Tariffic

How ‘bout those tariffs? I’m sure the penguin delegation was instrumental in getting their implementation partially delayed. Seriously though, this is what happens when the president has no idea how anything actually works and then delegates the policy creation to AI. Yup, the whole tariff chart was likely created with AI. And if the tech bros have their way, the whole country will soon be run mostly by AI.

Capitalism, and with it modern civilization as the “developed” world has come to know it, was always going to collapse at some point because it is an unsustainably predicated on perpetual growth in a finite system. This is why Musk wants to go to Mars, Bezos to the Moon, and plenty of others talk seriously about mining asteroids. Without the Sam Altmans, Peter Thiels, and Elons Musks, capitalism probably would have stumbled along for a good many years to come. However, with the tech bros at the top of the money-power pyramid, the collapse is suddenly accelerating.

Even up to a few months ago mention of collapse was not likely to appear in any kind of mainstream media, even the more liberal ones. You’d need to tune into podcasts like Crazy Town where they talk about it on the regular. But when The Guardian publishes an article about a report from Allianz SE, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, that warns climate change is on track to destroy capitalism and Scientific American publishes an article about how big banks like Morgan Stanley are quietly preparing for climate catastrophe you know things are getting serious. Of course, neither of the articles mentions how the insurance industry or the global finance industry have played significant roles in creating the conditions of collapse while they continue to find ways to profit off of it.

Meanwhile, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write, we find ourselves moving ever deeper into end times fascism. The super rich are building their bunkers and walled cities while they dismantle democracy. The tech bros are forthright about capitalism and democracy being incompatible. They cannot keep making money, using resources, and immiserating you and me unless all the guardrails of democracy are removed. So they make up lies about Venezuelan gang invasions, hoards of immigrants crossing the border, and trans people. They stop funding science and education and libraries. And then they start removing information from government websites about health and climate change, and anything that can be considered DEI or DEI adjacent. Because information is dangerous. If we know how to think, we can figure out how to resist.

All of the tech bros and a good many of the people who think like Robert Kennedy, are huge supporters of eugenics. It’s why Elon Musk pays women to have his children. It’s one reason why anti-vaxxers and health influencers are so self-righteous—if you are genetically worthy, the measles/COVID/other disease won’t kill you. Viruses are just Nature’s way of editing the gene pool.

The well-off know collapse is coming and that they, and their greedy capitalist fingers, are the reason for it. But they won’t ever say that and the mainstream will avoid talking about it for as long as possible because we wouldn’t want people to panic. Except people are panicking, we just don’t know what we are really panicking about. Those who suspect are being encouraged to prepare by buying guns, gold, ready-to-eat meals, to create our own mini bunkers so capitalism can make money off our panic.

It may seem nothing but doom and gloom, but it’s not. When you live in a dying civilization there are opportunities to create what comes next. What we do now, the ideas we talk about, the communities we create, and the positive futures we imagine make a difference. It is up to us as things fall apart to create the tools and vision to build something new and better.

Surveying possibilities, I recently read The Communist Manifesto for the first time. It is a fascinating and still relevant document. The analysis of capitalism is sharp and Marx and Engels are weirdly admiring of capitalism’s adaptability. They believed that capitalism’s end would come about by the rupture of revolution. I think at this point we are well beyond that sort of end. But even as capitalism collapses beneath its own weight, I do not agree with the communist future the pair imagined.

To go along with the Manifesto, I read China Miévile’s book A Spectre, Haunting. He provided very good historical context for the whole undertaking. Miéville, who considers himself a Communist, concludes his book by talking about hate. He says that Marx and Engels were very careful in the Manifesto to make it clear that we are to hate the system of capitalism and not the people who comprise the capitalist class—the bourgeoisie. A good and important distinction.

But then Miéville goes on to say for the sake of humanity, we must “hate harder” than the Manifesto. That “class hate is constitutive with and inextricable from solidarity.” He insists that we should “hate this hateful and hating and hatemongering system of cruelty.” He does say that we cannot celebrate or trust hate, that hate can easily turn on us. He quotes Che Guevara who said that the true revolutionary is “guided by a great feeling of love.” And then he does a bit of doublespeak by concluding his book: “It’s for the sake of love that, reading it today, we must hate more and better than even The Communist Manifesto knew how.”

That scares me more than straight up hate.

I recently read another book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview by Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez. In one of the chapters Fours Arrows comments that it isn’t “so much about resisting [or hating in Miéville’s case] those who are destroying life systems,” but about loving those life systems so much that you work to save them.

That’s what I aim to do. As capitalism and civilization collapses, I will be loving as much and as hard as I can. Hate can do nothing but destroy. But love, love saves and love creates. Let’s create a new and better world together.