Marxist Moments

ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE….OF DEATH!

 

          Saturday’s Daily Telegraph Book Review featured The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, editor of New York magazine, who shows through many facts and statistics that it is already too late to do anything about massive and ultimately fatal climate change. ‘Since 1992, we have done more damage to the planet than in all the millennia before…’ We are, in fact, doomed, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But the message here, according to reviewer Simon Ings, is: ‘the  human spirit persists.

          ‘Wallace-Wells thinks as much. When he thinks of his own children’s future, denizens of a world plunging ever deeper into its sixth major extinction event, he admits that despair melts and his heart fills instead with excitement. Humans will cling pluckily to live on this ever-less habitable earth for as long as they can. Quite right, too.’

          Thus we already have the configurations of the ultimate bourgeois response to the spectacle of capitalism having in effect destroyed the world: look upon this as bringing forth the ultimate sublimity of human heroism.

          So we have gone from climate-change denial to the embrace of extinction. (‘Thanks for pulling up the ladder behind you, Dad,' the children of this author might have said.) Forget about saving the world and concentrate on saving your own soul. Thus the result of several dozens of decades of exposure to Christian theology (as well as some Eastern teachings to the same effect) maintaining the fundamental reality only of the individual human soul, or – in capitalism – ‘rugged individualism’. Just as the response of many to what once seemed the likelihood of mass nuclear destruction was to plan one’s own family bunker with all mod cons and the necessary machine-guns for repelling stragglers. A far better bet than marching on the streets with CND. Thus the eternal dogma of the primacy of the individual as expressed by the ME generation, amongst other ideological manifestations, represented today by the ME’s of the great capitalist and corporate world, who have incidentally  brought about most of the carnage of nature, even simply through share ownership, whether in mining, drilling, motorcar manufacture, intensive agricultural monocultures, chemical companies or energy-hungry electronics. And in the ceaseless search for the cheapest labour on the planet. Anyhow, don’t think anger, or guilt, or fear: think personal beatification through sacrifice of life, like the Christian martyrs of old – and it helps too if you believe in the ‘life’ to come, so that death doesn’t really matter.

          And nor does it matter if societies collapse. Did not our dear departed Margaret Thatcher once inform the world that ‘there’s no such thing as society’?

          Children are growing in number who have a somewhat different take on all this. Protests have erupted from children in over 60 cities in the past week, demanding Change Now! And ‘Hey ho, fossil fuels have got to go.’ This movement appears to be gaining momentum.

          Only kids, of course. The Daily Mail has been quick to point out that ‘the Left’ has ‘hi-jacked’ the movement. So patronise but don’t blame the kids themselves: blame their manipulators, who see this as the chance to bring in socialism. That includes all adults who want to use their own power and knowledge and experience to give strength to the children’s movement, which obviously can’t see all this through on its own. Centuries ago, the Children’s crusade came to early grief trying on its own to save Jerusalem from the Muslims.

          Meanwhile our own Prime Minister Theresa May and her education secretary Damian Hinds have deplored the children bunking off school and not attending to their studies even if many children are saying that they will make up for lost school hours. Nonsense! They should be on the education factory floor at all times if production is to remain profitable. At least May and Hinds have the honesty to blame the children themselves.

          Ridicule and smear are also in order: as written by Ron Liddle in this week’s Sunday Times: ‘Those kids on the march had no idea of the issues surrounding global warming. If they did, they’d have told Mummy not to pick them up in the 4 x 4 once the march had ended.’ What reputable journalist smears children en masse?

          The Labour Party, typically in potentially divisive social situations, sought to adopt a more Guardian approach. As commented by the shadow education secretary Angela Rayner (who didn’t seek to be beastly to the children): she’s ‘inspired’ by the young people taking action, ‘But I hope it can evolve so we can build on its success without the loss of time in the classroom.’ (Morning Star, February 16^th-17^th.) Never mind the loss of time in saving the earth. In other words, stop demonstrating (that is, since it is useless and ineffective if it’s only done on Saturdays or Sundays or in half-term). Feel the passion but don’t act on it in a manner which is in any way disruptive. Where would women like Angela Rayner be today without the Pankhursts?

          Thus we run the gamut of strategies – uncannily like all the invective against any workers’ strike action since time immemorial – for undermining the resolve of children who are perfectly aware of the facts and have a childish wish to live.

          Thank goodness relatively few children read the newspapers, though a fortunate few may have read the Morning Star, the only paper that supports them in full. But they’re all Lefties over there whose ulterior motive in working to save the planet lies in expropriating those who have largely caused its premature decay.

          Which might, with action now, be ameliorated or slowed. Given half a chance, Nature can show astonishing resilience. Look at Chernobyl today. Kids, take a crack at it. Alternatively, look forward to your mass deaths in good time with ecstatic delight.