Suffocation
When Hollywood depicts the end of the world it is typically loud and bombastic. Wars, zombies, floods, biblical level events. And yet under capital, while certainly these all do exist, the overwhelming theme is a slow silent suffocation, like carbon monoxide building is a blood stream capital continues its value production and accumulation silently in an ever eroding world.
A Quiet Class Struggle
Class consciousness is not realized by an individual but by an entire class, namely the proletariat through continual interaction in the system of commodity production. The working class never has to read Marx to engage in class consciousness, just realize itself as a producer of labor power, and to take their fight from higher wages to the abolition of the system of wages. This of course is not automatic and only realized through conscious activity (organization). Regardless of a high activation of class consciousness or not class struggle persists, as the proletariat every day engages in a system where they are deprived of their human creative activity, coerced labor, for capital.
Class struggle within the modern world presents itself as amazingly silent. Though there have been counter trends of growing general strikes, overwhelmingly across the world as the organic composition of capital has risen, leading to falling wages, unemployment, cut welfare, the world remains silent, unmoving. As politicians like Trump bring about bombastic legislations that shatter rights, labor has won, as a ‘let them eat cake’ statement leaves the lips of the bourgeoisie almost daily, the world continues to run silently. Workers are squeezed of all value production possible, made exhausted and brain dead from work. The predominant sense that the world presents is ‘yes things are slowly getting worse but I’m tired and I’m not going to do anything about it.’ A suffocating atmosphere of apathy faces us under immense quantitative change. That great qualitative change lies under the surface waiting to burst with energy, for now building a great slow potential energy before it is finally allowed to go kinetic. To live in a generation where said potential is being stored provides the allusion of a world statically in silence.
A silently dying ecosphere (bugs)
Capital concerned with its continual self reproduction through M-C-M’ has no time for slowing its ecological consumption when there is always things to be commodified, value to be realized onto the market, and new constant capital to buy. It is an unthinking machine attempting to consume and grow itself every cycle. Rather than having a logical system based on need and long term human survivability on the planet, commodities that are overproduced as glut are instead destroyed so that price can be brought closer to value, filling dumpsters while the streets grow in the army of unhoused. All land that can be farmed is, every last drop of water that can be used is consumed, every drop of fossil fuel is pulled from the earth and burned, to realize more M’ so that capital can buy even more labor power and raw materials/machines. In such a world of gross overproduction of commodities beyond even use the ecosphere of earth has not been able to keep up. 40% of insect species has silently died, 4.7 million hectares of forests have been destroyed between 2010-2020, and millions of species are now endangered as the world ends what some scientists are calling the 6th mass extinction event. And yet such a massive crisis does not present itself with the urgency it is needed, though climate scientists are certainly trying their best to, but rather as just something relegated to page 5 of the evening news. There are no alarm bells, freak outs, or mass societal panics at an impending doom, but rather just another dull silence.
A Silent Apocalypse ( El nino)
Earth currently is on track for one of its hottest years on record comparable to a heating event in 1877 in which millions of people died all across the globe. The biggest victims of this event will be the most silent sections of the human population, Dalits, urban poor, informal settlers, the marginalized, barrio dwellers, etc. They will die without cameras, media attention, or much attention or sympathy, a silent suffocation. Capital has no plan of action for this coming apocalypse, nor does it care much if its reserve armies and surplus populations are ended. It has known for decades about the threat of climate change and yet has been more concerned with it’s own realization of value however it could in its never ending thirst for accumulation.
Quantitative To Qualitative
In an era of mass quantitative change it is easy to feel hopeless, suffocated, and as though this is how the world always was and always will be. But bubbling underneath this atmosphere of apathy and silence that great qualitative leap always awaits, the fundamental contradiction between capital and labor, capital and the ecosphere, and capital and the human species awaits a triumphant conclusion when the build up finally bursts the dam of social change. This is humanity’s make it or break it century, and if we make it the future is ours.
