutional racism currently fomenting protest. I have to observe that you cannot end the one without ending the other. The challenge on all fronts is Capitalism as a System that can and must be replaced, and that means linking all the issues and movements in common cause, not deferring at all to the old structures.

Thanks for your tolerance. Lovely to talk. Love and Struggle, Tony

And in other news…the CEO of the oil company seeking to build a pipeline between Edmonton and Vancouver says COVID-19 offers the very best time to start the building work, because protests of more than 15 people are outlawed! I admit to a growing sense of pent-up anger. Must be Lockdown fatigue.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that profiteers and gangsters use any and every crisis in order to plunder profit out of human misery. Indeed, since the time of Kissinger and the USA’s war in Vietnam, imperialists as the most dominant Capitalists have recognised the profits that can be made from actively creating crises for which they have already manufactured the most convenient, immediate and lucrative solution.

War makes big money for big business. So can ill health. Make it so.

As an example, the entire class of owners of industries and natural resources are in a frenzy looking at how to use the global pandemic to make more money. Of course, the primary focus may be on the creation of a cure, a vaccine that can be sold to hundreds of millions at a profit. Big money returns require that the Big Pharma provider can set its own price, as opposed to State regulated health services that can set a ceiling enforced by Law.

Little wonder that Bill Gates is investing big-style to capture the private health market worldwide, or that the Chief Adviser to the UK Prime Minister, Dominic Cumming’s visit to Barnard Castle appears suspect when the site is best known as the headquarters of the Big-Fraud-Big-Pharma company, GlaxoSmithKline. The self-aggrandising Corporate State came of age some time ago.

But the crisis caused by COVID-19 is also allowing for a great deal of corruption elsewhere, as well as the obfuscation of “most other news” including wars and plane crashes, but especially in relation to global heating.

A number of records for the Earth’s climate were set in 2019: It was the warmest year without a major El Niño event ever recorded at surface temperature, and the warmest year on record for ocean heat content, which increased markedly between 2018 and 2019. Last year also saw record lows in sea ice extent and volume in the Arctic and Antarctic for much of the period between April and August, while global sea levels and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations reached new record highs in 2019 and the world’s glaciers continued to melt at accelerating rates.

I’m writing this in a continuing heatwave across Britain, our local reservoirs extremely low although we’re not even at the end of May. Yet there have been snow storms in Eastern Turkey and record temperature rises in the Arctic. Cyclone Amphan destroyed the ecologically fragile region of the India-Bangladesh border, the record sea temperatures of the Bay of Bengal sweeping the super-typhoon inland through the mangrove forest last preserves of the Bengal tigers and destroying towns and homes, displacing at least 3 million people.

So when Alberta’s energy minister, appropriately called Sonya Savage, tells oil-drilling contractors to celebrate, I can’t help my anger. The recommencement of pipeline construction is the hallmark of Business as Usual. The Old Normal.

COVID Lockdown has not reduced C02 levels increasing in the atmosphere because there’s a significant time lag between close-downs of emissions and reduction in global warming gases. The pandemic has shown us, however, that human societies can change behaviours overnight; massively reducing oil use from Internal Combustion Engines, planes and cruise liners; finding thousands of billions of pounds to invest in infrastructure and people. That’s worth reading twice.

Here we are at the centre of the most gross contradictions. One global crisis proving we can change and adapt, the other even more perilous crisis being neglected and denied by Governments and Businesses. All the time the poorer peoples of the less developed economies and the Global South face mounting immiserisation, displacement into crowded and vast refugee camps, trapping them in discomfort and disease and a life shortened and degraded to a greater extent than any virus can do on its own.

It is the Capitalist mode of production that has caused the Pandemic, as predicted, and the Capitalist System’s deep and obsessive reliance upon fossil fuels that has caused this climate catastrophe. It is still the case that we face human extinction within two or three generations because temperatures are rising towards 6 degrees above pre-industrial norms. And it is the case that we will soon see more viruses to live and die by.

As the lockdown evaporates before its time in order for the Capitalists to resume their quest for profit growth rather than human survival, those of us who care about climate and people are re-emerging from our caves. My experience of countless Zoom meetings and web-based social messages is currently all consuming. With the manifestos for Green New Deals across the world identifying how a New Normal, a low-emission, Just and inclusive global economy is now possible, we should enjoy a surge hope and excitement.

The growing Climate Movement, briefly stalled but still with the millions who protested through 2019, is ready once more. Yet I am pessimistic. I’ve probably been indoors too long. All the discussions and debates I’m reading and engaging with state the solutions large and small, on a grand scale and in minutiae. But precious few activists are even beginning to state what needs to be done for it to be achieved, and no-one, apart from the Savages of this world, are recognising that protest is now illegal.

I find it frustrating. How do we achieve the New Normal? Governments worldwide are pushing back human protections and returning to an even deeper and more offensive exploitation of people and Planet as I write. New and draconian laws have been put in place under the excuse of Pandemic but to be maintained to prevent a return to mass mobilisation. And the buzz of oil-guzzling traffic is once again drowning out the new-found songs of wild birds.

I’m tired of talking about what could be. I’m disillusioned with the individual actions to limit plastics, recycle cardboard, collect litter and rewild the verges of paths and roadways. The destruction of life, both the day-to-day enjoyability of living and the extinction of entire species, is escalating exponentially. My conscience cannot be salved through symbolic actions.

What will it take to raise the level of political, economic and social revolution required to beat back the savages and achieve the New Normal? Nothing less than revolutionary leadership, coordinated and general strike actions against the centres of production, and a renewed mass class consciousness and realisation that we are experiencing escalating barbarity that will only consume humanity unless we achieve global system change. This is the fight for life.

The ancient Corinthian philosopher, Diogénēs, squatted and emptied his bowels in a well-timed and orchestrated act in front of an, up-to-this-point, rapturous audience. He wished to express his cynicism towards their lifestyles. His expression of contempt was to expose the hypocrisy of the informed and educated elite, happy to live with gross class inequality, slavery, opulence and corrupt personal power, but their sensibilities outraged by seeing another human being shit – a daily basic fact of life for us all.

It’s a basic rule across all classes – don’t shit on your own doorstep. Unless you don’t give a crap. And that appears to be the attitude of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his senior adviser (if not puppet-master), Dominic Cummings. The people who created the Lockdown Rules (against their own basic instincts, it has to be said, and too late to prevent thousands of unnecessary deaths), broke those laws from the very beginning and, when found out, have defended their right to break them.

The Elite are decent people, you see, as oppose to us common drunkards and n’er-do-wells. Cummings has been presented to us as simply a caring father (again, suggesting most of us Plebs aren’t), and did the “right thing” by travelling and walking publicly while infected with COVID-19, which, by contrast, most of us are not responsible enough to be trusted to do.

There is a much needed public outcry. Not just at the act itself but at the attempts by the most powerful politicians as well as friends and family to keep it all secret for months. It’s so good to see people spontaneously turning-up outside the Cummings’ London house and chanting their outrage, let alone the advertising trucks broadcasting Johnson’s original lockdown message onto his doorstep.

But this outcry may be misplaced. Are we simply smelling the Number 2 and not analysing the underlying message? This is the man who has publicly stated that: “Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don’t care about the NHS.”

Has Big C carefully choreographed every quote and act in order to cut the crap?

The elite had managed to have The Mob lock ourselves away for the best part of two months, largely lagging behind the responses of most other governments worldwide (apart from the USA). They acted at all times reluctantly because, as ideological eugenicists, they wanted to let the virus become part of public life, the fittest able to survive and the infirm and disabled freeing-up the inadequate social infrastructure by dying.

They knew that having 2-300,000 people die, the projected scientific figure if no action was taken, might threaten their power. As it is, the 80-120,000 deaths they are projected to be liable for appears workable as a compromise. Nevertheless, it is now time to end the pretence and force us all out of Lockdown and back to work. After all, they have a 60+ working majority government and no effective opposition.

Support for Johnson’s government has weakened to that of last December’s election, not exactly a signal of mass revolt. But the carefully constructed mixed-messages from Cumming’s Number 10 haven’t confused the public enough to no longer care. And, most importantly, the campaigns putting People before Profit, developed from the bottom-up to force trade unions and working class tribunes to act, have had some effect.

By last week the Government was on the back foot, fully cognisant of the growing opposition most apparent in the refusenik teachers and parents saying no to returning to schools on 1st June. How to break this inertia in the plan for “herd immunity”?

The first tactic of any Ruling Class is to divide the mass so to rule. So they protected their supporters with tax-payers money whilst herding the slaves back-to-work, carefully protecting the message of staying safe to appease their furloughed base whilst doing nothing practical to keep the workers healthy.

Then they condemned the dissenters and doubters as “becoming addicted to staying at home”, loosening the messages to ensure their right-wing cohort (within the Mob as well as their own Upper Classes) ran to the countryside and beaches in a party frenzy. COVID-19 was back on the loose to be caught and spread for a Second Wave that would do the job that the Lockdown had impeded.

And the Cummings’ controversy? They know it’ll blow over, the small bunch of Tory dissenters exposed to be culled once “all this” is over, with deep questions of democracy and plebiscite left hanging in the air. But how do you finally break the resistance and reinstill an “everyman for himself” (they are misogynists after all) mentality after Lockdown? Best to act by example.

Let’s “leak” the facts about Cummings’ family trips and offer the “any decent father would do the same” message of patriarchy, individual reliance, family-first survivalism and personal choice over social responsibility. Yep, breaking the Lockdown rules was the right thing to do.

But perhaps I’m just being cynical.

I agree generally with the Klein doctrine of Crisis Capitalism. There is no doubt that the social and economic system under which we live lurches from one crisis to the next. The crises are the direct consequences of how the system works, effectively produced by the dominant mode of production – exploitation and accumulation.

Competition creates war, accumulation produces famine, alienation creates hatred (of self as well as others). The dominant ideology of Capitalism divides in order to rule through white supremacy, male domination, physical elitism and most of all, fear of the unfamiliar “Other”.

Now, COVID-19 has been used to compound the privatisation of the individual as the unit of consumption. As a starting point, being packed together in the forced-family unit has inevitably caused a further rise in domestic abuse of children, women and older relatives. And COVID-19 has usefully created the latest “Other” to be fearful of and consumed by. We all want to be free of it.

Deeper, and more powerful still, is the powerlessness that has been instilled in us all. Whether we are feeling ineffective against the virus itself, at the whim of air-currents or touched-surfaces, or in the hands of an untrustworthy government offering contradictory advice, we have seldom felt more alone in our self-isolation.

Such “loss of Agency” – the correct political term for self-determined choice and action – creates passivity, as does lack of exercise or purposeful activity. Generally, as a sensation, the less you do the less you feel the energy for doing. Conversely, the more you do the more energy appears available. If you want something done, ask a busy person!

I have found the Lockdown to be deeply affecting. I have stopped writing whilst having all the time in the world to think. On the one hand I’ve busied myself with gardening in order to stop the fearful thoughts, and on the other scoured all media by the hour for information by which to make some sense of this crisis. The effect, the synthesis, has been to live in limbo.

I’m waiting for the crisis to be over. It will be over, won’t it? Or is, as Klein suggests, global Capitalism now based upon lurching us from one crisis to the next in order to prevent any coagulation of thought and experience by which to agree upon a better future: a real change of system?

Our powerlessness is essential to maintain the status quo: accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few; endless wars; mass poverty; mounting exploitation and climate collapse. And in such isolation we can contrive just about any set of opinions about reality and Truth. The mind in a vacuum, filled with emotion, can imagine anything it likes. Ideas overtake reality.

So it is that we have seen the attempt, worldwide, of protests against the Lockdown by people proclaiming liberty and freedom from the tyranny of the State. COVID is presented as Conspiracy. Attempts last weekend, following the UK Prime Minister telling all to go back to work, to have parties in local public parks fell flat. Clashes with police at Hyde Park’s Speakers Corner showed protesters, undeniably fascist in motive, proclaiming “freedom of speech and action” against the far-right Tory government they probably voted for just months ago.

Those who would deny human rights on the basis of their skin colour let alone ethnic background, now proclaimed freedom of assembly as a fundamental human right. By way of response, mainly virtual, anti-fascists condemned the assemblies and called-upon the working classes to “stay at home” despite the opening-up of Lockdown.

Superficially it would appear, the worm had turned. The Right were now proclaiming “Freedom,” the Left, social control. The far-Right who seek totalitarian White supremacy faked an anti-State stance, the Left apparently supported the eugenicist, racist far-right government.

Confusion, part of Klein’s “Fear Doctrine”, has been assured. But only if there is no method by which to test and understand reality. For budding Marxists, dialectical materialism offers such a method. Learn from past historical experiences, acknowledge situational facts over ideological presumptions, assess the societal conditions of the time as well as the motivations behind people’s actions.

In short, there is a Reality but only understandable in hindsight because everything is in a state of flux and therefore constantly changing. The “flux” is the point in the middle of the tension between all opposing forces. That takes a bit of working on. Over simplification ends up suggesting “thesis, antitheses, and synthesis”.

So the thesis is “self-isolate for the common good of weakening the spread of the virus until we can find a way of killing it off as a threat to human life”. The antithesis is “herd-immunity” – let the virus take its course and become part of the human experience, like the common cold (and lets not talk in detail about just how much more debilitating and deadly COVID-19 actually is), and get on with our normal lives.

This allows those anti-humans (from Malthusians to Nihilists) to demand freedom of movement when in fact they believe in State Power to prevent migration; and allows those who are pro-humanity to call for State support and restrictions in order to ensure proper protection of everyone, when in fact we believe wholeheartedly in universal liberty.

The tension at the heart of reality is between self-determination and mutual aid. Unbridled freedom is dog-eat-eat antisocial survival-of-the-fittest. Our own self-determination has to include consideration fo the impact of our behaviour upon the lives of others as well as the environment and ecology. So Freedom requires self-determined restrictions.

The synthesis is a human society based upon collective need, not individual avarice. The very antithesis of Capitalism. The fascists are seeking to impose survival-of-the fittest by demanding the right to free movement and the freedom to spread disease and death willy nilly. The socialists are respecting isolation as the temporary cost of collective safety – self-determination begins with survival.

Away from political philosophy, the day-to-day reality is that the UK’s far-Right government is seeking in all ways possible to bring about a “herd-immunity” regime. They are demanding schools to start reopening on 1st June, and as such, allow the virus to run rampant.

Thankfully, the People are not stupid. With 60,000+ premature deaths in the UK associated with COVID-19, no-one trusts the government’s call. Even those who don’t care if “the Others” die don’t want to die themselves (many of the “Freedom” fascists were wearing masks in the open-air). Right now, coughing at each other and holding hands is simply not safe.

So there’s a Movement against the schools’ opening, with much online discussion and plenty of organising that is bringing people together. The effect can be a successful boycott, not simply of the schools but also of the Government’s “Profits before People” campaign.

The right-wing’s response is to suggest we, the socialists and the trade unions, don’t care about the poor and the abused children who need schooling and release from the horrors of toxic family life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet the apparent contradictions, the dialectical tensions in this situation are immense.

Those who have slashed State funding of health and social welfare, those who cover-up child abuse and have done so much to increase child poverty now use the reality of inequality against those who have fought and campaigned against the causes of human suffering all our lives.

The very depth and strength of these tensions offer hope for the near future. The pressure is immense, and that suggests there will be real social upheavals – pressure cookers explode when the safety valve is shut. Indeed, the release from confinement, the end of powerlessness, however tentative and carefully organised, could produce a synthesis of human collaboration for real social change.

2020 Vision

Beginning a hopeful decade

There came a brand new blight,

Whooping with indignation

And wheezing with delight.

Some eight billion people

Roused to join the fight

To not die prematurely

Or speak their last Goodnight.

The Governments were slow to act

They sought to lay the blame

Against some one-or-other

Or animals and game.

The Truth was very different

And only known too late

That plans for “herd immunity”

Advised them just to wait

And let the virus take its toll

Until a peak was reached,

When sufficient numbers were immune

And COVID-19 breached.

They meant for old and vulnerable

Alike to pay the price

To cheaply solve infection

“You can’t catch Covid twice”.

They found some selfish scientists

Who’d just speak as they’re told

That this sickness was harmless

Unless you’re very old.

“We must keep business running”

We heard our rulers shout

And newspapers blamed the poor

For having to go out.

It’ll all be over by Easter

Decreed the Emperor Trump

But the medics all decried him

Declaring him a chump.

Reality was soon to hit

As thousands swamped the wards

Of hospitals still ill equipped

To deal with coughing hoards.

The masks were not forthcoming,

The ventilators still,

Good doctors and their nursing staff

Together falling ill.

A lockdown was agreed abroad

Too late to stem the tide,

Restricting work and life and love,

Too awful to abide.

We tried to stay at home and watch

Life through a neon screen,

To understand with shock and awe

A crisis so obscene

That millions lost their incomes

Whilst taxes bailed their bosses

And police forces and soldiers

Protected them from losses

And food banks were relied upon

By the poor, the weak and ill

“Stay at home, don’t make a fuss

Lie down, lay low, be still!”

But on a Sunday evening

Each came out from their house

To applaud the brave young medics

Who risked their lives for us.

The message started to emerge

That Governments were playing

A fiendish game with all our lives –

Don’t believe what they were saying;

They’d cut our social care to shreds,

Shut our hospitals too,

Denied us beds and privatised,

Huge profits to accrue.

The warnings had come years ago

Prepare for the next pandemic

But politicians of every hue

Said it was academic

That prophesies should not impede

The quest for growth and wealth,

No need to spend or invest at all

To protect the people’s health.

The companies were bailed-out

Whilst workers incurred debt

And landlords planned evictions

If the rent arrears weren’t met.

The banking bosses washed their hands

Of lower interest rates

To charge the earth for overdrafts

For everyone but their mates.

And doctors soon were forced to choose

Who should live or die,

Some lives worth more than others?

The eugenicist’s Great Lie.

And refugees still fresh from grief

Corralled into tent cities

Were collectively quarantined,

Infected without pity.

The pious called it God’s own will,

A judgment on human conditions,

And even climate activists

Applauded low emissions.

The far-Right anti-humanists

Hoped to reap rewards

By brandishing their racism

Of “Death to Foreign Hoards”.

But as the millions became unwell

Throughout the human world

Our anger began to rise and swell

Our banners soon unfurled

“To hell with with your profit margins,

To hell with the billionaire,

The lives of ordinary people

Should be your primary care!

“We pay our taxes willingly

Whilst the super rich pay now’t

So spend our commonwealth on us”,

We heard the People shout.

Enough of all your feeble lies

Deceptions and false news

Leaving us to pay the price

We never shall excuse.

You knew the threat long months ago.

Governments were warned.

You could have stopped this massive spread,

This catastrophe you spawned.

Instead you left the poor to rot

And sought to help the greedy

Profit from our misery

And neglect the weak and needy.

But a time is fast approaching

When your lockdown will be ended

And the wrath of those bereaved and sad

Will call out unimpeded

“Social Justice Now!” And Peace

For all through mass investment

In social infrastructure

And a fair assessment

Of who works for the common good

And who gets off so light

That their greedy exploitation

Proves they’re the parasite!

Today’s ratio of deaths to confirmed cases is 1 in 20. In truth there is very little knowledge of the true scale of infection. Lack of screening has been criticised by scientists to a point where the British Government is increasing tests from 2,000 to 25,000 a day.

The Government predicts around 20,000 deaths from COVID-19. If that were from any other cause there’d be outrage and public inquiry. Yet today’s report from the scientists at Imperial College, London, suggest there could be 250,000 in the UK before any vaccine is rolled-out across the population.

Whatever the morbidity rate it is shocking on any number of levels.

The Government failed to heed lessons from China or Italy and took no notice of the World Health Organisation. Prime Minister Johnson and his cronies continued with the test-tube experiment of “herd immunity” while Italy’s doctors spoke of experiencing an “unimaginable catastrophe”, unable to cope with the number of people requiring intensive care.

People are therefore dying unnecessarily, and we are all left to decide precisely how to react. Pressure from trade unions and teachers has seen the government finally close schools to all except the most vulnerable children and those whose parents are key workers. It was, at the same time, a fait á compli as more and more teachers and support staff fell ill or self-isolated because of others ill in their family.

This is an entirely new social situation without any historical reference. Society is vastly different to the post-war influenza epidemic of 1918 or the polio outbreak when I was a child. The ease of transmission and infection of CORVID-19 should create shock and due diligence on an unprecedented scale. Perhaps thats why “panic-buying” is also now at epidemic proportions. Yet social distancing and self-isolation is not.

It is probably predictable given the human condition, that there is no hegemony of accepted ideas or responses. Some billionaires want excessive tax handouts to sustain their corporate profits, some local shopkeepers have quadrupled the price of toilet rolls, whilst many locals have joined forces to offer voluntary support to the isolated and the vulnerable.

In short, the hoarding is happening at the top of society not the bottom.

The responses inside families is not uniform either, and there are already clear signs of disagreements over how to act through to arguments between polar opposites on the spectrum of what the government should do. That may sound familiar as a pattern in every intimate household, and certainly will become more intense as self-isolation becomes a requirement rather than recommendation.

But there is a difference with COVID-19. There has never before been a demand to stay indoors for 14-days or more. Alongside the ensuing claustrophobia lurks hidden tensions, the close proximity without escape being a breeding ground for an increase in domestic abuse and violence, already experienced by 1 in 4 women in the UK for an average period of 7 years at a time.

Children of all ages but particularly teenagers will soon be jigging their legs and losing their tempers, going “stir crazy” to a degree that will make the classroom appear as nirvana by comparison with their bedroom. Toddlers will be in revolt, no doubt.

Nevertheless, it is the relationships between grown-ups that I am most concerned with. Yes, the virus is unforgiving of those with pre-existing conditions. But the “stay at home for three months” government diktat, already weighing heavily upon the over ‘70’s and older people with underlying health problems, is fraught with dangers.

It only takes one householder to determine the threat level to be higher than does their partner and there will be discord. Household routines, some decades old, have to change fundamentally. And the very basic facts of life, rarely discussed until crisis comes, include arrangements for death.

And death has loomed large. Where one self-isolates and the other lives a more relaxed existence, what is to be done? Government advice includes that people should live in separated areas of their home for periods if one is mixing with others and the other not. Eat, sleep and languish separately, for 14 days at a minimum when one has come into contact with potential carriers, up to 3 months where one has to continue to risk the outside world.

Any loving relationship is going to be tested by this. The strength needed to say “I Love You” but I’m living away from you is substantial. The strength needed to accept the other’s self quarantine, equally tough. Both require the starting agreement that neither want the other to catch Coronavirus, whatever it takes.

And then there’s the dilemma of care and nursing. If one gets the dreaded cough and temperature, does the other desegregate to offer tender loving care? If both are elderly, vulnerable, and long-established as a couple, how could they not? After all, the likelihood of being hospitalised despite their health records is extremely low.

And then there’s death. Lovers tend, on their death bed, to take some solace in knowing that their partner will live on, remember them but move forward and enjoy more life. Would the dying partner want to be nursed by their partner, placing them at great risk? Or is it expected that one goes, both go in a strange incantation of “I can’t live without you”.

And what of the relatives? Children and grandchildren. Their sudden bereavement will breed potential recriminations towards one grandparent not having done enough for their partner, now deceased. Or conversely, is now at deaths door because s/he broke the quarantine out of love and compassion. There is shallow compensation in the fact there shall be no family funerals or wakes as theatres for the feuding family flack to fly.

A compassionate society based upon collective need not private profit would respond with decency to these core human dilemmas. There would be well protected and trained community nursing staff to prevent the risk to partners. There would be early and routine testing to catch the contamination quickly enough to isolate and treat before spreading.

There would be a sufficiency of beds in Intensive Care Units to relieve partners of the moral dilemma let alone the arduous and self-denying nursing care.

But there are none of these things. Not in the UK anyway. In Germany there are just over 29 ICU beds per thousand of the population and they’re under pressure. In Italy, now experiencing the horror of fragmenting infrastructure whilst not yet at the peak of contamination, there are 12.5 beds per thousand, most dying on camp beds in school gymnasiums. In the UK, just 6.6. This is what a crisis looks like.

The chances of getting specialist care as an older person with COVID-19 is minimal. The consequent upheaval for partner and family is as excruciating as the death, a pneumonia-like inflammation and painful shut down of the lungs, a sudden and premature loss of love, companionship, security. All within a couple of days. How to prepare for that.

The best preparation is to seek by all means possible not to catch the virus. Those who treat it lightly, or who scoff at the self-isolation of the worried, should reflect deeply on the consequences of their attitudes and actions. And those intimately involved will have to recognise that a period apart, quarantined and alone, is infinitely better than the much longer alternative.

And those who have created such an inhuman society should never be forgiven.

I can’t remember when I’ve been more angry or more scared.

I’m scared, quite honestly, not so much for myself, even tho’ I’ve self-isolated as an “older person with underlying health conditions” as the much used phrase now rolls off the tongue. As an asthmatic I don’t relish the sensation of gasping for breath, but I’m actually scared by the potential for millions more people being plunged into extremes of destitution.

With government requiring self-isolation of entire families if not neighbourhoods because of COVID-19, employers are “laying-off” or sacking people whilst enforcers are expected to criminalise people who should be in quarantine but aren’t. When it comes to it, if your family is infected and you need to feed them, you’ll either go out to work despite the risks, or go out to steal in order to survive. Who would stay at home and choose to starve or be evicted by self-protecting landlords?

Billionaires like Richard Branson are demanding billions in cash-handouts from tax-payers to keep his climate-collapsing airline and cruise ship companies afloat, whilst workers can claim a maximum of £94:50 a week in statutory sick pay. As a friend noted today, that would leave another £70 a week still to be found to simply pay the rent, leaving no cash to feed his partner and two children. Branson has told his thousands of staff they are now on at least two-months leave without pay. How are they going to survive?

I’m angry because it doesn’t have to be this way.

In France, under the neoliberal “populist” Macron, taxes, rates and utility bills are suspended and to be covered for the duration by the State, legally preventing employers from deducting wages whilst workers are in isolation. Similarly in Spain the privatised hospitals are being renationalised overnight. Denmark has finalised a tripartite agreement for permanent employees that either are subject to work reduction or possible dismissal due to the Corona Virus: for the next 3 months, companies will pay 25% of the affected workers wages, the government 75%. Workers lose 5 holiday days.

Meanwhile, the UK is, once again, being used as a test-tube for a neoliberal “protect big business and the super-Rich” test-tube to see how we fare without state intervention or guarantees: appallingly would be my guess at the cost to the millions of ordinary workers more than any business owner. It’s not that European Capitalism is any better than the UK – the European Union is actually doing nothing in response to the Coronavirus except shooting at migrants trying to escape even worse conditions in the war-torn Middle East and climate-shriven sub-Saharan geographic girdle of this crisis-riven Earth. It is the case that France and Spain have seen huge mass protests of millions in recent months and fear more if they don’t offer at least some crumbs to protect the working class.

Speaking last night with my sister who married into American citizenship decades ago, all the Trump promises are nothing more than chimera and outright lies as the billionaire dictatorship seeks to profit from the crisis just as the unscrupulous have under any wartime conditions. Google, Amazon and the pharmaceuticals are being handed all-but countless tax-dollars and producing nothing tangible in return, just as the USA’s industries did when plundering Iraq after the illegal invasion of 2003. The Pandemic is the latest opportunity to print and hoard more wealth whilst the world burns. The strongest capitalist corporations will survive, the weaker going to the wall. Let it the anarchy of the Market prevail once more.

Banks are being handed billions to sure-up their supposed liquidity, none of which will trickle down to us anymore than it did after the 2008 Crash. Meanwhile, the downtrodden US citizens are losing what little private pensions they have because of stock-market crash bigger than 1987 or anytime since, and queuing-up to buy guns in preparation for the coming social strife that is sure to ensue from mass immiserisation.

The economic threat to the majority almost eclipses the health crisis even tho’ current estimates are that COVID-19 has a 2.3% case-fatality rate and a 19% rate of severe disease. This means that achieving herd immunity to COVID-19 in the UK could result in the deaths of more a million people with a further eight million severe infections requiring critical care. The supposed pride-of-the-world National Health Service here is already short of supplies and seeing mass infection of its’ staff, cleaners, nurses and doctors alike. Xenophobic government propaganda repeats the lie of us having the best services in the world whilst our doctors anonymously post the truth of condition in hospitals that no newspaper will carry, for fear of punishment. And fear is a common expression, everywhere.

Some in the Environment Movement are welcoming the Pandemic as having a very immediate impact on pollution and emission levels as flights and travel stop, and are even suggesting that the “Boomers”, i.e. the Elderly born after the Second World War, are getting our comeuppance for having destroyed the Planet. Of course this precursor to full-on societal collapse is an sobering example of things to come, but nothing to be appreciated or relished if you care at all for other people.

Theirs is, ultimately, an extreme right-wing view from a very privileged position, not only fallacious in its total lack of historical or scientific accuracy but also feeding the anti-human, Malthusian and class-privileged propaganda of Johnson’s far-right government. The Environment Movement is not the domain of only left wing views or people. Their idea of “no more business as usual” concludes with “let them die for their sins” as a solution to the climate crisis. Apparently, the Planet is reaping it’s revenge on us and should be supported to do its worst. Such reactionary twaddle.

But the crisis could offer opportunities never to return to the status quo of Capitalist exploitation and competition. The question is how to revolt in the time of societal shut-down. If the Climate Movement is split between Left and Right whilst the working class is struggling for individual survival, isolated from each other and victim to online scare-stories and Establishment media lies, what chance have we to build effective opposition?

Firstly, Mutual Aid groups are springing-up everywhere, spontaneously enough, offering a chance for reasoned and factual online discourse whilst ensuring the safety and care of the most vulnerable in society. These groups can develop a critical analysis and focussed challenge to the government’s intransigence.

Secondly, some groups of health, care and emergency services in Italy have taken strike action to force, in the most powerful way possible, government to expand resources and deliver more help. It should be added that, because Italy’s national economy was already a basket case, it has sent out pleas for international aid currently heeded and responded to by no less than China and Cuba – no doubt propaganda exercises but certainly exposing the intransigence of the Western neoliberal Capitalist nation states.

Undoubtedly, strike action in the form of a General Strike has its own difficulties and consequences. But put the two together, mutual aid and collective defiance of employers’ self-protection and continued class warfare, and we have a recipe for real and lasting social change. I remember being active through the Great Miners Strike in the UK, 1984-5, when huge donations from the majority of the working class kept the strikers powerful and defiant for the best part of a year. Support groups and communal kitchens exemplified the power of the Collective.

Taking strike action rather than accepting “unpaid leave” has the advantage of completely closing down the bosses’ business, and given the inadequacy of welfare payments the establishment of neighbourhood support networks could easily outweigh the paltry £94:50 a week sick payment, especially if we enact a universal rent and mortgage strike as well. We could make the wealthy howl with pain, just for a change.

Does this all sound unnecessarily vicious and destructive? What? Unlike the vicious and, by its numbers, genocidal current policies of the Capitalist class-based governments so protective of the rich? What the crisis is exposing, possibly to a greater extent than any other time in recent history, is the total impossibility of Capitalism as a system to meet the needs of the majority let alone us all. It is, above all, this stratified class system of haves and have-nots that has created not only the Pandemic but the threat of global climate catastrophe. It’s time, not to lie-down (if it can be avoided) but to rise-up!

Whilst the British Government has made a single concession to the global advice by banning mass events, the political response of Johnson & Co to the Covid-19 pandemic stands isolated and singular amongst all nations. Yes, even Trump’s USA is doing more to combat mass infection than Britain, with universal access to screening being just one of a package of safeguards for the population.

Trump has declared a national emergency and identified £50 million in aid. Johnson, a eugenicist, is the mouthpiece for a completely unscientific and ideologically toxic axiom. His advisers, including Dominic Cummings, a eugenicist, are spouting “behavioural psychology” to portray a strategy for “herd immunity”. They are letting us continue with “business as usual” from the prediction that once most of us have contracted Covid-19 we will, as a nation, develop resistance and immunity to the virus.

This has no scientific basis. “Herd Immunity” in science is a process where, once at least half the population are vaccinated against a virus there are no longer enough people carrying it to spread it far and wide. Crucially, we have to have a vaccine and at least 50% of the population need to have been vaccinated before “herd immunity” begins to work. Point One: there is no vaccine.

The UK, with no news pictures of public streets and areas being sprayed with anti-viral cleansers or deep-clean teams in protective suits cleaning public transport and handrails, is letting the virus run rampant. Film from around the world, including the USA, shows huge effort to cleanse public places. But not in the UK. Even Trump is considering banning all travel form the UK to America. Point Two: Allowing the virus to spread will ensure half-a-million or more deaths.

And then, in defence of “Keep Calm and Carry On”, the BBC finds a psychiatrist whose wife is currently suffering, at home, from testing positive to Covid-19, who complains on prime-time morning Radio that he was asked to phone-in from home rather than come in to the studio for interview. He said his wife is staying 4-metres away from him in their house and therefore he’s perfectly safe from infection! Point Three: just because you’re a qualified professional doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about.

And then we’re back to the start. The eugenicists who dream of a super-race and find the elderly, infirm and disabled a brake on human progress, are in charge of our health and safety. This, combined with a Malthusian starting point of belief that there are just too many damned people in the world, is producing an extreme and unique social policy of leaving the virus to ravage the country.

The fact they promote the concept of “the herd” to refer to human society when it is primarily used in relation to animal husbandry displays their inner contempt for and perception of we, the common people. This false science of “behaviouralism” offers succour to the elitist supremacists that there is herd-mentality in general society that can be manipulated and controlled.

Add to this their deep commitment to the neoliberal free market, wholly disproven as an economic policy that serves or protects the majority of society, and they conclude that every catastrophe offers an opportunity for someone – there’s money to be made out of death and societal discord. Let some business go to the wall, let the fittest survive, the pharmaceutical companies and producers of hand-gel can make a killing…

Johnson is being challenged. The World Health Organisation has challenged the “herd immunity” policy. Dr Margaret Harris from WHO has publicly pronounced that it is based on absolutely no evidence. In fact, the so-called behavioural science from which the theory is derived only offers observations of human behaviours and is completely divorced from the real sciences of biology and medicine. It is pseudo, spurious, a sham.

Isn’t it beyond fearful that a government has the power to create policy that will produce catastrophe? Shouldn’t we be seriously challenging such corrupt duping of an entire population, not least when it will result in many lives being prematurely and needlessly ended? Here’s the rub. There is a sizeable proportion of the population who want to believe this nonsense because they have already swallowed the anti-vaccine zeitgeist.

Recent decades have displayed a growing and very obvious distrust of government and corporations leading to a flat-earth world-view incorporation of all manner of conspiracy theories, not least that vaccinations are used by the hidden and deep State to enforce social control. In an astounding convergence of double-think, these same right-wing, ultra-individualist survivalists are consuming Johnson’s pseudo-science and praising his anti-authoritarian approach to the world pandemic.

The Coronavirus has infected the ideological body politic with a new disease. The “fuck-it”, “I’m Alright Jack” mentality is spreading like wildfire across Britain as exquisitely distinct from possibly every other country in the world. It is down to us, the people who care for each other, who value scientific fact as opposed to ideologically concocted falsehoods, who see through the self-interest of political careerists, to challenge the lies. We must be heard.

Italy has suspended mortgage repayments and utility bills. Trump has suspended loan repayments by students for the foreseeable future, and introduced federal sick-pay from day-one in a country where there is no sick-pay whatsoever in 37 of the 50 states. There are lockdowns, deep-cleans and social distancing requirements across every continent and in every country – except the UK! The lives of millions are at risk.

Our response to the pandemic has to be neighbourhood and workplace mutual support. Ensuring workplaces are clean and safe and when we are infected we remain cared for and financially solvent. Checking on our neighbours, offering additional support and concern for the elderly and disabled, and changing our own behaviours to avoid spreading the germs.

Such human empathy and shared support will have to be matched by political organisation to voice outrage against this vicious, lying, far-right and inhuman UK government. With mass protest banned in amongst all mass gatherings, the potential for a silencing of all reason and fact is very possible. We have to use new methods of social networking and distance communication to beat the virus, and as importantly beat this far-right ideological assault, both aimed at liquidating our freedom and prosperity.

Speak out against the culling of the herd.

Yes, I’m panicking. Late sixties, heart and lung disease, a health service that is rationing admissions of the over ‘60’s and a Government that doesn’t care. Prime Minister Johnson appeared with groomed lackeys last night to tell us to stay at home and self-isolate. In reality, the infrastructure of our health and social care will not cope with the demand.

The Coronavirus epidemic is not a fake-news scare story. The current global death rates are some thirty-times higher than for influenza, and that’s scary. Panic buying is already intense, alongside vicious attacks on Black people across Britain perpetrated by racists using the risk of contamination as an excuse to blame and persecute non-Whites. The attacks on Chinese people wearing masks in public in the UK are as alarming as they are absurd.

Doctors in the thick of it declare this to be “the most frightening virus ever” – more contagious than Ebola or SARS and a higher death rate than flu. From Italy we hear that the marching orders are: “Save scarce resources for those patients who have the greatest chance of survival.”That means prioritizing younger, otherwise healthy patients over older patients or those with pre-existing conditions.”

As someone ticking most boxes of pre-existing conditions this raises existential issues. Are some people’s lives worth saving more than others? It’s a political as well as moral issue. As socialist author, Michael Rosen debated on BBC Radio 4, if we take a position other than “every life is equally precious”, where does society end up? I could say I’d rather a older left-wing socialist climate activist with heart trouble was saved than a macho-racist fascist, but what if the governors of the medical services felt the opposite?

Hmmm…Right to Life, and all that.

The right-wing responses to predictions that 80% of us will eventually catch Covid-19 include, as examples: people dismissing life as a lottery, championing the false “scientific Darwinism” of survival of the fittest; proselytising about the fake science of “behaviouralism” (that is, observe what you want and write it up as scientific fact); disregarding the threat as a Liberal conspiracy; organising outright eugenics by leaving the disabled to die or actively welcoming the Malthusian “clear-out” of the old and vulnerable clogging up our health and social care system.

The range and depth of emotions stimulated by the epidemic could easily outstrip the distress experienced by the illness itself.

For activists there are many factors to be considered. Not least, the incredible vulnerability of human society, the social fabric easily fragmented, the scale of production dramatically reduced by supply-side disruptions. The threat of social collapse caused by combined and extreme weather events, not to mention actual climate shift, is visibly exemplified by this current health crisis.

A second focus for us is industrial farming and specifically animal management. Intensive animal farming, the horror of their treatment a subject for a separate blog of outrage and pain, and the growth of exotic wildlife meat markets are the sources of continuous spread of life-threatening disease.

For the humanist, the way humans treat animals reflects upon the concurrent inhuman behaviours of humans one to another. For the scientist, the poor management of animal life is the root cause of much of societies ills. For the climate activist, the industrialised production of meat produces, proportionally, the highest levels of global heating gases of any industry other than the military.

Together this appears to amount to a searing indictment of humanity. Of course, its not quite as simple as that. When living above subsistence (and often even when on the verge of starvation), humans love and care for the animals around them. More than any other human condition, hunger and the need to survive tends to erode compassion. Any decent human society would place human need above all else.

A compassionate society would end industrial animal farming I’m sure. More vitally, for society to survive at all it is fairly universally accepted that consumption of meat has to fall markedly, not least of cows and bulls (the term “Beef” redacts all reference to the living being) to reduce global heating gases. Animal husbandry is certainly a core part of the transition required to prevent runaway climate change.

And the pandemic threat raises a third discussion for the environmentalist -the core debate about what we mean by “A Just Transition”. This is a lively and earnest set of current arguments about the transformation of society to Carbon-Zero. Whilst open political preference is apparently frowned upon, the demand for protection of democracy through the transition is shared by the majority.

We want everyone to be engaged with and participative in decisions to decry the internal combustion engine and carbon fuels. We certainly don’t want a totalitarian dictatorship to decree carbon-zero whatever the pain and injustice incurred. Do we? In the same way we want our old and vulnerable protected as much as anyone else from disease and premature death, not sacrificed by a Government keen to protect business profits above comfort in our old age.

Current images from China, South Korea and Italy raise important questions. The appearance of quarantine as a form of social control is inescapable. I have repeatedly imagined what would happen if people in Plymouth were threatened with imprisonment if we appeared on the streets. How well would a curfew be accepted? I’d like to predict an uprising, but today’s global school strikes were cancelled by Greta Thunberg herself!

Locally there appears to be a tacit acceptance of “staying in your home” – a self-imposed curfew, for a period of 14 days should you begin a fever. Even football fans will accept a close-down of the games on the basis of stopping the spread. Quite fundamental changes to human interactions and behaviours are being readily discussed and accepted in the cause of preventing a pandemic.

So why not the the same level of acquiescence to social change in the existential face of human extinction? Most importantly it is governments, informed by scientists, who are demanding collective engagement with the viral threat. Yet the same governments, informed by a far wider and diverse set of scientific analysis, refuse to act with anywhere near the same level of determination towards the existent global heating.

Or is this a false observation from the very beginning? Is it, in fact, the case that most governments are doing as little as possible to protect the people whilst offering every support to ensure production and profits are maintained – “business as usual”? It is reported that ten times as many people click to watch the virus-deniers and paranoid conspiracy online posts as click the government advice adverts. Is this proof of virus-denial being as widespread as climate-denial?

One conclusion has to be this. To win hearts and minds to the level of change needed to keep global heating to below two-degrees centigrade (let alone 1.5), we have to prove the reality of the threat at a very personal and material level. Not by waiting until people “catch-it” – fires, floods, food shortages – but by speaking the science clearly, repeatedly and with a passion.

And that translates into how environmentalists and socialists should be relating to Covid-19. We have to learn about the science of the virus, read the conclusions of reports on effective approaches in other countries, and find ways “speak the truth to power” to challenge popular mythology, complacency and most of all Government lies and spin. The Coronavirus requires a system change away from profit and towards human need just as much as does any solution to global heating.

Everyone gets depressed from time to time. Some people very rarely, some much of the time. And then there’s the difference in the depths experienced. Some tendencies are suggested to be genetic, some bio-chemical, some stirred by material conditions. I have been a therapist and in therapy, a social worker and a parent, a teacher and a student, a lover and a hater. I have no qualifications to make heady statements about the causes or effects of depression. I simply experience it like any other human being.

There is much being written about our children becoming more prone to depression, not least because of the knowledge of climate change. I’m certainly in no position to quantify the causes of what appears to be an epidemic as large as the predicted impact of the Coronavirus. For example, at least 1 in 4 young women are suffering identifiable and seriously impacting depression in Britain at any one time, and male suicide is increasing amongst our young. Identification of depression is being recorded in ever larger proportions of younger and younger children.

This cannot be blamed upon we, the disparaged “doom-mongers” of the Climate Movement, although some do. We have had the discussion and tested the theory that doing something, taking action, joining with others to shout-out against Ecocide and Extinction is the best antidote to climate depression.

This is not so much a question of having Hope but Purpose. Hope is as ephemeral as Joy or Happiness. These are each emotional exceptions, momentary sensations that come-and-go and cannot be relied upon. People report moments of pleasure even from inside a prison cell and when hope isn’t present.

Purpose, by contrast, offers some consistency, stability and solidity. Emotions can rise and fall by the hour, day or week, but having a goal, committing to a cause, offers a sense of purpose that can balance the highs and lows.

This is not to say that people prone to depression are vulnerable to being coerced into being recruited into extremist sects or cults. True, the deepest depressions are wholly disabling and require help and support and a safe space well away from the demands of society in crisis. And we all have our vulnerabilities, our Achilles Heel.

But for most of us, depression does not blind us to rational thought even if it may colour perception. We can still perceive the inadequacies of an argument, the lies inside a fraud, the gaps in a theory. When someone says that half of all life on Earth faces extinction, or predicts that global heating is accelerating at such an unprecedented rate that we face societal collapse, the vast majority of human beings, young and old, require a sufficiency of evidence.

So I reject accusations that climate activists are scaremongering, hoodwinking, exploiting, oppressing or grooming the striking school students and young adults. The scientific evidence, best triangulated and double-checked well away from Wikipedia, is as close to absolute as is possible in a universe of no absolutes.

But it may be true that those advocating Hope are indeed hoodwinking us, and therein lies a challenge. Their individualist remedies – turning down the central heating and wearing more layers instead, recycling plastic, using public transport instead of having a car – may make us feel like we’re doing something for the Planet but may just as well make us feel all the more powerless and depressed, as well as less comfortable.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t all do our bit, but even Extinction Rebellion notes that, with an average (always a deeply flawed statistical tool) annual emission of around 7.5 tonnes per person (UK), were we to live a hair-shirt existence in an unheated yurt and picking berries we could not reduce our average below 4.5 tonnes. Why? Because we cannot escape being one of 60+ million people living on the island of Britain. Such is the law of averages.

It is the construct of Society, the sum-total of inter-relations and interactions of human beings, that is the source of the global heating gases that are rapidly increasing global temperatures at a speed and intensity not seen in the past 2 million years (at least). And so a society so damaging has to be reorganised if we are to prevent extinction. The System in which we live cannot and will not continue as it is, in the very near short term.

That is a harrowing and unnerving fact. Whether six years old or sixty, the prospect of the future needing to be like nothing you have experienced, or are familiar with, or are used to is daunting if not depressing. Unless, of course, the current system continues to offer you so little, such discomfort, so little Hope that the prospect of something else and indeed something better than this is truly inspiring.

I’m not suggesting that the Environment and Climate Movement is offering any Pie-in-the-Sky promises. The situation is dire and we shouldn’t be blamed for saying so. It is still the case that the majority of young people are either wholly uniformed or misinformed about the Climate Emergency. Extreme weather conditions are not the source of the depressed emotional climate.

Much of the depression of our current youth is documented as being about current social pressures – body shape, bullying, gangs, academic testing and competition – indeed all the alienation ensured by neoliberal capitalist society, little to do with any predictions of potential climate collapse.

What we can offer is the possibility of another world, a more inclusive, sharing, less pressurised existence. Becoming Carbon-Zero is indeed a daunting challenge but for all but the wealthiest 10% its far better than the alternative of continuing to live as we do now, let alone face the chaos and barbarism of societal collapse. And by recognising just how big a challenge we face we are not offering any level of false Hope, just death-defying Purpose.

Wednesday 4th March 2020

There are a couple of important slogans, nay mantras, that are permeating out from Extinction Rebellion into the entire environment movement. The first, “No More Business As Usual!” and the second, “Beyond Politics”. The ideological base that unites both, I am told, is the impressive and impassioned demand to develop a new system of human society based upon a circular system of thinking corresponding to the natural ecosystems, humans becoming fully integrated back into Nature.

Whilst it takes a great deal of reflection to begin to materially conceive of what such a social and economic system would feel and look like, I very much concur. As someone who uses the Marxist methodology of historical materialism to try to understand the world of humans, this aligns with my own world view. More or less.

We should be collaborative, meeting all human needs without oppression or exploitation. The current global human society is based upon social class, privilege and the lottery of birth that endows some with greater entitlements to life than others. A socialist society, by contrast, is one based upon need not private profit, “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their need”.

Karl Marx, no Guru or Saint, obsessively studied the emergence of Capitalist class society in comparison to previous Feudal through to “Primitive Communist” societies and identified one crucial notion. Capitalism, as differentiated from all previous human societies, ruptured, tore apart, the interaction between humanity and the rest of Nature.

To précis to the point of near-destruction, capitalist techniques of production, ripping people from rural subsistence and into town and city squalor, separating people from contact with raw materials and from any ownership of the final product of their toil, created a “Metabolic Rift” between humanity and Nature. The Earth’s metabolism of which we had for so long been a part, has been torn apart.

We experience the result of the metabolic rift as Alienation, feeling alien from nature’s systems, feeling divorced from and in competition with other human beings, and feeling estranged from ourselves. The domination of property relationships render us in conflict with all, unable to feel secure as a unique identity other than through material symbols of wealth and power, ownership and control, domination and status. Our validity is determined not by simply being but by socially ascribed status.

It is interesting that some in the environment movement react against these feelings simply by saying they don’t care how they’re seen – Prime Minister Johnson may refer to them as “long-haired crusties” (coming from him I wear such a label as a badge of honour) – they will be as they wish, live as they please, and care not a jot as to what others think.

Such a condition is likely to increase alienation and isolation, being, somewhat ironically, a permutation of precisely the individualism they are trying to challenge and end. Individuality and individualism are at opposite ends of the identity continuum, and the self-determination offered by individuality can only be achieved through a system based upon cooperation, mutual trust and universal provision for all.

I come back to the main theme here. The “Beyond Politics” mantra has been skewed, perhaps purposefully by some, to mean no-one in the Movement should use political constructs or “be political’. The “No More Business As Usual” mantra then amplifies the deconstruction of politics by damning all previously existing World Views as being redundant in the face of the sixth mass extinction and climate catastrophe.

And in doing so, it rejects discussion or consideration of social class. Old formulations of how society is constructed should be disregarded. This is a recipe for failure, abject failure, a loss of focus, and a Great Lie to be permitted as to the root cause of the climate emergency. It is not ideas that have created Ecocide and threaten societal collapse, but actions.

Capitalism is an exploitative form of human society that has not been around long, is not the only way humans can live together, and needs to be replaced. Capitalism relies upon social control through stratification for subjugation – Class – and exploitation of all in the human and natural world for the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority.

Not all hitherto existing societies have lived like this, offering us a sense that things can be different and better. We should not reject such historical interpretations as redundant. And then, the political formulations that stem from a class interpretation of society cannot be disregarded either.

There are those who wish to prosper, or who have already prospered, under Capitalism. They do not want the system replaced even if they do want the harsher edges reformed to ensure survival of their children. And there are those, like me, who look wider at global humanity and its history and conclude that Capitalism has to be ended and replaced if we and our children’s children are to survive.

Again, crudely put, these are the polls of the political continuum within the environment movement today – the Left and Right wings. Without intending the pun, recent polls have shown both at home and abroad that roughly 20% of citizens care less about climate change (for various ideological reasons or none), 60% are concerned but feel too busy or powerless to do much about it, and consistently, 20% are fully engaged with the impending catastrophe and wish to act to stop it. This, too, reflects the ancient ideological and political spectrum.

So we cannot be “beyond politics” as interpreted by the autonomistic “Beyond Left and Right” ideologues. Ironically, being “beyond politics” is a deeply ideological and political stance. In the here and now, Class society exists and is in control, and Left-wing and Right-wing ideologies exist as a material consequence, and are in constant conflict for influence and power. Consequently, the Movement cannot “accept everyone and every part of everyone”, as directed.

The Far Right (the deep blues) continue to utilise the Climate Emergency as an excuse for white supremacy (“keep out the Global South”), eugenics (climate Change will require the speedy evolution of a new super-human “master race”), Malthusianism (“there are far too many human beings and therefore we should allow billions to die from climate war, drowning, famine and plague with all its religious resonance”) and these ideologues exert their power and control through racism and ultra-nationalism. This is all very apparent and happening right now as a portent of far worse to come.

Meanwhile the “reformist” middle (the rainbow greens, yellows and purples) want “someone to do something” but not so “extreme” as to overthrow the existing entitlements they enjoy. They worry they may have something to loose through total system change despite risking losing everything through climate catastrophe.

The active Left (the Reds) argue for System Change not Climate Change, and are by nature, anti-capitalist. We have a proud history of challenging the exploitation of Nature as well as People. And we know that a classless society based on peace and social justice will offer a much better quality of life for even the wealthier of the Rainbow middle.

We have a clear analysis of how the climate catastrophe came about through the system of Capitalism, not innate human greed or carelessness, and therefore that it can be stopped, in time, and replaced with a social and economic system quite able to correspond with natural ecosystems as well as meet the needs of all humanity (yes, all 12 billion of us – the predicted zenith of population growth).

My own experience is that, currently, the Rainbow People are allowing the Blues to hold sway whilst constantly challenging the Reds to “stop being overtly political”. I refuse, not simply because I demand respect for my chosen identity, but because that way leads to a totalitarian state that will ensure the destruction of all.

And the immediate problem formed of the misinterpretation of “Beyond Politics” is the focus upon denying the Left our voice or even the display our ideas (books, papers, stalls, placards, banners, slogans), whilst the Right, never openly admitting their political alignment and associations, are pandered to and allowed domination in the name of unity. History proves, over and over again, that the Blues, given their space, will devour not only the Reds but the Rainbow and all.

And so I insist upon displaying my political allegiance, my associations, in order firstly to avoid being later accused of hoodwinking or manipulating by subterfuge, and secondly to demand that others do the same. Only in that way we can all be assured that we know the intentions of one another and can build the level of trust and unity essential to preventing global societal collapse.

Tony Staunton

Plymouth

Of course, despite everything, the Media is overloaded with Christmas. There are articles on just about anything and everything that could possible fill column inches with banal and superficial nonsense cheerleading nothing other than consumerism and the “family spend”. So it could be refreshing to consider articles suggesting “lean” and “sustainable” “GREEN” festivities.

This morning’s radio nonsense was a case in point. The BBC’s “You and Yours” dedicated three-quarters of an hour to pursuing a carbon-zero Christmas. It could have been essential listening. But the Great Lie being carefully put across was apparent from the very first sentence: “We use more plastic during the Christmas period than any other time of the year and waste enough wrapping paper to stretch from Earth to the Moon.”

Whilst the statistics are probably accurate, the “we” offers the continuation of the propaganda that blames us all equally for global heating and obscures if not denies the lack of choice most of us have. Anyone who finds it essential to budget carefully to the point of penny-pinching on the Christmas presents has long known one thing. Common commodities on sale through the year are suddenly “gift-wrapped” and over-priced in the lead-up to Year End. A branded bath oil and its brother, shampoo, are produced in smaller than usual rubberised tubes, then nestled in huge moulded plastic display boxes, the printed outers then covered in thick see-through plastic lids complete with plastic bows and nylon ribbons. The packaging uses-up dozens of times the natural resources of the cleaning products themselves and will remain as pollutants for hundreds of times the time.

We could buy twice the grams of the same stuff for a fifth of the price were it not that we are emotionally coerced and guilt-tripped into giving proper gifts to be unwrapped from under the tree. Oh and yes, the usual packaging is removed from the shelves through the twelve weeks of Christmas.

It is the packaging companies, worldwide, who produce this garbage to end-up in land-fill for generations or as toxic fumes and micro-particulates from an incinerator chimney. Its all just a money-making racket.

We are not all equally responsible. The potential for a boycott of all packaging by all 50 million UK consumers, let alone the billions of us worldwide is far more difficult to organise and sustain than simply outlawing the production of such profligate waste. If we can ban CFCs we should be able to ban the non-degradable plastics. It just requires political will.

Of course, this argument can be extended to all manner of pollutants. It is quite possible to ban all extraction of carbon-based fuels. Leave the oil and gas and coal in the ground. Such action is far more urgent than anything to do with plastics or tree-planting or re-wilding. It the absence of carbon emissions that will lead to a carbon-zero economy and have any chance of preventing societal breakdown and our own extinction.

The question begged is what will it take to make the laws required to curb the waste producers? The answer, after very little contemplation, has to be nothing less than a revolution. The capitalist system of competition and short-term profit simply won’t allow the producers to change their ways. To do so would be for them to go to the wall because someone else will be there waiting in the wings to take-over to make a fast buck.

The general ideas raised by this Christmas banter are unworthy of greater exploration. It may well allow individuals to feel better about themselves (and even save money in these austere times) to recycle last years Christmas cards and offer second-hand gifts wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers. But it won’t go anywhere near to having any impact at all on the still-accelerating levels of global heating and Ecocide.

Which is why the entire discussion is a distraction from the very urgent real challenges facing us. In fact, all this waste-less use-less individualism is just one more element of the climate denial propaganda constantly churned out on behalf of the producers. They advertise relentlessly to sell their must-have stuff and at the same time demand we feel guilty about having it. It’s a win-win strategy for the profiteers.

It’s not an either-or, but the amount of time spent individually on cutting-down on plastic waste and fuel-use needs to be balanced by the amount of time spent on challenging this polluting, wasteful and anti-human system that is responsible for the global destruction now upon us all. It may just be that buying a bath set, ready-wrapped and whisked out of the Pound Shop saves enough time to join the Non-Violent Direct Action outside Barclays Bank or BP! We really do need to get focussed upon exactly what actions are needed to save the World.

Just as we have seen scientific evidence of a number of climate Tipping Points having been reached across the world, so we need to recognise the climate catastrophes already happening. Armageddon is not a date in a diary. Societal collapse is not predictable according to any calendar either.

Climate science is detailing the historic degradation of the environment and modelling potential futures with growing accuracy. Ice melt, methane release, slowdown in ocean currents, record temperatures, mega-hurricanes, all signs and symptoms of climate collapse.

Through a similar process we can map the fragmentation of human society. Models of possible futures tend to be created by including as many known variables as possible and seeing how they inter-relate to produce a new dynamic.

So the understanding of human history becomes vital to our recognition of our potential futures. And there’s the first challenge. History is subject to interpretation to an extent that scientific fact is not. There is a “People’s History” and a “Victor’s History” written of any one event or era.

For example, established history suggests that the First World War was “won” by the British Allies and Germany “defeated”, whilst the people’s history would argue that mutiny and revolution prevented the national ruling classes from continuing their genocidal barbarism (only to reignite the carnage by 1939).

Through the same ideological tensions the history of climate change is explained away by Establishment historians as the ebbs and flows of natural forces, redacting, censoring or denying the early scientific observations of the human-made climatic impact of carbon emissions offered from the 1880’s onwards.

Nevertheless, we have sufficient independent record of how society works to be able to predict a lot about how society collapses. The desertification of ancient Mesopotamia was caused, in large part, through water wars that restricted and diverted access to supplies. The Anasazi, ancestors of the Pueblo Indians in today’s USA, over-used their natural resources and became all but extinct through drought and famine by the 1300’s.

A recent model developed by a team at Ruskin University suggested that global human society will collapse in less than three decades due to catastrophic food shortages. Another, by the John Hopkins Centre, modelled that society as we know it would collapse within 13 days of any catastrophic event: a pandemic, Yellowstone exploding, or an exchange of nuclear weapons. These are the predictions of catastrophe most advertised by the more sympathetic climate commentators.

But it would seem that many of the indicators of social collapse are already appearing. Its more a slow burn than a sudden event. What, in fact, are we observing?

Primarily a definite polarisation between peoples within most nations: the rich getting richer, poor getting poorer; the growth of far-right ideology and activity set against mass movements challenging poverty and exploitation; accelerating growth in fundamentalist and absolutist quasi-religions in all their guises; the fast decline in effectiveness of antibiotics; descent of previously coherent communities into obsessive conspiracy theories damning everything from life-saving immunisation to taxation for social infrastructure.

And mass strikes, protests and anti-Establishment manifestations across the world – Colombia, Chilé, Spain, Iraq, France, Hong Kong…

This is the stuff of the breakdown of social cohesion. Human history would suggest, from whichever perspective, that any shortage of resource or threat to stability quickly results in conflict. As the socialist, Karl Marx observed, “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”. And war between nation states is often the answer by the existing ruling class to any movement for their overthrow from within.

As we hurtle, condemned by our current rulers, into runaway climate collapse, the precursors of global social collapse appear ever more apparent. And yet, superficially, life goes on. Exactly what the Tipping Points look like for social turmoil may be hidden or obscure, but history does give us clues. Current global tensions suggest we are closer than would at first appear.

So what is to be done? Struggle, of course. Whilst it may seem impossible for the change needed to save society – leaving all existing fossil fuels in the ground and ending subsidies for carbon industries and transferring all production to zero-carbon technologies within the next ten years – our human history is full of examples of such dramatic change. Not without cost, of course.

The only alternative to struggle is the current and accelerating descent into barbarism. In a world economy based upon greed, corruption, competition, gangsterism and exploitation, the fragmentation of societies will only encourage the survival-of-the-fittest mentality that will see armed gangs controlling neighbourhoods and mass immiserisation a lá Mad Max. Those of us who understand that the future is not written and that we can make it better have to get active: throw ourselves at the task of survival with a gusto and that Extinction Rebellion-style of humility and sacrifice. After all, the alternative is far too ghastly to contemplate.

It may be only coincidence that, on the day President Trump arrived in London for the NATO Summit, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, warned of the “point of no return” for the Climate. He insisted that the political efforts of world leaders to stop catastrophic climate change have been “utterly inadequate”. He stated, “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling towards us”.

Tomorrow, political delegates from over 200 countries will meet in Madrid to refine and enact the Paris Agreement of 2015. Too little and much too late. Meanwhile, those same leadership groups will meet within the remit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to agree higher military spending and threaten more warfare from South America to the Arctic Circle, Kashmir to the South China Seas, not to mention the maintenance of their continuing decimation of Afghanistan and Libya.

It should not be a secondary consideration for climate activists to challenge and oppose NATO and it’s imperialist wars. Even if the human tragedy and horror could be put to one side, the impact of war on global heating is phenomenal:

• the climate change impact of huge military bases around the world is considerable locally, regionally and globally. For example, it is estimated that US military consumes 395,000 gallons of oil daily alone. The entire world military establishment is wholly dependent upon and predatory for carbon-based fuels.

• The US military emits more global warming gases than the total emissions from 200 countries across the globe. Securing and deploying oil across the globe to the fuel-greedy hummers, jets and drones has become a growing preoccupation of NATO military strategists.

• The military is not just a prolific user of oil, it is one of the central pillars of the global fossil-fuel economy. Today whether it is in the Middle East, the Gulf, or the Pacific, modern-day military deployment is about controlling oil-rich regions and defending the key shipping supply routes that carry half the world’s oil and sustain our consumer economy.

• the environmental damage caused by war is not limited to climate change and CO2 emissions. It has been estimated that 20% of all environmental degradation and ecocide around the world is due to military and other related activities.

• Global military expenditure now exceeds $200,000,000,000,000 a year (that’s two-hundred trillion US dollars). When the UK government allocates $49 billion (£36b) to the Ministry of Defence but only £1.5 billion to the Department of Energy & Climate Change, it is clear where its priorities lie. Just think what could be done with that cash for renewables and a Just Transition to a carbon-zero economy.

We should be able to say No to War on environmental grounds alone. Perhaps the reticence of activists to join with the XR Peace Movement or other anti-war groups is a tendency towards seeing Climate as a single-issue. Or, conversely, that the mantra that “climate overwhelms all other issues” obscures the fact that all other issues are entwined within the world’s climate.

President Trump has insisted that climate change is a “hoax” and at the same time is demanding increased military expenditure by all NATO allies. His withdrawal of the USA from the international climate agreements and the treaties against the proliferation of nuclear weapons denotes a clear agenda of conflict over sustainability, the accumulation of private wealth and power rather than collective human survival.

Perhaps, at least emotionally, it is easier to focus the practical needs for tree-planting, recycling, investment in renewables and even the comparative abstractions of a Green New Deal than it is to challenge the Military.

But war is no side-issue. In fact, the system of imperialism is at the core of the very processes that are destroying the Planet. Imperialism is the most concentrated manifestation of the competition that is the motor of Capitalism. The battle for resources, both natural and human, results routinely in warfare. But this is not because of Human Nature or any human DNA that condemns us to a fate of self-inflicted extinction.

Huge periods of human history, entire eras encompassing small clans through to huge civilisations have managed in conditions forged by purposefully minimalising conflict and maximising mutually beneficial trade and inter-mingling. There is nothing either biological or God-given about fighting, competing or enslaving – the system that we find ourselves born into tends to determine our behaviours. The current system of Capitalism is only one human system amongst many possibilities.

Of course, the struggle for survival and then for identity can lead us into conflict with others. We should retain the right to self-defence against predatory threats from others if only to prevent the descent into barbarism. But it is only the false construction of nation states and notions of racial hierarchies that combine to create the industrialised warfare we see today.

As an example, NATO is neither defensive nor just. It is an undemocratic alliance of the most powerful private corporate interests aimed at carving-up and accumulating the world’s natural resources and controlling its’ peoples.

This returns us to the fundamental issue. Climate degradation is fast-accelerating the scramble for declining resources. The catastrophes currently overwhelming entire countries in the Global South are just the precursor of social upheavals soon to hit the rest of us. The devastation from war could quite easily overwhelm us well in advance of the catastrophe of ecocide.

We have to challenge the drive to war and force the change from military to civilian expenditure. The money is clearly there to fund a carbon-zero economy by 2025, yet the System won’t allow it. That is the real issue. So today we need to say Not War, No to NATO, because that’s what the powerful are discussing. And everyday we have to enact the practical conclusions from the recognition that we need system change to minimise catastrophic climate change.

“Hypocrites are welcome in Extinction Rebellion”, says XR’s founder, Roger Hallam. For the record, I like this statement. I am in favour of listening to others, of being polite and empathetic, and practicing humility. We are all full of contradictions. And I’m clear that compassion has a vital role to play in the process of revolution.

It may be primarily a religious statement to “forgive us our sins”, yet in the material world of challenge and struggle any notion that we can live either a benign or a perfect life is ludicrous. Consequently, too harsh a judgement on each other is nothing other than destructive.

Being a hypocrite may be summed up as saying one thing whilst doing the opposite, or vice versa. Such a judgement upon another’s behaviour starts from a presumption that we are in charge of our own circumstances. In fact, as individuals we do not create our own environment and have only limited choices, some of which we’re ignorant of, absent of information and knowledge that may open the doors of choice.

There is, nevertheless, a place for judgement. Everything we do affects those around us. Even hermits have an impact upon the environment, not least by their abstention from helping humanity to tend rather than destroy Nature. It is also the case that our ideas have an impact – they inform and determine all our actions. Our thoughts affect others.

So I’m hesitant about the Extinction Rebellion’s mantra of being non-judgemental, only because the “Rule” appears much misunderstood, a bit like the associated Rule of being “beyond politics”. Both are quite liberally used to shut down debate, hopefully quite the opposite of the original intention. We are trying to save humanity and all life on earth from extinction at the hands of human-made climate catastrophe.

How do we agree about what to do? Judgements about each other’s opinions are important, because every belief corresponds to actions, and every action moves towards anti-human or pro-human results.

Being non-judgmental must surely mean preventing pre-judgement – assumptions made with insufficient evidence – and at the same time acknowledging the universal vulnerabilities of being human. Before damning someone else have you taken sufficient time to look at yourself? And in any case, is damnation essential…for what outcome?

I damn Fascism on the basis of evidence of the Holocaust, damn racism on the basis of it’s vicious denial of fact, damn sexism and homophobia for reason of their denial of equality and human rights, and disablism for the lack of collective provision for a common humanity. These judgements are in my mind essential for human survival.

We must therefore argue with each other about the small “p” political direction of travel, not only to clarify our own ideas but to test possible actions before carrying out possibly negative or destructive activities. XR’s dismissal of Party Politics as having not worked for sustainable development and the protection of the environment – surely a factual statement – doesn’t then require us to be beyond having political opinions or debate.

In this period of General Election in the United Kingdom, political debate and argument with all its pedantic word-play and double-speak hypocrisy, is vital. My observation so far is of a distinct paucity in the ability and readiness to debate without malice. Sides have been taken despite or without attention to facts or alternative ways of seeing. The cry of “hypocrite’ has become over-used as a tool of self-protection and condemnation of “the other”. This has all the resonance of a society scared, defensive and descending towards individual survival mode. Cowering from the threats of predation, hardship and climate catastrophe, we are repelling all borders and dismissing all those outside our chosen mini-clan.

We appear to have dismissed Reason as well as reasonable behaviour. What is needed now more than ever is robust, fulsome and informed debate about what is to be done, and yet we are being denied the atmosphere in which this can happen. It appears we have been set one-against-the-other by a set of contrived hostilities that divides us all and allows the current state of affairs to continue unchallenged.

If we’re all hypocrites then Truth is of no value and debate is without purpose. Choose your bunker and slam shut the door. The alternative? To recognise that we would like to live in a world where we do not have to be hypocrites, where we can live meaningfully without destroying the environment, in a harmony with each other which offers self-determination through social discourse and negotiation.

In which case, we’re not hypocrites at all. By acting to negate the negation we are being true to ourselves: living in an oppressive society but at all times challenging that oppression; needing to work to survive but challenging all exploitation of people and natural resources; having to shop for food but boycotting key pollutants; surviving in a carbon-based economy but seeking-out alternative futures. That’s Life.

Ultimately it is in the nature of the Capitalist System to compete, exploit, oppress and go to war. Challenging someone’s pro-Capitalist views is not to condemn the individual but to object to being led into a cul-de-sac. Any reliance on Capitalism as a system able to prevent the coming Climate Catastrophe is bound to fail – to rely on the carbon industries to end carbon-use in time to save the environment is beyond belief. We must practice political thought and use informed judgement to argue with each other. Only through debate can we agree the way forward. To prevent argument is indeed the greatest hypocrisy.

Last weekend we saw a large fascist rally in Poland and a military coup in Bolivia. There is a deep and growing polarisation in societies across the world and here. Deepening poverty and incredible wealth at each ends of the economic spectrum are mirrored by the same ideological extremes. On the far-right the growth of identity politics, the falsehoods of social media bubbles, altogether increasing bigotry, prejudice, discrimination and abuse. Underneath this is a global push to undermine the flimsy and quite superficial administrations of liberal democracies towards totalitarian autocratic control by super-rich oligarchs.

This sounds like conspiracy theory. Indeed, there can be a thin line between “plans” and “conspiracies”. In the main, conspiracy theories are concocted by right-wing libertarians antipathetic to State administration or control of any kind and paranoid about any and all restrictions on their chosen beliefs and feelings. At the same time we all experience phases or moments of paranoia, not least because life includes adversity.

A general problem is the tendency to interpret and describe the world from one’s own and singular experience. In truth it is all but impossible to extrapolate any general theory of the World from our personal perceptions. Especially in a hugely stratified class society, the separation of experience by the matrix of access to resources, education, communication, media and world views makes us all prisoners of our social circumstance.

There is another reason for closed mindedness. As Karl Marx observed, human beings are inherently conservative. Once our necessities are more-or-less met we tend to hold-on to our comforts and resist any change that may threaten our equilibrium. Not only do we defend our hovels and stale bread against the threat of homelessness and starvation, we put-up with limited liberties rather than risk violence and incarceration.

The human motivations towards social inclusion and self-determination are in constant tension. Submitting ourself to the greater good can conflict with personal desires to do exactly what we want. The entwined dynamic of the requirement for survival and identity – both essential needs – underwrite all human behaviours. But the human mind allows for people to believe whatever we like and therein lies the tension. The self-determination of one person, whether in a state of delusion or prescience, may require the subjugation or death of another.

Ultimately, an inclusive human society cannot manage an “anything goes” approach. The tolerance of the wide and broad spectrum of human behaviours can only be sustained by agreed boundaries to what is acceptable. In essence, denial of voice (identity) or life (survival) denote these boundaries. We tend to feel upset by and regale against calls for genocide, and express discomfort at any governance that requires the incarceration or death of others. Such political boundaries are very fluid and impermanent and mostly dependent upon our own perception of personal safety and survival.

Society can switch from tolerance to repression overnight, either when a majority feels threatened from without or from within. Survival tends to trump identity. Humanity has lived under ghastly repression for long periods. In totalitarian societies minorities continually give-up the dominance of their survival-mechanism, determining that their identity – freedom of thought and action – is more important than their own survival. People choose to die for their beliefs.

We have learnt that there has to be general agreement about social boundaries in order for any society to remain stable. Totalitarian governance is inherently unstable and requires extensive and expensive forces of mass repression of dissonance, disagreement and potential revolt. The trick of any ruling class – by its nature a minority of the population – is to maintain their rule over the masses without too much resistance.

Class society has developed quite exquisite nuances of structures that can be perceived as libertarian whilst markedly confining behaviours and identities. Successive ruling classes have made experiences of poverty, exploitation and inequality “natural” and “normal”. Indeed, such propaganda has normalised racism and sexism, such as the “scientific Darwinism” that apparently explains white supremacy, or the false psychology that makes women more sensitive and therefore vulnerable than men, and so requiring male protection and dominance.

The tension between day-to-day experiences and the dominant social propaganda gives rise to a sense of Anomie, an element of alienation, where we are told we are comfortable “enough” yet feel constantly out-of-sorts, lacking something vital, but can’t say what it is. In the heartbeat of history there are periods when scales fall from eyes, when the false propaganda becomes see-through, when the Emperor has no clothes.

We are in such a period. The Status Quo of super-rich amidst mass poverty has become apparent, not least because of new technologies that allow most of us to see the entire human world and develop deeper world views. Those who wish can look outside their close-horizoned protective bubble. We have access to far more information and to so much more social contact with other cultures and peoples than ever before. We also have refreshed knowledge of Nature, the natural environment, and the impact of the exploitation of natural resources on climate and ecosystems.

As a result, the ruling classes, wholly dependent on exploitation of both Nature and Humanity, have to become more repressive in their determination to hold on to their wealth and power. This can explain the re-emergence of far-right governments and fascist parties. It also explains the “imperialist” interference of more powerful nations into the structures and governance of less powerful countries. These are not conspiracies, they are planned interventions by a few small grouping of humans against the mass of others.

They mobilise those who still cling on to their propaganda of “deserving rich” and “undeserving poor”, and wage a war of ideas against those of us who crave liberty, inclusivity and the freedom of self-determination. And when those ideas aren’t enough, they provoke street violence and stage military coups to smash dissent, such as Last weekend’s fascist rallies in Poland or the military coup in Bolivia.

The dynamics and tensions of class society also explains the strength and power of the climate deniers. Capitalism depends upon carbon industries, indeed the system is intrinsically dependent of fossil fuels. Should the demand for carbon-zero production become dominant the current ruling classes will be fundamentally threatened and undermined. They have already spent tens of billions denying human-made global heating.

In direct consequence, the struggle for carbon-zero – to protect Nature and prevent mass extinction of life and even Humanity itself – is nothing short of a class struggle. The international environmental movement itself is in tension between internal forces of groupings allied to the survival of Capitalism (and, in essence, notions of Nation, class privilege, male and White supremacy) and those of us committed to System Change for survival, human progress and ecological protection.