Apocalypse is the logical conclusion of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Because these systems aren’t sustainable, they’ve always been working towards a scenario where the earth gets destroyed. While the billionaires pitch corporate-engineered geoengineering and other capitalist “solutions” as ways to prevent the encroaching climate doomsday, these billionaires are continuing this march towards doomsday nevertheless; their version of geoengineering is just a more marketable route towards annihilation than an uninterrupted hothouse earth would be.
With Covid-19 and its related crises, we’re seeing a prelude to when this marketing campaign for geoengineering ramps up sometime during the next several decades. Every time capitalists step in to “help” society during the pandemic, all they do is exacerbate inequality, state violence, violations of privacy, militarism, and the silencing of free expression—which makes the social ills behind the pandemic worse. The IMF and its driving corporate interests have taken advantage of the pandemic by imposing greater austerity, privatization, and wage cuts onto 81 countries. Big Tech has used the pandemic as an excuse to push for an additional mass surveillance system, one where people are monitored from every corner by an “internet of things” that will fill the streets with cameras and connect countless everyday items to the government’s eyes and ears. The intensifying fusion between governments and the tech industry in surveillance throughout the last year-and-a-half has laid the groundwork for this vision.
The imperialists have weaponized the pandemic against vulnerable countries like Cuba and Venezuela by tightening sanctions against them. This reinforces the paradigm of military buildup that Washington is carrying out against China and its allies—which is justified by the campaign to blame China for the virus. The tech industry’s explosion in online censorship during the pandemic has been used as a cover for further silencing anti-imperialist journalists. And as even the pro-Washington biased Human Rights Watch has reported, the rise of digital tracking during the pandemic has led to a humanitarian crisis for the lower class:
Government reliance on risky, intrusive, and unproven technologies has also threatened access to social protection measures. In a bid to prevent benefits fraud, 21 unemployment insurance agencies in the United States are reportedly using facial recognition software to screen applicants for unemployment insurance and other benefits to support people during the pandemic. This forces applicants to give up their right to privacy in exchange for lifesaving support. People have also complained on social media that difficulties in verifying their identity using the software are delaying their claims. These setbacks are the latest in a string of technology-related problems marring access to benefits in the US. Since the beginning of the pandemic, many people reported frequent website glitches and shutdowns, excessive wait times on state unemployment agency helplines, and password reset protocols that force them to wait for their login credentials by mail. Delays in obtaining benefits have forced families to cut back on food, fall behind on their bills, and skip essential medical care.
As the pandemic gets used to wage war against the global working class in these ways, capital continues to consolidate its power in accordance with the opportunities the pandemic has granted it to do so. Taking advantage of the eviction crisis that the pandemic has created, BlackRock has been buying up affordable homes, taking ownership over entire neighborhoods, and turning single-family households into rentals. The rise of civil unrest during the economic downturn has helped give private military companies an excuse to expand their policing operations into U.S. borders, with PMCs now roamingMinneapolis to regularly violate the civil rights of locals. For-profit migrant detention centers continue to exist, snatching up the population of asylum seekers that continues to grow despite the pandemic’s making conditions more dangerous for such vulnerable groups.
This is the true meaning of the “great reset” that Biden officials have discussed: a dictatorship of capital that gets continuously more brutal and uncaring. Despite this dictatorship’s arbiters claiming to hold the solution to the crisis, they’re the reason why the pandemic has so far killed nearly 5 million people; it’s the most hyper-capitalist countries that have had by far the most Covid-19 deaths, with the U.S. being at the top after having over 700 thousand of its people die according to the official count. The five socialist countries China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and the DPRK are all free from pandemic death counts any higher than Vietnam’s 19 thousand. Capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism make crises that could be manageable under socialism a thousand times worse.
Imagine how much damage capitalism’s “solutions” will do when the climate crisis gets bad enough for the billionaires to have a narrative precedent to geoengineer the planet. The world’s richest men already fully intend to bring about such a project. And due to the warming trajectory that capitalism has already set us on, geoengineering is becoming increasingly accepted as a necessary evil; according to Gernot Wagner of Harvard University's Solar Geoengineering Research Program, it’s a fact that we won’t be able to stop the more extreme warming outcome without taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. In his book Geoengineering: The Gamble, Wagner concludes that we’ve reached a point of no return on the climate, one that can only be reversed by intervention that goes beyond reducing emissions.
It’s this objective truth that the ruling class is going to exploit, that will be distorted to fit the sinister version of geoengineering which billionaires seek to realize. The climate plans of Musk (who seeks to capture carbon) and Gates (who seeks to make the skies more reflective) both lack the logistical and scientific backing to be able to work. Which makes doubly dangerous the plans that people like Gates have; they want to intervene in ways that could permanently alter the atmosphere, whether that will look like a whitened sky that has unpredictable impacts on agriculture and weather, a cover of artificial clouds that could lead to ozone layer damage and acid rain, or a drastic cooling that triggers a new ice age.
These measures, if facilitated by the capitalist class, will only be ways of avoiding the simpler solution of sufficiently reducing emissions. Worst case scenario, they’ll be implemented in a way that only cools the planet for a temporary amount of years, allowing even more greenhouse gases to fill up the atmosphere before creating rapid heating when the geoengineering effort halts. Best case scenario, we’ll experience a climatic version of the capitalist accelerationism that Covid-19 has allowed for. A future where the ruling class markets cooling routes that don’t adequately stem emissions—like how the vaccines and lockdowns haven’t adequately stemmed infections under capitalism—while the wheels of free-market fanaticism and state violence turn ever faster.
If we accept the climate “solution” that the billionaires and the imperialist governments are going to offer us, we’ll doom ourselves to a far larger repeat of the hell that capitalism has subjected us to during the Covid-19 era. The death toll created by capitalism’s crisis mishandling will jump from the millions to the tens of millions, with hundreds of millions more climate refugees. And even when it’s gotten to that point, the ruling class will demand we be grateful for how they’ve “helped” us. This argument will come from the relativist logic described by Gerry Canavan in his paper on Snowpiercer, the dystopian graphic novel about capitalist-facilitated geoengineering:
Necrofuturist themes in texts like Soylent Green and The Sheep Look Up reveal contemporary necrocapitalism as a pathology akin to drug addiction: locked in an entropic, self-destructive cycle, we compromise more and more in the name of keeping the system remaining unchanged, as necrocapitalist dispossession and violence slowly spread across more and more domains of all our lives. (This week, an American city is evacuated by flooding and never repopulated; this week, an entire province in Japan is rendered permanently uninhabitable; this week we fired all the career teachers and replaced them with Teach for America recruits and YouTube videos; this week, American police forces use tear gas, rubber bullets, and riot dogs on their own citizens night after night after bloody night with no consequences or opposition...) Necrofuturism is thus a relentless doubling-down on necrocapitalism, the knowledge that necrocapitalism is creating a world of horrors coupled with the ironclad belief that there is no possible alternative to such a future.
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