Confronting Climate Anxiety: From Doomerism to Collective Action

[00:00:15][Music] [Applause] [Music] Where are you from?

[00:00:25]From Sudan.

[00:00:27]From Sudan.

[00:00:31]Have you come from Cal?

[00:00:32]It's not the first time the government is using giant tents to bolster its facilities to deal with asylum seekers.

[00:00:39]Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?

[00:00:46]You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones.

[00:00:56]People are suffering. People are dying.

[00:01:00]Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.

[00:01:07]And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

[00:01:13]Part one, the uninhabitable earth.

[00:01:22][Music] It feels really hard to talk about the future.

[00:01:37][Music] We all know climate change is getting worse at a terrifying pace. And I think to a lot of people it doesn't even feel worthwhile looking into the problem in any detail because we all feel incredibly helpless in the face of what really looks like it could be the end of the world.

[00:02:03]and then you go look into the problem more and that doesn't help.

[00:02:11]In fact, the details and data about just how badly pollution has [ __ ] up the planet lead you to the inevitable conclusion this is a problem beyond voting or protest. This is a problem we just don't have the time to solve with incremental reforms or market solutions.

[00:02:32]The opening page of the uninhabitable earth by David Wallace Wells describes this pretty perfectly.

[00:02:36]It is worse, much worse than you think.

[00:02:39]The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions. That global warming is an Arctic saga unfolding remotely. that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed. That it is a crisis of the natural world, not the human one. That those two are distinct and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it. That wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming.

[00:03:22]that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth. That growth and the technology it produces will inevitably engineer a way out of environmental disaster. That there is any analog to the scale or scope of this threat in the long span of human history that might give us confidence in staring it down. The chapter titles of the uninhabitable earth read like a list of ways that a recently divorced super villain would try to kill himself taking out as many other people as possible like heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfires, dying oceans, unbreathable air, economic collapse. David Wallace Wells does a meticulous job in bringing together climate data in ways that bring the climate emergency into focus as an overlapping cascade of apocalyptic problems. And at the same time, he explains very well why so many of the warnings that actually managed to make it into the news are really softening the problem. See, scientists are bound by academic practice not to engage in too much conjecture. And that's why so many of the big scary last chance got to do something now or else final warnings that the scientific community are actually comfortable publishing are about what we could avoid if we took drastic action right now. That doesn't sound that unreasonable, but the actual trend is that the fossil fuel industry keeps growing, keeps finding more sources of fuel, and industrial production powered by the fossil fuel industry keeps putting more CO2 into the atmosphere year on year. That means that at any point, what we could avoid by taking drastic action right now is pretty bad. But any reasonable person's evaluation of the situation would read more like it looks like you are trying to accelerate towards a world where the top soil is so scorched and poisoned nothing will ever grow again and all the oceans are barren. Stop now or we will all die. I am not [ __ ] around. Or more accurately any reasonable person's evaluation of the situation would read more like and [ __ ] then there's the attempts at trying to tell us it's all going to be okay. You see Bill Gates and tragically the science communicators who've been paid to regurgitate his gibberish telling us all that we're going to invent our way out of the problem like we're going to rely on some gizmo that hasn't even been invented yet being manufactured on a large enough scale to actually make a difference. I will become violently ill if I see another cartoon of a little box fan somehow sucking carbon out of the air narrated by a cheerful liberal telling us that market economics is going to get us out of the problem that market economics got us into.

[00:06:04]The more of these technologies we deploy, the cheaper new and better technology gets. The cheaper they get, the more people use them, and so on. You see liberal politicians with a radical plan of action to ensure a just and happy transition to green energy by 2030 or 2050 or 2080 or some other date that they've deemed achievable that's way outside of the realm of their own electoral cycle. Like I'll vote for the better candidate and I'll vote to try and keep them in, but I don't even have a vote in American elections and those seem to be the ones that like matter at all. And even if my candidate gets in and stays in, are we sure the policies will be enacted the way that they want them to? Like, we can only vote, or according to my YouTube analytics, most of you can only vote every few years. How many elections do we even think are left before the literal end of the world? strapping on my waiters and my air filtration mask to swim down to the polling station so I can vote for Saria Stalmer's Labour party to please make transgenderism illegal next year instead of this year.

[00:07:13]All of these liberal answers completely disregard the rapidity of climate change and none of them take a reasonable look at how we actually got here. As David Willis Wells puts it, many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt accumulated since the beginning of the industrial revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.

[00:07:44]Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries, all the millennia that came before. The United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992, advertising scientific consensus unmistakably to the world. This means we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance. And somewhat whimsically, the majority of burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld.

[00:08:20]Jerry, you hear what's going on out there, buddy? Some kind of echological collapse? Planet's on fire. Leave me alone, Kramer. I'm going back to bed.

[00:08:29]So, when I started researching and writing this two years ago, I thought that um it would be really funny to have a joke about Seinfeld in um the my video about the about about climate change. I suppose that brings me to the purpose of this essay, depression, dumerism, the belief that we are all [ __ ] and there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop climate change. I've noticed a pattern in my offline friends as well as in the online leftist content sphere where we all keep on invoking climate change only in order to say everything's [ __ ] It's the last on a list of reasons why everything sucks. Fascism and recession and so on and so on and not even to mention climate change except the not to mention is actually extremely real. We are effectively not mentioning climate change. We are just evoking climate change as the idea of a completely insurmountable obstacle. I can't pretend I don't understand the impulse to not look at the problem. Of course, I did legitimately make myself deeply miserable by reading more into climate data and the politics surrounding it.

[00:09:42]The failsafe mechanisms as it were that keep us locked on course for a total climate apocalypse. David Wallace Wells breaks down the escalating devastation of climate change according to the degrees of warming reached due to carbon emissions. At 2° the ice sheets will begin their collapse. 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity.

[00:10:03]Major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable. And even in northern latitudes, heat waves will kill thousands each summer. There would be 32 times as many extreme heat waves in India. and each would last five times as long, exposing 93 times more people. This is our best case scenario.

[00:10:23]At three degrees, southern Europe would be in a permanent drought, and the average drought in Central America would last 19 months longer and in the Caribbean, 21 months longer. In Northern Africa, the figure is 60 months longer, 5 years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the Mediterranean and sixuple or more in the United States. At 4° there would be 8 million more cases of deni fever each year in Latin America and close to annual global flood crisis. There could be 9% more heat related deaths. Damages from river flooding would grow 30fold in Bangladesh, 20fold in India and as much as 60fold in the United Kingdom. In certain places, six climate-driven natural disasters could strike simultaneously, and globally, damages could pass $600 trillion dollars. More than twice the wealth as exists in the world today. Conflict and warfare could double. Part of what makes the question of our planetary future feel too bleak to even consider, makes part of our total annihilation feel a certainty to many, is the nature of the problem of climate change as a socopolitical economic issue. We live in a world divided by what? I can't be sad and gorgeous. Grow up. We live in a world divided by global capitalist imperialism. There aren't just poor countries and rich countries, a global north and south, a first and third world. There is an imperial core and an imperial periphery. And the imperial core countries definitionally exploit from and steal from the imperial periphery. Okay, a map usually helps people understand things like this a bit better. Behold the walled world. The most heavily policed and militarized borders in the world. And inside of them only 14% of the population, but 73% of the wealth. This isn't a perfect map. It doesn't show, for instance, the varied relationships between the countries outside those borders or how they have different relationships to the countries within them. It also paints this as pretty black and white countries are either in or out. And that's unhelpful because of the ways that the boundaries and flows of imperialism can shift and change. and also because it can't tell us a very important aspect of its own visualization that these borders are there to keep people in as well as to keep them out. The imperial periphery is in a very real sense thanks to the limits that wealth places on freedom of movement ghettoized. As David Greyber put it in direct action and ethnography, a lot of us were already arguing that the whole point of free trade was in fact to confine most of the world's population in impoverished global ghettos with heavily militarized borders in which existing social protections could be removed and the resulting terror and desperation fully exploited by global capital. Nonetheless, as a visualization, it does bring together some political truths we're aware of implicitly. That the country is responsible for historic imperialism and their white majority offshoots and settle colonial projects continue to benefit from that legacy in a material way. Liberal discussions of who is responsible for climate change and who should fix it treat global politics like an even playing field, as though all countries compete on an even footing in the marketplace of global capitalism. In fact, the richest country in the world and its allies, the other richest countries in the world, are responsible for not only a disproportionate share of emissions, but also responsible through financial mechanisms for a lot of the way that other countries emit too.

[00:13:47]International bodies like the UN measure the progress and success of countries according to a model based off the countries in the imperial core, not only using wealth, but a specific pathway of industrialization and then eventual shift from an industrial sector economy to something else. This framework of human development is ahistorical.

[00:14:04]Countries in the imperial corps underwent industrialization off the back of colonialism and then the domination of other countries and even chatt slavery. In the US and UK, our economies de-industrialized, that is shifted from an industrial sector to service sector economy because the industrial workers were gaining organized class consciousness and the government's outsourced industrial manufacturer to the imperial periphery to force the working class into jobs without unions.

[00:14:31]Are imperial periphery countries supposed to follow this same pathway?

[00:14:36]How? This is starting to look more and more like America making a selfie video in its garage with its two Lamborghinis and its bookshelf and telling all the poor countries they can be just like this if they work hard and subscribe to its private Discord channel. Am I wrong?

[00:14:48]To describe the scope and nature of the problem of climate change requires these digressions into so much else. Because without it, we kind of have a nonsense map of countries with huge emissions but not enough resources to deal with those emissions. And the best answer liberals give us is that those countries just need to develop more. They need more time because using fossil fuels is just a natural part of human development. In reality, there is a system of coercion and incentives here which encourages every nation to be as dependent on oil as possible because to do so makes America richer. It's not just that the American Empire runs on oil, but the concept of value and the primary financial mechanism for structuring the American empire, the dollar, is intrinsically linked to oil. Since the US was historically a net importer of oil, it used to be that the value of oil and the US dollar had an inverse relationship. When the price of oil went up, the value of the dollar would go down until about 2010 when the US became a net exporter, at which point the relationship reversed. Now, if oil is worth more, the dollar is also worth more. The commonality between these two relationships is the US always gets the best deal on oil sales. This isn't an informal relationship either. In August 1971, in a deeply jokified move, Richard Nixon deped the value of the dollar from gold and pegged it to oil instead. This was a response to the enormous debts that America was generating due to, among other things, the Vietnam War. As a result, oil is always traded in US dollars, sometimes referred to as petro dollars. Of course, the Seinfeld premiere wasn't until 1989 when Ronald Reagan left office, so we can't pin this all on Nixon. If your currency has more value, it has more power. It's important to understand money as instructional tokens because the point of money is not to store value, but to convey it from one party to another in exchange for something. So, if you have more money, you have more power. Go figure. So, if someone said, "Why would America invade the Middle East for oil when it's already one of the biggest producers of oil?" The answer is actually surprisingly simple. If your currency has a value tied to the value of oil, well, you have a vested interest in firstly controlling the supply of oil or at least making sure the supply of oil is in the hands of a few reliable monopolies and secondly in people using oil. But to understand the shape of power isn't enough because for many the next thought would be well the American presidential elections must hold enormous importance in the question of climate which of course they do. But to vote in a completely green president of the United States is no magic bullet. France Kfka has a short story titled an imperial message.

[00:17:30]And it really is very brief. So I'll just read it to you.

[00:17:35]The emperor, so they say, has sent a message directly from his deathbed to you alone. His pathetic subject, a tiny shadow. Actually, it's a bit fruity even for me. So I'll just paraphrase. The emperor is dying and his last dying act is to give a message for you at the farthest flowing reaches of the empire to his messenger verified by everyone at his deathbed. The messenger sets off right away but immediately encounters a problem. The inner chambers are [ __ ] rammed. There are too many mourers in there, servants and sycopants and so on.

[00:18:06]But the messenger he has the imperial crest he can point to to say, "Get out of my way." But even getting out of his way is not so easy because it's just so jam-packed. So, the messenger is basically shoving people out of the way, one arm in front of the other, trying to swim through the crowd. But if he ever gets out of the inner chambers, there's still the outer chambers. And outside the outer chambers, there's the inner palace. And outside the inner palace, the inner palace garden, and then the wall, and then the outer palace, and then the outer palace garden, and another wall, and then the imperial city. And guess what? Every single square inch of it is [ __ ] rammed with people here to see the dying emperor. So in effect the message will never actually reach you. This is how imperialism works. It has to create convoluted systems of power through which to enact the will of the empire.

[00:18:54]Both to distance the people at the top from the imperial subjects and to legitimize the power of the empire through abstraction and esoterica.

[00:19:03]The flip side of this is that even the power of the most powerful political figure in the world has to work through these convoluted mechanisms slowing it to a snail's pace. This shows how the nature of global power while dictating much about the imperial periphery from the core doesn't actually allow for a change that could tackle the climate emergency through the existing channels of worldwide politics. As is often noted about imperial core periphery relationships, the superructure exceeds the infrastructure. The ideology of the free market, the patterns of behavior and service of the idol of capital are rampant and unrestricted and exist far beyond the ability of the imperial project to regulate them. If Joe Biden actually wanted to stop climate change, I know, right? Good stuff. I'm here all week, folks. If they moved to shut down all fossil fuel extraction within the states and then used their political influence to pressure every other country they could to stop fossil fuel extraction as well, it wouldn't result in the fossil fuel industry being shut down. It would likely either result in Biden being removed from power or the collapse of America's power on the global stage. Most likely, in fact, it would just become a new frontier of imperialism in which poorer countries would be brutalized and sanctioned while America promised it was definitely going to move away from fossil fuels. But it's those other countries, you know, it's those other people, they're the ones holding it up. In fact, we can see this is already more or less the case. Green imperialism is well underway. And while America makes empty gestures towards domestic reform, the focus for many has shifted to what China will do about its emissions. Green energy has been recuperated into one of those never fulfilled and yet never empty threats that makes imperialism work. The way that the system operates is not meaningfully separable from global warming. To put it more plainly, global warming cannot be stopped without ending global imperialist capitalism. So flooding, droughts, heat waves, extreme and devastating weather events, unbreathable air, and dying oceans are all the end point of the normal way of doing business on which all of our political relationships are built.

[00:21:13]To stop these horrible things happening, we would have to dismantle the power of the most powerful nation on earth. And probably even more absurdly, we would have to dismantle the framework which gives it its power. Capitalism itself is the thing killing the world.

[00:21:32]Why do you even watch videos like this?

[00:21:34]Long as hell video essays about philosophy and leftist takes on media and communist political theory.

[00:21:42]I know the answer very clearly for a lot of my audience because I watch longass YouTube videos as well, albeit on different topics. I know a lot of people watching this are at their work desk or in bed or in some other way consuming this content when you should be working or eating or sleeping or tending to your life in some way. I know this is a comforting space from people who need to procrastinate away from something. And again, I know because I do this too. I like to watch long as hell videos about how to grow mushrooms at home. I love mushrooms. I've always loved fungus and mosses and molds. I remember being fascinated by it. Brace for a really gross name here. A type of slime mold that grew outside my bedroom window as a kid called dog vomit mold. I just love the idea of these organisms, neither plant nor animal, down in the dirt doing amazing things that we don't even know about. Did you know that the mcelial networks beneath forests can attach to the roots of trees and allow forests to basically think like trees can send messages to each other through the fungus. Anyway, I like to lie in bed and not sleep and not eat and not get up to do the day and learn about how I could grow pink oysters or lion's mane at home. Of course, I'm not doing those things. I'm just watching a YouTube video. It's a kind of escapist fantasy for the things I could be doing if I weren't so paralyzingly depressed. And I know lots of other people consume the content they consume in the same way, the kind of content I create even. So, I just lie there, not buying a plastic tub or a grow tent or a misting setup, not mixing a bulk substrate or inoculating a grow bag, not growing mushrooms at home, just waiting, incubating. Other content creators and influencers on the left are very quick to say that nobody should seriously listen to them about what to do politically, because why would you listen to an influencer about something as serious and important as that? And maybe they're right. It does sound pretty [ __ ] silly to get your directions for how to build a better world from a video on the internet, right? I mean, what the [ __ ] can I actually say anyway? I am literally a YouTuber. My qualifications are a gifted and talented program in high school, a silver plaque that says I got 100,000 subscribers, and reading as many accounts of historical revolutions as I could possibly get my hands on. No one is expecting me to lay out a step-by-step analysis and plan of how not only to ensure that a revolution succeeds, but to shape the character of it to be as loving and kind as possible as to ensure the most equitable and gentle world we can possibly live in.

[00:24:26]That would be ridiculous.

[00:24:28]So, I'll just keep on making videos about the phenomenology of Alex Jones's conspiracy theories, and you'll keep on watching them, and I'll keep on watching videos about how to grow mushrooms at home, but not actually do it, and we can all just enjoy the fantasy.

[00:24:44][Music] But what if we actually did it though?

[00:25:09]I started out quite ambitious with my mushroom growing. I skipped over buying grow your own kits and went straight for mixing my own substrate which is a word which here means expensive dirt that I could grow my mushrooms on. My substrate was mostly vermiculite gypsum and cocoaqua with water I had boiled to avoid contamination. I also made a pretty silly mistake and decided to grow pink oysters out of this tub of dirt.

[00:25:30]Pink oysters grow best out of vertical surfaces, not horizontal ones. So the way my pink oysters grew was extremely wacky and probably could have come out better with a different setup.

[00:25:38]Nonetheless, they came out really well, which looking back was extremely lucky because the whole setup here was full of problems. But maybe that's a testament to how easily pink oysters can fruit.

[00:25:47]And boy, are they gorgeous. I have footage of these first flush of pink oysters, but I had to travel during the second flush, and that was during the big summer heat wave. And if I'd been there, I would have put a lot of work into keeping them temperature regulated and hydrated. But because I was away, the second flush withered and dried up.

[00:26:04]Later on, I got a grow kit so I could capture a time-lapse of pink oysters actually fruing. And the footage shows off another big mistake I made starting out. I didn't make a separated sterile space for my mushroom growing. So flies found it pretty fast and it got kind of gross. The reason I'm talking about it and showing it and describing the failures and problems here is I think it's really important to expect that things will go wrong when you decide to actually get out of bed and do something. In fact, it's good to expect everything to go wrong. But it's also worth understanding what that really looks like. I was pretty heartbroken after the heat wave killed my little pink guys and I really thought that the entire mycelium had died off. But a few weeks later, a third flush started.

[00:26:43]Anyway, it turned out they needed to just rest and recuperate for a little bit. And even though at first I thought the lesson here was I needed to be around and put in my caring labor to make my project work at all times. It turned out the real lesson was sometimes you just have to be patient. And when your mcelium gets burned out, it just needs to rest a little.

[00:27:24]Let's start at the worst case scenario and work backwards from there. Now, that might seem callous, which is not my intention given the sheer scale of human misery that climate change is about to and already is inflicting upon the world. But discussing this problem involves saying things like if billions of people die because, well, that's a thing that could actually happen. But sketching out the worst case scenario can be an exercise in reassurance. My mom taught me to do something like this.

[00:27:49]Talking through the realistic worst case scenario can give us a good baseline for everything else that might happen. If I'm worried that no one will come to my birthday party, I can't say the worst case scenario is I get arrested and sentenced to death for being a Billy no mates. So when people talk about the worst case scenario for climate change, they usually say something along the lines of millions upon millions die directly. Millions more are displaced.

[00:28:13]Farright politics seeing an opportunity in the migrant crisis balloons in the richer nations that the migrants flee to and neoliberal governments responding the way they do to well everything become more authoritarian stripping away people's rights to say bodily autonomy being queer other lifestyles than 9to-5 capitalist work. That's where we're at already. And as the warming continues, not only does the migrant crisis and therefore the farright politics feeding off the migrant crisis worsen, but also some resources become scarce. say clean water. And then wars are fought over previously abundant resources. And after major population centers are nuked to [ __ ] the stragglers find themselves living in a MadMax wasteland, permanently sewn into their finest fetishware and ready to gar, stab, scam, and steal their way through at least a dozen other human beings just to get to the last vegan sausage roll on the irradiated shelf of the Rexom Gregs.

[00:29:07]But how much of that is actually realistic? For one, the reality of mutually assured destruction is that anyone taking steps to launch nuclear weapons in a world so full of nuclear weapons as ours is would be taking steps to effectively end all life on Earth.

[00:29:20]And I don't think that's going to happen. Call it misguided optimism in humanity, if you will. But if I'm wrong, are you going to say I told you so? I'll be at good luck. I don't think that nuclear Armageddon is a real possibility. But the fact that it could be should be enough to motivate anybody to campaign to have all nuclear weapons disarmed. For another, there is an assumption in our picture of the end of the world that we will be protected from the worst conditions. When we tell this story, we can't help but place ourselves in it as characters and therefore as the survivors. We think that if the richer countries we live in were to descend into utter tyrannical chaos, it could only be because the rest of the world had become utterly uninhabitable. The relationship between our safety and comfort and everyone else's will remain the same, but the lowering tide will beach all boats. This is quite a silly approach that I think is born out of the chauvinism of the imperial corps. We refuse to contemplate, even in total collapse, that our relationships to the countries that our governments exploit would change. But I think it's actually quite naive to assume that power relationships that exist now would continue to hold firm through such an all-encompassing crisis. We like this phrase about the future, socialism or barbarism. But it isn't really socialism or barbarism. It's that we live under barbarism right now and until we build socialism. Never think you don't live in a barbaric society just because you can get deliveroo to your door. If you think we don't live in a cruel and desperate world right now, speak to a homeless person. Speak to a refugee. Speak to a mother whose children and parents are freezing this winter because the people in charge could give them all access to electricity for free. but don't care to do anything about the soaring bills for that matter speak to your deliveroo driver. So I think that imagining that the exploitative relationships will hold out is actually how we construct our picture of the end of the world. But also quite absurd like implicitly when we're talking about this we are imagining American imperialism riding out the wave of diminishing human population until President Robo Trump is the last metahuman alive and then I guess he dies of quazar varian co because he refused to get vaccinated as a political stunt. Anyway, in fact, let's peel back from the worst case scenario now and look again at David Wallace Wells's projections for 4 degrees of warming. At that dramatic a shift in the Earth's climate, will capitalism still be able to function? In certain places, six climate-driven natural disasters could strike simultaneously, and globally damages could pass $600 trillion, more than twice the wealth as exists in the world today. It seems like there is a point at which the damage of climate change will make the normal functioning of capitalism impossible. And since the normal functioning of capitalism is what is driving climate change, that means there is a point at which capitalism will make capitalism impossible. This brings us back to our worst case scenario exercise. If billions of people die, would the survivors still be practicing capitalism? At what point will people abandon the system that is killing the planet?

[00:32:27]My argument in what follows is that that point is sooner than we think. This seems at first blush to bring us to a kind of human nature conversation, which is a kind of conversation I personally hate. Do we just love capitalism too much? Will we let billions die? Will we continue producing and consuming like we are now until forced not to by powers beyond our control? Are human beings just too greedy? Well, I don't think so.

[00:32:54]But I'm not going to argue it's because people are fundamentally good. As Wallace Wells tells us, at four degrees of warming, climate change will have destroyed more than twice the wealth as exists in the world today. Now, capitalists and much western culture since the Renaissance wants us to see people, society, progress, and civilization as separate from nature and not dependent on it. But the reality is that climate change diminishing the resources that capitalist production can pull from will diminish the wealth that the ruling class use to instruct the working class. Let me put it like this.

[00:33:30]If any capitalist state had no money, they wouldn't be able to make people do things because money is instructional tokens. Yes, they could pay fewer people more police to terrorize the population and so on, but if the state and by extension the businesses that step in to fulfill the roles of the state for profit under neoliberalism doesn't provide ways for people to get what they need to survive, people are going to organize to get it for themselves. And if enough people are in that situation, they will form structures of mutual aid that will constitute a parallel power to the state's diminishing presence. It's not that I'm describing an inevitable tipping point. It's that things will keep getting worse and the sooner people form those care structures and resist, the better things will be. A calculation that will be more and more readily apparent to everyone as time goes on.

[00:34:20]And if a state fails and the structures that step in to take its place aren't oriented around meeting everyone's needs, those new structures will be on a rapid path to collapse and again and again until those care structures are formed. It's all about how quickly people withdraw their dependence on capital and form those care structures instead. This is actually a very worthwhile approach because the damage of climate change is still despite its suddeness a sliding scale. As David Wallace Wells puts it, perhaps because of the exhausting false debate about whether climate change is real, too many of us have developed a misleading impression that its effects are binary.

[00:34:59]But global warming is not yes or no. Nor is it today's weather forever or doomsday tomorrow.

[00:35:06]This is what is fundamentally quite unhelpful about a lot of media that talks about climate change directly or indirectly only in terms of total annihilation. It lets us think of a big onoff switch for the apocalypse.

[00:35:17]Currently, it's switched on and it would take quite a lot of work to switch it off. So, I guess we'll die. One very popular story tackling a societal approach to climate change is Adam McKay in David Sro's 2021 film Don't Look Up. It doesn't talk directly about climate change, but rather has an asteroid barreling towards Earth that will destroy the entire planet and follows the despair and frustration of a pair of scientists who are aware of it and trying to get the government to act as they are first met by ignorance and then complacency and then a kaleidoscopic horror of the ultra wealthy trying to let the asteroid get closer so they can make money off it. cynical right-wing politicians fueling a cult of denialism to maintain political leverage and the US government actively sabotaging other countries attempts to stop the asteroid.

[00:36:04]It's a doomer classic. In its exploration of these things, Don't Look Up remains a quite sophisticated look at the political systems around climate change. It actually really helps explain how and why the American Empire has accelerated gleefully towards the end of the world. The problem is while the film can imagine looting and rioting as well as last day on earth drugfueled orgies and selfish contingency plans by the ultra wealthy, it is determined to show us how in action is forced on the population and then to take us right up to the final moment so we can see total annihilation in clear absolute terms.

[00:36:38]Don't get me wrong, this too is a strength of the film in many ways.

[00:36:41]People need to take it deadly [ __ ] seriously that what is happening now could actually destroy everything. At the same time, it is the film's greatest weakness. It fails to imagine there could be more meaningful resistance both internationally and domestically to how the US government courts apocalypse. It posits the people in America who would riot as separate from the mechanisms of the state. What would the soldiers and aerospace engineers and emergency planners in direct control of the technologies that could stop the asteroid be doing? Well, the film tells us they'll follow all instructions and do their jobs. I'm not sure I believe it. How hostile will the international community become to America as the world plunges towards certain doom in service of American imperialism? The film tells us they wouldn't dare oppose the United States.

[00:37:31]I'm not so sure. Climate change is necessarily a generational question and a question of the old and established and of the youth. And a lot of older people writing about climate change have correctly identified that climate change cannot be stopped without dismantling global capitalism. But then whether they like it or not, they have decided that capitalism cannot be toppled. Whereas a lot of younger people in no small part because they understand it's the only way they can have their future at all aren't too keen on capitalism sticking around. This is observable in demographic data. Even the classic trend is that people get more conservative politically as they age. But for millennials and younger generations, that just isn't the case anymore. Our Madawi comments on this very insightfully in millennials aren't getting more right-wing with age. I suspect I know why. I mean, do we even need to say why? Like I mean, how would you even say it with the right?

[00:38:21]Millennials have been royally screwed by an inequitable economic system and a runaway climate crisis. only an idiot with loads of money would be happy with the way things are.

[00:38:31]Yep, that's pretty much it. So, in very real terms, a lot of younger people are basically on board with having a revolution or with getting rid of capitalism because even if it weren't poised to annihilate their future in a you will literally be dead kind of way.

[00:38:46]They understand that they can't own homes or have kids or retire under the current economic system. It actually seems obvious enough if you think about the problem we're describing here.

[00:38:56]Currently, the objective of society is to maximize profit for the ruling class.

[00:39:00]So, if we wanted a society where the objective was to live sustainably and peacefully, which I think seems to be what we're asking for, it would require a fundamental reorganizing of social relations. Incidentally, David Greyber described a revolution as the fundamental reorganizing of social relations, sometimes with violence. This makes better sense of things like the industrial revolution or the free love sexual revolution of the 60s as revolutions.

[00:39:27]They changed the fundamental social relations. The way people interacted shifted so radically as to constitute an epistemic jump between one generation and the next. And now today we have older generations who are stuck in the logic of capitalism and younger generations seeking a world where our interactions aren't mediated by capital or enforced social hierarchies. A lot of this conversation is actually about what kind of world those younger generations are going to build. But because it's those older generations, typically richer people, so definitely the ones invested in capitalism sticking around, who get to dictate our mainstream cultural narratives, and they find the idea of a postcist world utterly horrifying. They'd rather we imagine the end of the world instead. But what we should actually be talking about is how we want social relations to change. We need to give ourselves guiding narratives to understand what it is we are aiming for because it really seems like a deep largescale change is coming.

[00:40:23]Whether that change happens sooner because people push for it or happens later because people form it after the crisis collapses in on itself. We don't need to run around making sedicious threats that are going to get us in trouble without helping anyone. What we need to do is take a breath and a step back and look at the bigger picture and understand what the pragmatic next steps are. Part two. How to blow up a pipeline.

[00:40:47][Applause] What will we all do about climate change if we accept that our states have failed us? Is the question most central to Andreas Malm's book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline? The influential work, which has been an international hit and even had an adaptation into a narrative fiction movie about activists sabotaging oil infrastructure, is about the inevitability of the population as a whole, deciding that the only course of action is the direct destruction of the physical infrastructure of the systems that are killing the planet. In a sense, the book doesn't really advocate for anything. It just explains in simple terms why people are going to do this.

[00:41:28]sabotage. In the case of the fossil fuel industry, of course, will mean not just property damage, but massive market dysregulation. Sabotaging oil infrastructure will cause the price of oil to spike enormously, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has. And that's kind of the point. This kind of sabotage is meant to put an even more extreme pressure point on fossil fuels by making them literally too expensive to stick with. How to get put on a watch list. I'm sorry. How to blow up a pipeline draws parallels to the suffragette movement which acting at a time when women had very clearly delineated secondclass citizenship in the UK engaged in acts of sabotage and property destruction against the very systems that were oppressing them.

[00:42:04]Sabotage, Mel makes clear, is simply the option that protest movements must turn to when it's clear they are not being listened to and giving up is not an option. This gives states a choice. They can either abandon oil or defend oil.

[00:42:17]start finding other fuel sources or start militantly defending oil infrastructure, probably with the literal military if the Dakota Keystone Access Pipeline is anything to go by.

[00:42:27]Mal makes a point of emphasizing how the anti-terrorism laws brought in post 911 were used against the climate movement and against the climate activists who are seen as the biggest domestic threat by the state and how the movement suffered a huge setback because of the wave of extreme arrests and sentencing.

[00:42:42]But as the socialists say, you may cut all the flowers, but you cannot stop the spring. On a planet with a collapsing ecology, the collapse of which could at least be halted by drastic action, even if reversal is no longer possible, every year we'll only see more and more people politicized by the weather. And you know what they say about the weather, it's [ __ ] everywhere. Malm also points out that no matter how strict the consequences or absurd the legislation of what constitutes an offense to the state, people will keep throwing themselves at this problem. Because once you recognize how serious the issue is, there isn't really a deterrent that will stop you from fighting against, you know, the end of the [ __ ] world. This means that people fighting back will either get more extreme or more organized or both. More extreme acts of sabotage are more likely because once you reach a point where you can get 50 years in prison for interrupting an oil executive speech at a gala, you may as well be getting 50 years in prison for well blowing up a pipeline. More organized actions are more likely because the more people take part in a large-scale action, the more organized power is being demonstrated and therefore the quicker the state will back down. For instance, when we talk about a revolution and again what we mean by that is a fundamental rearrangement of social relations. One way a revolution against oil could be fairly peaceful is if workers who are concerned with our planetary future organized a general strike and refused to work again until the state abandoned fossil fuels. Mound doesn't actually tell the reader how one would go about blowing up a pipeline until quite deep into the book, at which point it kind of doesn't matter because both the inevitability of such sabotage and the diversity of tactics needed for resistance against the climate apocalypse have become quite clear. Now, I really think the inevitability of extreme and organized resistance is quite absolute. Sea above weather [ __ ] everywhere. But I think people have a squeamishness about thinking too hard about this because of the understandable fear of retaliation by the state. If the army are patrolling oil infrastructure and arresting or even shooting people who try to do property damage, how many hops, skips, and or jumps away from out andout civil war is that? And if more and more people are going to be politicized by the climate crisis and at the same time the systems that we depend on are going to be falling apart, doesn't that just lead to the same Mad Maxesque libertarian backstabbing wasteland situation that most people are thinking of when they talk about the end of the world? The answer is complicated and I need to give it in two parts. Part one, how far the violent dial cranks up is in the hands of the state and how they choose to respond to acts of resistance. Let's unpack that. In the novel Blindness, author Jose Sarago explores the nature of crisis and how people react to it. In the book, everyone in the world suddenly can only see blank white. I assume this is to differentiate from the actual disability of blindness and to make the affliction more blindness as metaphor.

[00:45:34]But the short version is suddenly nobody can see and society immediately collapses. Horrible things happen. The book includes scenes of violence, rape, exploitation, imprisonment and so on as people who see a short-term benefit in this situation form a coalition of the greedy, stupid, and cruel to take advantage of others. Then at the end of the book, the doctor's wife, the first character in the book to go blind, starts to see again. The implication is that everyone else will also shortly be able to see again. And whatever changes society takes on, the people who have done horrible things will have to reckon with everyone else being able to see what they've done. The book is a harrowing read, but its core idea is relatively easy to describe. If some people feel like there will be no consequences for their enacting out their most disgusting impulses, they will carry them out. But the idea of social repercussions, no matter what form they take, are a powerful deterrent because we are social animals. Of course, the book also contains plenty of characters taking care of each other, but the question that hangs over the story the whole way through, whether caring can outdo cruelty is entirely alleviated by the ending. I felt almost robbed the first time I finished the book because it created such a powerful sense that although the caring characters had done for each other was obviously worthwhile. All the suffering the characters had inflicted upon one another was utterly pointless and wouldn't have happened if they knew that soon people would see again. It's really important in this analogy I'm making not just to think about the individuals who would do violent and fascist things during a crisis, but the state actors and fossil fuel executives now who arguably more than anyone are acting like they won't face any social repercussions for perpetuating climate change. None of them are thinking about what the people of tomorrow will think of what we are doing now. Hang on though. That's kind of a strange concept, isn't it? what the people of tomorrow will think of what we're doing now. And not just because it relies on thinking what people with a completely different culture, socialization, and material circumstance will think and feel, but even just in its premise, right? It all hinges on the idea there will be people here tomorrow. And that's the part we're being actively pushed back on, told not to think about because it's not that hard to think what they will think of us. But as soon as we think there will be people there tomorrow, we find ourselves saying things like the enforcement of the legal protection of the fossil fuel industry will be seen in similar moral terms by the people of tomorrow as the legality of colonialism, chattal slavery, and the Holocaust. The sheer scale of human misery will be seen as morally indefensible. And that leads us nicely onto part two of my answer. The resultant situation for people whose lives are in opposition to the state is no fallout desert free-for-all. Our picture of the end of the world culturally tends to depict people fighting over tiny scraps while bloody tyrants are the only ones able to create bubbles of safety and stability through violent enforcement.

[00:48:31]But that idea of the world after society collapses actually comes from a specific ideological lineage. This all relates to the work of philosopher Thomas Hobbes who Andreas Mal and other climate politics writers have spilled a lot of ink discussing and debunking. Hobbes, who lived during the English Civil War, authored a book in 1651 called Leviathan, a seminal peace in social contract theory, and his argument was essentially that only a powerful undivided body could rule in such a way that would create peace and stability.

[00:49:01]The first political influencer to have a strong thumbnail game, Hobbs gave Leviathan a frontest piece depicting the king as a giant made up of people, an enlightening depiction of the nature of sovereignty. It also communicates a core part of Hobbes's thesis on sovereignty that to act with appropriate and meaningful power, a sovereign needs to have the unanimous support of their subjects. For this same reason, Hobbes also explicitly argue that a sovereign should censor political discourse and tightly control religion within the state. Hobbes sucks is the thing. And Leviathan is in many ways the ultimate authoritarian text. This guy is a goon and we shouldn't be taking his ideas about society seriously. Sorry, Tommy. I get why people looked like they would descend into a bloody and violent war of all against all to you. Like, you saw that kind of happen. But the English civil war isn't what human nature looks like stripped back to its bare essentials. It's a civil war with sides who hate each other. Allow me to just sidestep another conversation about human nature here and simply say, if the issue is security, security doesn't actually come first and foremost from people willing to enact violence, but rather from people enacting systems of care. As unrealistic as it is, if all the systems that keep society taking over just disappeared tomorrow, the largest social organisms to develop would be systems of people figuring out how to provide for each other sustainably. Hobbs's whole shtick is actually just smok and mirrors because what he's positing nominally as why only an all powerful sovereign can create peace and stability is actually just an argument that the working class can't possibly govern themselves without a ruling class oppressing them. These essentially limitless imagined threats from a lawless, stateless society that Hobbes cooked up in his average telegraph reader brain are always going to be enough to justify the power of the state. He even said that without a sovereign, it would be reasonable for a man to kill his neighbor out of suspicion his neighbor might want to kill him first. How do we not just see this guy as a GP news presenter thrown 400 years back in time through a wormhole? This is reactionary gibberish and I do not need to make my essay any longer to accommodate it. Oh no, spooky scary anarchism. Everyone will stab each other if I don't become god emperor immediately. Shut up. We need to talk about what it looks like though if people sabotage oil infrastructure and the state becomes more hostile. We just need to do it without imagining the working class immediately switching on battle royale mode. Realistically, as the state's defense gets more extreme and more people are politicized, the people resisting climate change will fall into certain social structures to create sustainability and safety. A lot of climate protesters are currently engaging in the tactic of allowing themselves to get arrested, both in the hopes that juries will equip them, which they generally tend to do, and as a statement that they view their actions as totally moral. Now, that's a strong stance and probably does a lot for their public image. But as in action continues and more people resist, the only way the state can really respond is by being tougher on the people who are arrested.

[00:51:58]And at that point, you aren't getting arrested and putting your faith in humanity and society as much as just allowing yourself to be captured by the systems that solely exist to defend fossil fuels. So when writers like Malm are calling for a plurality of tactics in sabotaging the machinery of ecological destruction, blocking roads, interrupting parliament, and yes, blowing up pipelines, I just want to say that the biggest diversity of tactics needs to come in ways of allowing people to live free from the capitalist system altogether, especially as the capitalist system loses its ability to provide more all the time. Mass politicization cuts two ways. A lot of the people forming systems to take care of people fighting back are just going to be doing it because they care about those people, not because they have the same politics.

[00:52:46]At the same time, as the mass movement becomes more politically informed, it's likely that more of their attacks will be against the various organs of capitalism rather than just the parts most directly tied to polluting the atmosphere. We have a lot of climate protesters in the UK, but truly our role as an international instrument of financial imperialism trumps any of our direct pollution. If protesters in the UK wanted to sabotage the systems of ecoside, the engines of finance capital would be a likely target. Whether it's oil prices or the ripples of a financial shutdown, these forms of sabotage will cause immediately worsened conditions for lots of people. Which is why anticipating that people will do this kind of sabotage means we need to organize much larger systems to take care of each other. Capitalist states are frequently hostile to people who are trying to organize to provide for one another outside of capitalism. But just like with predicting that people will engage in this kind of sabotage, we can predict that people will engage in this kind of organized mass mutual aid as well. This is how a mass movement becomes a parallel society to the established order. These people are crushed by the state or the movement gets bigger by virtue of people taking care of each other. And as that happens, the state is weakened because the state's power comes from people. We can come back to don't look up here actually, which is in a sense in conversation with how to blow up a pipeline. For the people in the film, as the asteroid approaches, there is nothing they can do but make internal peace with the fact they are doomed.

[00:54:06]Whether they do so indignantly or out of their head on drugs and ignoring the problem or interpreting the asteroid as a biblical apocalypse because there is nothing they can do. It is too late and the asteroid is too powerful. Climate change isn't like an asteroid, though.

[00:54:22]An asteroid doesn't get closer to the planet's surface because of a physical set of pipes located in lands accessible to human beings which operate every day.

[00:54:30]An asteroid doesn't progress towards annihilating all human beings on Earth because people are making money off the asteroid getting closer. Climate change does. That means climate change can be stopped. In less pleasant terms, it means climate change can be stopped from getting worse at an everinccreasing rate. In this way, Don't Look Up takes the position that the force of capital is undefeable, that the extinction of the human race by climate change is equivalent to an asteroid because capital is just too powerful.

[00:55:03]How to blow up a pipeline, on the other hand, takes the position that capital's power entirely comes from human beings, and human beings do not want to die. After having some trouble with the big box grows, I got some kits where the seller gives you a block of fully inoculated spawn and the mushrooms just grow out of the block.

[00:55:23]There's much less to go wrong with this kind of approach, although it will be harder to keep it going past a few flushes of mushrooms because there's just less material for the fungus to feed on. With the boxes, you can dump waste like spent coffee grounds and keep feeding them. But here, there's just the block. I also cleared all the flies out and set up a mushroom tent in the room I'd been using so I could control the space where they were growing a lot better with lighting and an automatic misting setup so I could just leave a time-lapse camera running over a week and capture the mushrooms growing. I'm not going to attack people who are doomilled because I know they are just depressed. And I don't know about anyone else here, but I have never once found it particularly helpful when I'm depressed to have someone stand in the room with me and yell, "Feel better.

[00:56:02]Stop being depressed. Feel better."

[00:56:04]Instead, I'm going to criticize the people who act as thought leaders in the community. People who drive doomer thought and talking points and show why they are wrong both factually and strategically to say and to repeat that the world is ending and there is nothing we can do. I may as well start with my beloved David Wallace Wells and the uninhabitable earth since I've already used it to scare everyone so much. On one hand, it might be a little unfair to call Wallace Wells a doomer and I'll get back to that. But on the other hand, he did publish a book with a dead bee on the cover called The Uninhabitable Earth that starts with the words, "It is worse, much worse than you think." Wells puts a lot about himself into the uninhabitable earth. For instance, at one point he tells the reader, "I bought into Bitcoin at the peak of the market," which is honestly just wow, my guy, the CIA would not torture that out of me, and you put it in a best-selling book. Incredible.

[00:56:55]I bring up David's insights into his personal life, not just to roast him for being a crypto rube, but because in discussing the climate movement, a lot of people have commented on what they call the Greta effect, named after youth activist Greta Thunberg. The Greta effect is the politicization of people who would not normally be expected to be political due to climate change and the seeming demographiclessness of the climate movement. Everyone has a stake in the survival of the planet. So a lot of people who wouldn't normally get into political discussions are being mobilized by this issue. As David Wallace Wells says about himself, I am not an environmentalist and don't even think of myself as a nature person.

[00:57:33]But there's something about lots of people becoming politicized. They bring a lot to the discussion they aren't necessarily aware of. Now, let's be fair, nobody was born an environmentalist. We all bring our own politics to discussions to some degree.

[00:57:46]And for example, I'm bringing anarchist socialist pinko call me radical free love legalized transgender public joy for everyone politics to the discussion.

[00:57:56]The crucial difference is my politics have an answer to climate change. I think that unless another intervention gets there first, and let's be real, I don't think it will, the result of more and more people getting politicized and the state trying to suppress protest will be a revolution, a fundamental change to everyone's social relations. Wells, on the other hand, only uses the word revolution twice, and one of them isn't even in the book proper. From the afterward to the paperback edition, the likeliest outcome by far is something murkier achieved not through the single silver bullet policies or political revolutions or exclusionary nivism or the revantist triumph of corporate self-interest, but some messy mix of all these and more.

[00:58:41]Now, I find this a little silly because while I don't disagree that exclusionary nivism and corporate self-interest are part of the response to climate change and already have been for many years, I struggle to call it the outcome. To me, an outcome is an end point of the climate crisis, the resultant politics that end the destruction of the planet.

[00:59:00]And while both of those things are happening and will keep on happening for the time being, they're also both things that need to be stopped in order for climate change to be ended. I think there's something quite interesting in the other time Wells uses the word revolution. Practical technocrats of the environmental center left believe that what is needed to avert catastrophic climate change is a global mobilization at the scale of World War II. They are right. That is an entirely sober assessment of the size of the problem which no more alarmist a group than the IPCC endorsed in 2018. But it is also an undertaking of ambition so inconsistent with the present tense of politics in nearly every corner of the world that it is hard not to worry what will happen when that mobilization does not happen.

[00:59:46]To the planet, yes, but also to the political commitments of those most engaged with the problem. Those calling for mass mobilization starting today and no later, remember they can be counted as environmental technocrats.

[01:00:01]To their left are those who see no solution short of political revolution.

[01:00:05]And even those activists are being crowded for space these days by texts of climate alarmism of which you may even feel the book in your hands is one. That would be fair enough because I am alarmed. I agree that the crisis at hand is so vital and so scary that alarm is entirely appropriate. So I don't know if I'm particularly invested in labeling people alarmists. I do think the act of raising alarm though is one that implies the actor is without their own solutions. It's calling for help, right? The purpose of the book is to get the reader to take the situation seriously. This makes the uninhabitable earth and don't look up excellent bedfellows because they're both trying to get people to understand the full scope of the devastation climate change could actually cause. It may not have solutions to offer, but reading the uninhabitable earth does give a great understanding of the science and the political systems around it that will really show just how useless technological conversations about ending climate change really are under capitalism. Not only are the proposed technologies not enough to fight back the emissions, not only are they not being implemented, not only are there no incentives under capitalism to implement them, but the very notion of offsetting the emissions that these only partially helpful, not being implemented, won't be implemented technologies provides is really just a political argument for why we should use even more fossil fuels. We're offsetting the damage so we can do even more damage. Before my next big box grow, I hit another huge snag. This time so big I had to start over and order a new grain block for my mushroom spores because I didn't manage to keep the grain spawn sterile enough. It picked up this green mold which spread through the whole bag, more or less. I looked it up in case it was something toxic. And apparently this is a parasitic mold that eats fungus that's incredibly common place. Like it's probably already in your house which is why you have to do what everyone's been telling you to do and keep the mcelium sterile. Sophie, there's another lesson from failure here. I think your mushroom spawn needs to be kept safe from internal parasites that can cannibalize it and completely stop it growing. So I set up another bulk substrate box and this time between the mold and the flies I was feeling extra hygiene conscious. So I actually used boiling water on the cocoaqua so it would also sterilize the mixture at the same time. Then I broke up a big block of grain into it which was so inoculated with myelium it was like a piece of polyyrene. I ordered this block on eBay and it was supposed to be wine caps which funny story are illegal in Louisiana because of a micological mixup. Apparently when magic mushrooms used to be classified as ammonita mushrooms alongside amanita mascaria another well-known hallucinogenic mushroom. So Louisiana banned all ammonita mushrooms which includes wine caps even though they're just a normal edible mushroom. The law is kind of silly sometimes, but sadly it is the arbiter of all morality. So I would never encourage anyone to break the law under any circumstances because that would be wrong. Anyway, I ordered wine caps, but when I started recording the time lapse, these funny little yellow guys started fruiting, which were definitely not wine caps. I couldn't quite identify them for a while. They're golden oysters. I think it still ended up being the best time-lapse I had so far, even if we couldn't be sure what we were growing. mushroom lessons number whatever we're up to now. Sometimes what you're growing doesn't turn out to be what you expected, but that's okay.

[01:03:23]Another source of dumerism I want to address comes from the works of communist writer Mark Fischer. In his most famous work, Capitalist Realism, Fischer describes the way that capitalism has eclipsed our imaginative landscape so that the majority of us can't even imagine a world beyond capitalism. In short, we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This was of course supposed to describe an imaginative trap we've fallen into, but lots of leftists have taken pessimism from this because they can recognize the capitalist realism in themselves and they don't know how to get out of the trap. A lot of Fisher's writing contains essentially half completed thoughts that I think leads to a lot of ambiguity in his work which in turn leads to a certain kind of Fisher Stan being the absolute dead cold worst kind of person in leftist discourse. Now, arguably this is because most sentences of fishes would end the same way. Therefore, we should revolt and have communism. And even if you fear no censor or no consequence for sedition, ending every sentence like that would make your writing just deadly boring. So, while Fischer remains a very incisive critic of modern capitalism and arguably unparalleled in his discussion of its psychic effects on our lives, he does often just leave the reader hanging. Capitalist realism is an all pervasive mode which dominates our imaginative landscapes and recuperates every rebellious impulse into itself.

[01:04:42]Therefore, we should just revolt and have communism becomes Yeah, we're [ __ ] A good example of what I'm talking about would be Fish's well-known discussion of Tory Grifter Louise Mench and her comment about leftists who are at once outraged about capitalism and also enjoy Starbucks, Apple products, etc. This gotcha against leftists has become incredibly commonplace to the point of having an arguably even more well-known meme popularized to dispel it. Fish's comment about Mench's comment was essentially that she no matter how flippantly and disingenuously was highlighting something real. Seemingly everything is mediated by capital. So the lives and habits and pleasures and desires of anti- capitalists still reside within capitalism. This is perhaps where Fischer thought it was redundant to say, "So we should revolt and have communism." And as a result, the doomer strain of Fischer enthusiasts took to just repeating Mench's point, albeit with more layers of self- congratulatory theory posturing. For this reason, not Fischer nor his writing, but an eerie presence born out of his legacy. A parasocial poltergeist haunts leftist discourse. Let's see if we can't just perform an exorcism. One very important half-finish thought in Fischer's work relates to the state of the modern left in the imperial corps. Fischer essentially said that the modern left views power as something that bad people have and use and therefore to seize any amount of power would immediately violate their morality. So rather they focus on their own oppression and defeat without any concrete plans to actually change anything. Now, as much as I want to finish that sentence with, "So, we should revolt and have communism," I do think it's worth pointing out that Fish's own work contains an answer to this conundrum. And if the fish are doomers who go around repeating this criticism were real fans like me, then they because Mark Fisher put a big emphasis on the development of group consciousness, the overcoming of what nature would call rantim, the development of systemic understanding of oppression as the earliest and perhaps most important step in overcoming oppression. With that in mind, this criticism of the modern left is really just an evaluation of the early stage at which it currently sits. It isn't some impenetrable mind prison, but rather just a somewhat depressive first step towards actual revolutionary thought and practice. In exactly the same way, Fish's most famous line, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, is perhaps his most famous halffinish thought. If we are trapped by the conviction that we cannot possibly win, imagining others remaining idle is the thing keeping us stuck. If we want to come unstuck, we need to have confidence in each other. For what it's worth, everyone I've spoken to about the end of the world has come to see the future in these terms. The sooner we fight back, the better the world gets to be as a result. I've come to view dumerism as an interstitial step, just like what Fischer described. First, people think that climate change isn't that big a deal because the state and the liberal establishment will deal with it. Then they realize the full scope of the problem and they become doomers. And then they realize that if there is going to be a solution to the problem, they have to be part of that solution. Fish's less known but excellent work, Post Capitalist Desire, a transcript of his final lecture series, focuses on the ways that capitalism has shaped our imaginations, just like capitalist realism. Here, however, Fischer focuses on our desires. The way we can't imagine anything we want as anything other than consumer goods or provided to us through the medium of capital, the way that capitalism has shaped our desires into a desire for more of capitalism itself. To complete the thought here, and I really could give this a whole separate essay just as long as this one, I think Fischer was asking us to imagine how we can find postcist desire and how more importantly we can capture human desire back from capitalism. But is there a postcist desire present in our culture already? I think there is. Let me talk about my two favorite nouns in the British press right now. Wokery, which is evidently some kind of troublesome pixie dust sprinkled into educational institutions by mischievous elves. And woke, as in what woke wants, and capitulating to woke and brave gigachad PM Richy Sunnak uses his rippling muscles to wrestle woke into submission.

[01:09:01]Woke is a word with a very storied political history. From AAV slang to left liberal adoption to insult that right-wingers use for anything they don't like. But I think that woke beliefs, broadly speaking, the political position that supports human liberation across various axes of oppression is actually a form of postcist desire. As young people have come to realize that they won't be able to own homes, have kids, and so on, they've started to imagine the kind of society in which they could and therefore reimagined how society could work. While the desires that they're driving at are broadly just very simple things that our ancestors could take for granted, I think there is a tangible political consciousness that to get those things is going to require a fundamental reorganization of social relations. I think there are lots of desires still captured by capitalism, but I think a lot of those could easily become uncaptured. And I think a lot of the core desires that people seek in living in society at all are currently disappearing over the horizon of the climate crisis. Now seems like as good a time as any to take a digression and talk about anonyihilism. I really don't want to come across as hostile to anaco nihilist. So I should approach this section carefully. If I start my discussion of anak nihilism by saying how much the chaos star reminds me of the Greenale Community College logo, it will seem like I'm setting out to start beef. The anacon niilist position is that with no hope for actually saving the world or changing the future for the better, people should still sabotage systems of oppression and fight for moments and spaces of human joy and freedom. The position rejects the possibility of large-scale organized revolt because of the tendency for authoritarianism in the aftermath or even sooner. Rather, they embrace chaos, hence the chaos star. Because an Naron niilists take something of the exact opposite position to Hobbes. That the oppression of the state Leviathan is the font of all misery. And that the disorganized mess of human chaotic association will necessarily be kinder and better than any hierarchical central power structure. A lot of anarchist thought is informed by a text called blessed is the flame which examines and celebrates the history of resistances and revolts within Nazi concentration camps. This is sort of the same worst case scenario exercise I talked about before. Even in the worst possible circumstances where the outcome will almost certainly be execution, people still fight back. Now, I don't want to belabor an allegory between concentration camps and climate apocalypse because I do find it personally distasteful. It's something in David Wallace Wells's writing that I particularly don't enjoy when he measures the scale of oncoming deaths in numbers of holocausts. So instead, I'll say the similarities are thus. The very little hopes in anyone surviving. The total control of the enemy who is the same enemy feeding us into the machinery of death. The suppression of solidarity and morale by the conditions in which we find ourselves. The active sabotage of any organized resistance by bribery inside agents and so on. And I think that an anarchist nihilist framework in response to these conditions is very appropriate. To quote blessed is the flame. The myth that we are somehow moving forward forms the backbone of the socialist tradition. Like the trains bound for Aswitch, the movement of history is heading nowhere good and needs to be sabotaged at every possible turn. I genuinely worry about my points in this essay coming across as cold and flippant. Like, no, the world isn't technically ending. They'll still be mushrooms, so what are we complaining about? Which of course isn't what I'm saying at all. Nonetheless, I want to allow a little space for people who might find my position silly because if I couldn't tolerate being silly at all, I would be endlessly tilting at windmills and be all the sillier for it.

[01:12:51]As one modern anarchist writer has it, nihilism allows for the possibility that there is no future. And this is the reason that I don't feel the need to oppose anihilists or include them in my critique of doomers. With nihilism, these anarchists have found a freedom to resist for the sake of resisting, for the sake of declaring their own humanity in the face of annihilation. And I find that beautiful. I'm sure that some of us with more of a tendency to schismogenesis, more of a tendency to make enemies than friends with our fellow socialists might think anarchiists by rejecting the possibility of large-scale organized collective revolt are making such resistance impossible.

[01:13:31]I think they're just waiting to see if it will work. To borrow a slogan from a movie I've never seen about a sport I've never played, if you build it, they will come. What I mean by that is that anarcho nihilism is at once a nihilist position that doesn't expect to defeat capitalism and an expression of post capitalist desire and that it works in concert with larger organized resistance, not against it. Even if we anarchists won't join any ascendant communist party, we'll be fighting the same fight on our own terms. If we only pay attention to bourgeoa electoralism, the picture is unbelievably bleak. The farright has stormed onto the scene and has a growing share of the vote across a wide range of not only the most powerful countries on Earth, but many others besides. Right-wing governments work with, enable, and encourage right-wing militants and militias to act as a paramilitary wing of their neofascist project. The corrupt and gerrymandered pre-existing power structures enable them to easily capture vital political organs and make long lasting meaningful changes that will negatively impact the lives of millions of people. And we can do little but vote for liberal politicians who offer progressive platitudes with a practiced smile while taking enormous checks from the wealthiest people in our society to protect their interests first and foremost. [ __ ] is, in a word, bleak.

[01:14:44]Electoral politics, it seems, offers no solutions to climate change and only generates more social ills by the day, wasting everyone's energy and effort in defending the rights we're used to taking for granted. So that's the bourgeoa political system, the spectacle we have all been trained to see as the only game in town. But what's going on down in the dirt, huh? What about the fungus? After all, you can cut all the flowers, but the weather is [ __ ] everywhere. Climate change is so many little problems. The climate crisis is an ecological crisis and a food crisis, a migrant crisis, a housing crisis, a human rights crisis and more besides.

[01:15:20]They may not realize it yet, but there are people fighting in a political coalition of people who assume there will be people there tomorrow. And their enemies are in a political coalition of people who assume that there won't. This kind of action based on a measurable belief that is not stated explicitly actually perfectly aligns with Marx's definition of ideology which means they don't know what it is.

[01:15:48]Nonetheless, they are doing it. In other words, someone doesn't need to say I am a liberal capitalist. I believe in free market trade in order to be participating in and upholding liberal capitalism. They don't need to believe in it or like it or even understand it to be doing it. They sure don't be vess.

[01:16:04]But I'll be damned if they aren't tuned.

[01:16:06]And I have a little word play on this definition. So, put a pin in for a second and check this out.

[01:16:16]Yeah, I know. Pretty good, right? Okay.

[01:16:19]I know most of you probably didn't catch that, but according to analytics, I'm not being exclusionary of my English speakers. I'm being especially inclusive of my 3.2% 2% German audience. Yeah, that's right, sponsors, 3.2%. Bear that in mind next time you need an influencer to advertise your new Fritzer flavor.

[01:16:36]I've never been someone who particularly minds explaining my own jokes to the point of utterly killing them. So, let me unpack my word play a little bit here.

[01:16:44]Unlike they don't know what it is, but they are doing it means they know that it is nothing and still they do it.

[01:16:53]because I find those to be the places where ideology is most haunting. Imagine a Canary Warf finance pervert, someone who works in the financial sector in London. She goes to work spinning the big wheels of the nonsense machine, not even working with money she can actually touch and hold, but rather making bets on whether companies succeed or fail to make lime go up. Two huge investment sectors are construction and fossil fuels. Meaning that our finance perverts work contributes both to climate change and the construction of shoddy, overpriced, and personal gripe, ugly new build apartment blocks that are going up all over London. Huge numbers of these new builds are being constructed on London's flood planes. Too expensive for most people to buy, but perfect for developers to rent out at extortionate rates to people with well-paying office jobs, for example. You know, Canary War finance perverts. So, our pervert gets up every day and goes to work on the big nonsense machine which is going to flood her ugly house. It's not that she doesn't know what she is doing, though the knowing is not directly connected to the doing, hence, but rather she believes what she is doing is abstract and disconnected from consequence. Hence, capitalist realism, the imagining of the end of the world more easily than the end of capitalism is a perfect example of We are all to one degree or another the Canary War finance pervert spinning the big wheel that's going to flood her ugly house. We are all to one degree or another the guy from the meme where the survivors of the collapse are huddled around a campfire saying yes the world ended but for one glorious moment we made a lot of profits but the people who are fighting the war on woke on the side of woke are whether they ven it or not fighting as if there will be people here tomorrow. Capitalists are convinced that it's grown-up talk to dismiss all possibility of socialism and all talk of class struggle. But in a crisis, a state can't survive without policies that take the reigns and provide for people.

[01:18:56]Because if people can't survive, the state can't either. This mobilization on the scale of World War II hear about isn't happening on the state level. And emissions are increasing at an increasing rate. In other words, capitalists convinced themselves socialism was impossible and then they found out capitalism was the thing killing the planet. So, they started killing the planet much, much faster.

[01:19:23]Okay, we've covered a lot of ground.

[01:19:25]Now, just as many great thinkers and philosophers of the past before me, I feel the need to talk about a tweet.

[01:19:32]Just as Musk's purchase of Twitter was being finalized, Eva Wisman tweeted, "I feel like in these last days of Twitter, we should all be just [ __ ] asking for what we want, like love or work or cash or attention. No time for jokes or memes or whatever. Just like say it loudly and quickly." This tweet is fascinating as well as just very funny to me. And not just because Twitter did not die shortly afterwards, but also because you can just do those things anytime. Eva here is mourning Twitter changing into something else. And that's fair because Twitter, oh X, sorry, does objectively suck now, even more than before. I just find this kind of mourning, this discussion of the rapidly approaching end times, really reminiscent of our discussion of dumerism. a big enough change or even the uncertainty of what will come next is being treated like a total ending. You're mourning how life has been, knowing that it will end. And with that comes a mourning of what could have been but never was. What you could have had, what you could have done or been or seen. And that's okay. It sucks that all the stories we were told about how society was supposed to work for us were lies. And it sucks even worse that the people who lied to us didn't even know they were lying. As much as the next person, I am struggling constantly with terror and fear and feelings of hopelessness that nothing is being done and push is coming to shove and we all going to suffer and die waiting for someone to for God's sake do something.

[01:21:04]But even saying that feels ridiculous on the face of it. Not because I have some unshakable belief that everything will be okay. It's not because I believe something that other people don't, but because I think about other people when I say I am just as paralyzed as other people are. What a ridiculous thing to say. There are plenty people more paralyzed than me. And I am nowhere near naive enough to imagine I am the person most affected by climate change. There are so many people dealing with the effects right now, uprooting everything they have, moving away from tons of people they know and care about. They don't just say, "H, there's nothing I can do. we'll all just die. No. Climate doomerism is absolutely borne out first and foremost from a level of assumed security. We living in the imperial core benefiting from the shape that power takes in the world today as well as the shape that it has taken for hundreds of years are really used to at least the idea that our voices really matter. Our votes, we are told, have the power to not only shape the political landscape around us, but the lives of millions, billions of people far away who we can't even see. But now, with the growing trend of authoritarianism, with the resurgent wave of fascism, we are finally seeing that our votes mean absolutely nothing. We're really trying to deal with an emotional and imaginative problem because we're looking at how much work would need to be done to really change things and getting exhausted before we even start.

[01:22:30]A big part of that, I think, is that we don't really have a picture of what the world will look like after all the work is done. But we can actually define our postcist desire in the negative. Because if the work is to defeat and dismantle things that are harming us now and the rest of the work is just taking care of each other, that will give us a picture of everything we want. If we say that people are going to fight the fossil fuel industry because it's killing the planet and fight capitalism because it will always find new ways to kill the planet and fight borders and prisons and fascism and take care of each other. We actually just described a future even if we did it in pretty vague terms. In that case, I only need to rethink how I approach the idea of doing the work. And if that's true, I'm going to just tell myself this. Every time I feel like this, I have to look at what needs to be done for me to not feel like this. And I have to decide I and as many other people as it takes to do it, am going to do it. I am not trying to give you hope.

[01:23:34]The purpose of this essay, despite my antagonism to pessimistic politics, is not to inspire hope. If you're drawing hope for the future from what I'm saying, that's fantastic. But I'm just trying to explain in logical terms why dumerism is both paralyzing us and also an unrealistic approach to the politics of the future. The politics of the future cannot be written off with such simple summations as things are going to get bad. In fact, for a lot of people, the best way to describe the shift that is beginning now is a change from a certain amount of dependability and security to a lot more procarity. We don't want or like to interrogate what it means when we say things are going to get bad. But the underlying analysis of that statement is that for a lot more people, life is going to be a lot more precarious. So to move from an immediate reaction to ecological violence to a model of what it might look like for us to live on this planet for the next 100 years really means a better understanding of what it means to live precariously. Part three, the mushroom at the end of the world.

[01:24:42]In growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms, Paul Stamuts writes, "A mushroom of many names. Ganoderma lucidum has been used medically by diverse peoples for centuries. The Japanese call this mushroom rayi or manantake, 10,000year mushroom. Whereas the Chinese and Koreans known it as lingchi, lingchi or lingji mushroom or herb of immortality. Renowned for its health stimulating properties, this mushroom is more often depicted in ancient Chinese, Korean, and Japanese art than any other. Going on to say, "A satisfying mushroom to grow and consume.

[01:25:15]Ganoderma lucidum is a mushroom whose transformations are mesmerizing, responsive to the slightest changes in environment. Its unique growth habits have undoubtedly enchanted humans for centuries. Rati are really woody, sturdy mushrooms, which means they grow very slowly over a few weeks, but they can get really big and the caps are just stunning to see and even more wonderful to watch evolve over time. The thing I really deeply love about mushrooms is the unavoidable way they remind us how entangled we are with other forms of life on the planet. There are microisal connections that some fungi form with plants. But there are many species of mushroom that can't even survive if they aren't connected into a microisal network, which means you can't grow them from scratch at home. But it also means you can only really find them out in a forest. What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk and if I'm really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses. Not just like flowers through their riotous colors and smells, but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy. Terrors, of course, there are plenty, and not just for me. The world's climate is going haywire, and industrial progress has proved much more deadly to life on Earth than anyone imagined a century ago. The economy is no longer a source of growth or optimism. Any of our jobs could disappear with the next economic crisis.

[01:26:48]And it's not just that I might fear a spurt of new disasters. I find myself without the handrails of stories that tell where everyone is going and also why. Pecarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all of our lives are precarious. Even when for the moment our pockets are lined, in contrast to the midentth century when poets and philosophers of the global north felt caged by too much stability, now many of us north and south confront the condition of trouble without end.

[01:27:21]This is how Anna Loenhot Singh's book the mushroom at the end of the world begins. But to present this quote on its own really does a disservice to the text. The book is written with this pervasive contextuality that makes it almost mossy. You try and pull any part out to look at on its own and it feels wrong without the succeeding and preceding sentences. And then it feels wrong to talk about those without the sentence before the sentence before and the sentence after the sentence after.

[01:27:52]Let me offer this second clipping alongside the opening. The uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift and a guide when the controlled world we thought we had fails.

[01:28:02]The mushroom at the end of the world is about the matsutake mushroom, an edible species that grows in parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific coast of the United States. It's also about the people who pick the mushrooms.

[01:28:16]It's also about a lot of things.

[01:28:17]Matsutake are microisal, so they can't be cultivated in a controlled environment. They have to grow in a larger organic context. As Annalon Hop Singh points out, they grow best in disturbed forests, places where wildfires or logging or storms have caused some amount of devastation to the ecosystem. Yes, the mushroom pickers are selling their matsutake to capitalists as commodities. Yes, the money they receive fluctuates depending on market conditions. And yes, of course, the people doing this spend that money to get things under capitalist systems, but the work they're doing exists at a certain economic periphery. The pickers are participating in what Singh calls salvage accumulation, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control, or more precisely, the ability to create capitalist value from non-scalable value regimes. A capitalist who makes money on the collection and sale of Matsutaki mushrooms cannot reinvest their capital to expand the amount of Matsutake grown. Their privatelyowned mushroom is an offshoot from a community-l living underground body. A body forged through the possibilities of latent commons, human and not human. Humans cannot control Matsutake. Waiting to see if mushrooms might emerge is thus an existential problem. The mushrooms remind us of our dependence on more than human natural processes. We can't fix anything, even what we have broken, by ourselves. A lot of the mushroom pickers that Singh writes about are economically precarious because they're immigrants to America or live in similarly economically precarious communities. For example, she also writes about military veterans who do the same thing. We need stories to be able to understand what is happening to our planet and what our lives are going to look like in the future. So, I'd like to spend this last section considering what we can actually answer of the question of what the next hundred years will look like. It's important to remember that the effects of emissions being put into the atmosphere now won't stop being felt for at least another h 100red years. So straight up, we have one very easy, if unpleasant and upsetting, prediction. The planet will keep warming. The rest is harder at first glance to piece together. To understand what shape our lives are going to take is going to take some political intuition. So let's get a framework together to start to understand some possibilities. First up is the idea of progress. Before he wrote How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm researched and wrote a book called Fossil Capital, a deep look at the systems that created the climate crisis historically, just really rolling for sanity damage against the Eldrich Systems of Finance and Fuel Capital.

[01:30:49]Understandably, the kind of book you do research for just before you decide to write another book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline. The focus of fossil capital is largely about the modern notion of societal progress and how intrinsically it ties together with getting more fuel to power more machines to defeat worker power. Malm points out how some of the first capitalist automation in history was the replacement of unionized cotton spinners with machines. The cotton industry of course was an industry that was booming because it relied on slave labor, a kind of labor that is completely subjugated. So as little sympathy as any capitalist boss might have for replaceable workers, a cotton boss would have even less. The linear notion of progress that capitalists have been selling us is dependent on fossil fuels because it is dependent on automation because it is dependent on the most effective control of the working class. More fuel means more power means more industry means more more and of course more progress. There are also advancements that human beings have taken in the course of our history that are hugely meaningful to the lives of many people. and I in no way endorse a model of the future where we lose, say, the advancements of modern medicine, the internet, modern water, electricity, and food infrastructure.

[01:31:58]The idea, however, that forever finding more fossil fuels is the only way to prevent backsliding into a world without these things isn't true. Progress isn't going to disappear because we get rid of fossil fuels or capitalism. Neither social progress nor technological progress are inherently dependent on the devastation of the planetary ecology.

[01:32:17]And it should be obvious enough to say that in a lot of cases it's quite the opposite. The politics created by climate change are a politics unmed from the comforting myth of capitalist progress. More fossil fuel extraction, more GDP and higher quality of life will no longer cleanly map together and less so yearbyear. I mean think about how capitalist states handled co. They had to slow down or shut down business as usual and climate scientists immediately noticed a dip in emissions and they had to give cost of living payments to all the people who couldn't go to work. Then when vaccines started to appear, they pushed as hard as they could to get the workforce back into public. That is, of course, if they were ever not in public to begin with, so they could get profits back up, resulting in co being still a serious public health issue. Now, that's pretty much what we can expect from neoliberal states handling crises. the absolute minimum possible followed by actively harmful drives to put the workforce in more danger. So what do our immediate climate politics look like?

[01:33:17]Climate Leviathan by Joel Waynewright and Jeff Man aims to lay out four possible planetary futures and succeeds at laying out kind of two. I guess I think this book is very foundational in thinking about climate politics, but I also think there's a lot to critique in it. In that way, I find it inspiring because I think it's provided a platform for people to question and develop ideas about our political future in a way that I truly hope this essay can be. The book takes its name from Hobbes's Leviathan because its basic premise is that climate change is essentially a struggle of sovereignty. The first future discussed in the book is the titular climate leviathan, a political project to create sustainable, even carbonneutral or negative capitalism.

[01:33:57]Two crucial requirements for this are unipolar capitalist imperialism of the kind we mostly have now and cooperation between capitalist nations into bodies that have planetary sovereignty and are capable of controlling the constituent countries right to emit. This future shouldn't be mistaken for a one world government conspiracy theory. Although because conspiracy theories reflect intergroup social conflicts, you could make a strong argument that the real moves towards this future have something to do with those conspiracy theories existing. Anyway, when I say real moves towards this, see my entire discussion of imperialism above. The feeble moves that the American Empire has made to stop climate change have all been through these kinds of bodies. And they have been utterly feeble because, as I have hopefully explained by now, capitalism cannot stop climate change.

[01:34:42]The right to emit is a central question of the book and of this future in particular since the nature of this global sustainable capitalism that constitutes climate leviathan is imperialist and the capitalists in the imperial core are going to want to keep the frontiers of potential profit as far from the effects of climate change as possible. This is a basic economic function of how a climate leviathan is fundamentally impossible. The damage of climate change is focused onto the imperial periphery, harming not only potential product but also damaging supply chains and the human capital, labor, on which imperialism depends most vitally. But though the people in the periphery are immediately supplied with the worst damage, the people up the chain of extraction are going to be accountable for all the failure beneath them. Around the world, droughts and floods and storms kill crops and delay construction and evict millions of people from their homes. And on Wall Street, a financial cataclysm unlike anything ever seen before turns the stock market inside out. To put it another way, the climate crisis will put the crisis of capitalism on meth. The important thing to grasp about climate leviathan as well as the other futures discussed in the book though is that it doesn't have to be viable to be politically poignant because the people who do believe in that future will have politics informed by it. So for all the political futures informed by climate change that we can consider, there are essentially three questions. Can it save the world? Can it actually be built and do people believe in it? And of course for climate leviathan the answers are no, probably not and unfortunately yes.

[01:36:08]The next feature is distinct from the first primarily because of the size of the political project because of its sovereignty. Climate behemoth named after the smaller enormous monster from Hebrew legend is not really about stopping climate change, but it is still about the right to emit. Climate behemoth is a capitalist political system in which the right to emit is reserved for citizens, subjects of the sovereignty being necessarily a smaller project, a breakaway faction or nation state from the global leviathan.

[01:36:35]Behemoth is necessarily undemocratic and a step towards the divine right of kings. The right to emit is defended by whatever sovereign the subjects live under. And that sovereign gets the rights of sovereignty as Hobbes described them like deciding all the laws and how justice works, censoring anyone who disagrees with it and declaring wars and so on. So it's pretty easy to understand, I think, that any climate behemoth has a tendency towards being a reactionary nightmare where different minorities are scapegoed to distract from the general injustices and abuses of the ruling class. In other words, living in climate behemoth gives you British brain. Next, Wayne Wright and man take a step. I will have to spend a moment critiquing. In looking at planetary futures, they start with climate leviathan and then imagine a similar scale of project but socialist.

[01:37:22]Why? Because socialism can actually stop further damage to the environment and even deploy technologies to heal it and capitalism can't. Here's the formulation. As a method of organizing ecology, a capitalist economy requires infinite growth and therefore everinccreasing emissions. This means ecological collapse and necessarily also economic collapse. Next, in their logical steps towards most plausible outcomes, Wayright and Man argue that since the most workers in the world who will be the most impacted by climate change live in India and China, and since China has a recent revolutionary communist history, if a new world order of socialism were to emerge, it may well be from China. Therefore, they name this third alternative climate Mauo. This name is unhelpful both to their analysis and the communication of it in my opinion since it comes off as distractingly xenophobic, but also since it muddies how the authors would feel about, say, an American global hegemonic socialism. But we're not going to start calling it climate morphin, so never mind. The crucial characteristics in this alternative, as laid out in the book, are the non- capitalist nature of the international governing bodies and the presence of socialism. The international governing schema in way man's model here would have control over the right to emit for the same reason albeit more plausible this time as Leviathan. It would be the perceived bull work against further climate change. We have to play with the space of what is plausible a little here because climate Mauo is in the very strange space where although can it exist being answered no should preclude us from answering can it save the world differently in the highly theoretical space they've constructed were a new communist superpower to barge onto the world stage grab up the desperate pieces of collapsing American imperialism and form a communist leviathan it probably could stop climate change but could it exist maybe if these supposed Chinese revolutionaries emerge tomorrow and then roll NAT 20 afterNFNAT 20 all the way to a unified communist China. Sure, if we're thinking about the more plausible coalition of existing powers in the imperial periphery building a new world order, we could call it climate chimera and it would fit the mythical monster naming scheme. We could also call it climate thesis since every part of the ramshackle project is liable to be swapped out over time and become something utterly new and quite unpredictable while maintaining the appearance of being the same entity in order to hold onto its sovereignty. It's also important to consider the way that a world power like this could influence world politics even from the position as a smaller power in a divided world. If it were one of the poles, so to speak, in a multipolar world, for example, the question of geoengineering. We're experiencing a termination shock from ceasing the use of sulfur as shipping fuels at the moment. The emissions from which we're cooling large stretches of northern oceans by about.5° C. This opens up the possibility that someone somewhere will start creating their own localized cooling by polluting the air on purpose. Even if the smaller global power were to start doing this, both it and the American Empire could get into a geoengineering arms race. Although I do have some restraint, and I'll save my thoughts on how badly that would go for another time. But now that we've played with the plausible a little, I think it's more productive for us to understand the nature of the framework that wing right and man were laying out.

[01:40:28]Climate Mauo is an extreme for the purposes of ideological discussion as are Leviathan and Behemoth. Everything that is wrong with laying out a simplistic political compass is wrong here too. But I think it's important for us to understand it not as a possible or particularly plausible reality rather as an ideological negative space to arrive at their final point of discussion.

[01:40:52]Except their final point of discussion never comes. Way and man have spent all this time laying out their visions for a global capitalist sovereignty, a global communist sovereignty, a non-planetary capitalist sovereignty, and then in the last square, they leave it to the reader to imagine how the world might look without a global sovereignty or capitalism.

[01:41:13]Wayne man's so-called climate X is left deliberately vague, and in my opinion, this is a bit silly. I understand them not wanting to put themselves in the position where they stand up on their soap box and say this is how the world should be and risk critique or losing the interest and support of their reader. And I understand that in what they see as a very academic framework, making prescriptive statements feels ill-fitting. But why not even just describe the political future as imagined by the most radical eco anarchists? You don't have to believe in any of these futures per se, but the 2 by two grid of political sovereignty and political economy that they form is a map for the future of our politics. And as fantasy fiction enjoyers can tell you, a map can actually make a really good start for telling a story. The framework that Wayne writer and man laid out has provided a basis for a lot of climate politics. For example, some people calling for what they name climate lenin, a reappearance of Leninist revolutionary strategy in the specific context of climate collapse. In that way, both their climate MAU and what they haven't said about climate X represent corners of a theoretical framework that it's useful to examine even without a practicable reality because it shows us the dimensions of climate driven political thought. What I think is most missing from all their possibilities, however, is procarity.

[01:42:30]The material reality for more and more people is going to be that the hegemonic political framework simply isn't taking care of them. And therefore, the reality of our next h 100red years hinges far more on procarity than anything else. If we're going to figure out what a more precarious future looks like, a great place to start is this. What will the capitalists do when there is nothing left to invest in except each other?

[01:42:53]To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life, ancient and new, underfoot, and reaching into the light.

[01:43:02]But how does one tell the life of the forest? We might begin by looking for drama and adventure beyond the activities of humans. Yet, we are not used to reading stories without human heroes. This is the puzzle that informs this section of the book. Can I show landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant? Over the past few decades, many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias. It is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization. There are other ways of making worlds.

[01:43:40]Anthropologists have become interested, for example, in how subsistence hunters recognize other living beings as persons, that is protagonists of stories. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Yet, expectations of progress block this insight. Talking animals are for children and primitives, their voices silent. We imagine well-being without them. We trample over them for our advancement. We forget that collaborative survival requires cross species coordination. To enlarge what is possible, we need other kinds of stories, including adventures of landscapes. A broad critique you could make of Waynewright and man is not too far from Fish's points in capitalist realism. Their projections of future politics go so far off the rails when they step outside of capitalism in part because their analysis is very much rooted in the world order as it exists.

[01:44:31]And this means their ideas of non- capitalist futures don't feel situated in the real world. They don't emerge from our material conditions, but rather from the framework set out. For example, their idea of global communist sovereignty is centered around China because of the mass of workers who will be most affected by climate change. But their analysis has nothing to say about the total mass of people who will be unemployed, displaced, disregarded, and shut out of capitalism by climate change. They tell us that stopping climate change at this point would require a revolution of mythic proportions. While it isn't an implicitly defeist statement, it does take the political framework as is, and imagine it turning red. Rather than walking through the more realistic possibility that the existing framework is crumbling to pieces, some of which may turn red, but most of which will perish. The collective agency of the dispossessed doesn't figure very strongly in their discussion. They say a revolution of mythic proportions is required to get us out of this. I say one already got us into this. The shift to neoliberal capitalism was despite being done but at the administrative, state and electoral levels a revolution of the corporate bourgeoisi. It changed social relations on a fundamental level.

[01:45:38]The revolution to a political framework that can stop climate change will happen because it must and it will happen for some countries in their elections and others in their streets. Not to say that radical electoral shift to social democracies worldwide is a workable vision for this politics, but rather that some countries will shift to ecosocialist politics without overwhelming immediate procarity. As I said earlier, it depends how hard each state tries to cut all the flowers in order to stop the spring. How soon this happens, depending on which states and therefore emitters we're talking about, will ultimately depend on how long the sabotage of the environment is allowed to go on. The ruling class are making bets on this premise. survival bunkers in New Zealand and so on. They see everything that gives them power as coming to an end and want to escape whatever comes next because there is no future for kings. But that doesn't mean there's no future for us. Climate Leviathan, the political tendency, not the book, already isn't a workable realistic project. But the apparency of how unworkable it is is going to drive people to doubt it faster and faster.

[01:46:38]Climate Behemoth will first reject Climate Leviathan on the terms that any sharing, even within a hyper capitalist framework to [ __ ] over the poor and make the ultra wealthy near godlike in power, is still too much sharing. Trump's administration and postrexit Britain are perfect examples. Wayne Written Man's futures are compelling and they can help us map out a new political landscape, but it is the uncertain, dispossessed, and precarious that will shape the future. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western philosophers have shown us a nature that is grand and universal, but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of man, which could tame and master nature. It was left to fabulists, including non-western, non-ivilizational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human. Several things have happened to undermine this division of labor. First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on Earth can continue. Second, interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists who show how life requires the interplay of many kinds of beings.

[01:47:54]Humans cannot survive by stumping on all the others. Third, women and men from around the world have clamorred to be included in the status once given to man. Our riotist presence undermines the moral intentionality of man's Christian masculinity which separated man from nature. In telling the story of our planetary future, it might help to get a clearer focus on the threat, the monster, the antagonist driving the plot. In we are nature defending itself.

[01:48:22]Jay Jordan Jordan and Issa Fo point out that some biologists have been calling human beings the future eaters. But of course it is not all human beings who are engaging in the process of eating up our planetary future. They are pointing out as I hope I have pointed out in the essay so far that the struggle for a planetary future is a class struggle.

[01:48:44]It's important though to balance our antagonism for the ruling class with a systemic awareness. Because without everyone's complicity in capitalism, the ruling class wouldn't have been able to do all the damage they have done and continue to do to the ecology. When we say that capitalism and climate change are inseparable, that to stop climate change, you have to stop capitalism, that they are both facets of the same thing. I think it's important to acknowledge the other elements or facets that have to be present in order for this thing to exist. white supremacy, patriarchy, queer phobia, the lens in common between capitalism and the divine right of kings that treats abled bodies as valuable units of labor and disabled ones as a burden. This many faceted thing is the future eater, a Frankenstein's monster of our collective social imagination, giving what I hope is the appropriate level of respect to both Leviathan and the sovereignty of capital. I think of this thing as the worm. The worm cannot live one day without us. And by our manufactured consent, it is eating our planetary future. The worm, however, needs to always grow. It must dominate every conceivable horizon. And because of this, it will eventually choke on its own tail. Capitalism, or if you like the worm, is killing huge numbers of us every day. And it will kill more and more of us. Mass death due to climate change has become inevitable. As the collapse of the systems we are used to progresses and people fall into procarity, society will have an ever growing precarious fringe, which is also what I call the haircut I gave myself during the pandemic. Sorry Americans, that doesn't translate. Uh ever growing precarious bangs. I guess sometimes common entanglements emerge not from human plans but despite them.

[01:50:34]So what kind of world will the precarious be living in? To talk about how people take care of each other, we need to talk about reproductive labor.

[01:50:42]Reproductive labor is all the work that goes into reproducing the society in which that labor takes place. Primarily, this means reproducing the workforce. So having and raising kids, but specifically raising those kids to perform productive or reproductive labor in society. It's worth noting that the majority of reproductive labor, unlike practically all productive labor, is unpaid. It's also worth noting that the majority of reproductive labor is performed by women. So when I say raising those children to perform productive or reproductive labor in society, we're aware that in many cases which way that goes depends on gender.

[01:51:16]Lots of people aware of the struggle for women's liberation in the modern era still conceive of the patriarchal enslavement of women for reproductive labor as a natural state. In reality, different cultures and societies throughout history have organized reproductive labor in all sorts of different ways. And the enslavement of women in European history that was then carried as a societal template all around the world by colonialism emerged from a specific historic moment that we don't really like to think about because the idea of women being relatively free and then being enslaved is unspeakably horrible. It took centuries of genocidal all-out war on women to enact the enclosures in Europe and to force women into the submission and dependence from which we are still trying to free ourselves. If we're shit-talking human beings, I won't call us the future eaters, but I will say we're the only species who've invented a socopolitical panopticon to enslave half of our own population. Frogs and fungus don't have misogyny and they are better for it. I don't see enough people talk about the massive women worker strike that started the Russian Revolution or the fact it started on International Women's Day.

[01:52:25]This isn't the place. But I think sooner or later we're going to have to have a conversation about how successful revolutions need reproductive labor. And in the case of socialist revolutions, that means having half your comrades be women. Marxism without feminism is like a handle without a cup. For people who are living precariously, the security of a roof over your head, your next meal, warm, clean, and dry clothes, and so on is not a sure thing. This is why they form what I'm calling communities of care, where the reproductive labor is in a highly funible arrangement to afford stability and mitigate harm. In say the US military, the reproductive labor remains in rigid structures designed to maximize its potency as a fighting force. By contrast, in communities of care, the fight is against procarity and the front line is care labor. To give more insight into communities of care, I think it makes sense for me to talk about the one with which I'm most familiar, the London trans community.

[01:53:21]Sylvia Federici is a Marxist feminist most famous for her seinal work, Caliban and the Witch, which describes the enclosures and the enslavement of women and the emergence of capitalism in medieval Europe. As discussed above in wages against housework, describing the traditional household as a workplace where the man is the boss and the woman the employee, Federici says homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions. But homosexuality is workers control of production, not the end of work.

[01:53:50]In a typical heterosexual household, who does the dishes would be an assumption.

[01:53:54]In a homosexual one, it would require a conversation. But as Federici is pointing out, the dishes would still need doing. In my household, all the workers are on strike until negotiations have been resolved. I bring this up because the households and social relations in the community I'm talking about are neither typical nor typically heterosexual. This community helps people find housing and employment and other things that can be especially precarious for people like us. It helps people navigate Britain's utterly impossible health care system, get through trauma and big life changes, and build relationships of found family. It also creates events and spaces where people can go to and be themselves. And crucially, none of the reason that anyone does any of it has anything to do with profit or capital. My friend doesn't practice all week for the gig at the warehouse flats because it's a big gig, an opportunity to get eyes on her work, uh to get scouted by an industry executive. It's none of those things.

[01:54:46]She does it because she cares about her art, about her music, and about sharing it with people she cares about. She does it because she loves her community and that has nothing to do with making money. Sometimes we sing songs just for each other. I wouldn't want to paint a picture that pretends that reproductive labor is never contentious. One woman I know has spent weeks working on a shared space that's also a community hub.

[01:55:09]That's also where some of her friends and partners live. Partly she wants to spend her time, a lot of which she spends there in a nicer space. But moreover, she wants the people she cares about to live in a nicer space. Rigidly designated roles in this kind of community would imply a kind of formalized structure that doesn't exist in this kind of community because of the way that it organically responds to procarity. But obviously people can still slide into de facto roles. And for her being the de facto cleaner of this space wasn't what she signed up for. She wants to do the work to improve the space as long as it isn't her job to do it. These community roles also in their non-escription are reached through a kind of balancing act of personal capacity and naturally enough don't have names. I couldn't possibly give a name to the role that another friend of mine plays in the community. She runs a regular sports group with a fund donated to by members for other members who can't afford the related fees. Lots of queer events are run at cost or by community donations. She also uses her flat as a social space after the group, a place for her friends when they're feeling overwhelmed, and a place for people to gather before big parties, which she likes to help people get to and from in large groups, you know, because transgender in public and so on.

[01:56:21]She also uses these same skills in organizing people to go to protests or facilitating people to do things like share medicine if their doctor's [ __ ] them around, find a place to live, or even organize their own social events.

[01:56:32]She also constantly lends people books, apparently for no other reason than a passion for the things she has read and a desire to offer people chances to learn. All that is voluntary reproductive labor. And not only can I not name it, but if I did, it would imply too much of a transactional obligation. So, I'll just say if you asked me what kind of people we need to live in a better world, I'd say more people like her. All the individual people in our community are also doing so-called productive labor in exchange for money. Of course, it's undeniably contained within capitalism, though the social relations are themselves not capitalistic. It's less perfectly utopian and more from each according their ability to each according their need plus rent and bills.

[01:57:14]There are no matsutake mushrooms without such eancent mutualities.

[01:57:20]There are no assets at all without them.

[01:57:22]Even as entrepreneurs concentrate their private wealth through building alienation into commodities, they continue to draw from unrecognized entanglements. The thrill of private ownership is the fruit of an underground common. Foragers have their own way of knowing the Matsutake forest. They look for the lines of mushroom lives. Being in the forest this way might be considered dance lines of life pursued through senses, movements, and orientations. This dance is a form of forest knowledge, but not all the dances are alike. Each dance is shaped by communal histories with their disperate aesthetics and orientations. In the mushroom at the end of the world, Singh describes a forager she met at one point who goes by the moniker of Matsy Man. By her account, Matsy man, as in Matutake Man, if I wasn't clear, is quite a character. He foragages for mushrooms primarily by feeling the forest floor for textures and shapes that feel like the mushrooms. and his self-styling or brand as you might think of it comes from his passion for foraging for Masatake. On his website, Singh tells us he has a section which asks this seemingly autobiographical question, who is Matsiman? To which he answers, anyone who loves hunting, learning, understanding, protecting, educating others, and respects Matsutake mushrooms and its habitat is Matsiman. And I just found that delightful. So now it's in the essay. Uh, you're you're welcome.

[01:58:48]Sing on Matthew Man's method.

[01:58:50]But he showed me how to get down on the ground and fill the leaves with my hands until I found a promising texture, a lump. We were looking for mushrooms by Phil alone. For me, a new way to learn the forest. We trust our eyes too much.

[01:59:08]I looked at the ground and thought there's nothing there. But there was, as Matsy man found with his hands. Getting by without progress requires a good deal of feeling around with our hands.

[01:59:21]Stories are incredible guidelines in order to be able to imagine the future.

[01:59:24]In order to be able to imagine the end of capitalism more easily than the end of the world, but feeling around with our hands is important, too. At risk of mixing my metaphors, here's what John Burgger has to say about feeling in ways of seeing.

[01:59:36]To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. Close your eyes, move around the room, and notice how the faculty of touch is like a static limited form of sight. And to me, that's what this means. We have to reach out and touch what we can of the future in order to situate ourselves in relation to it. Now, more than ever in our lifetimes, the future is hard to see, and tomorrow, it'll be even harder than today. But maybe if we can reach out and touch the future, we can still see it in a static limited sense. One thing we can say about the next hundred years is it's certainly going to be interesting. Or as Analone How Singh puts it, precarious living is always an adventure.

[02:00:19]Blue oysters are a strain of oyster mushrooms, plurotus ostriatus, which at least for me were only ever blue at the start of each flush, with the color getting softer and paler as the caps grew bigger. As with the pink oysters, these blue fellas required next to no maintenance. As Paul Stammit says in growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms, the oyster mushrooms are easiest to grow. Pluritus ostriitis is an extraordinarily interesting mushroom from many viewpoints. It is highly tolerant and responsive to carbon dioxide levels. In fact, the cap to stem ratio is an accurate measurement of carbon dioxide levels in the growing room and is used as a visual cue by oyster cultivators for increasing air exchange. This mushroom species is also super sensitive to light levels. When the mushroom is exposed to high light levels, pigmentation of the cap is usually enhanced. Blue strains become bluer. Brown cap strains become a richer brown. Similar results are also seen at lower-end temperatures given constant light conditions. Here are my opinions.

[02:01:13]I'm going to take the step to say what I think will actually happen. And I welcome discussion and criticism of it because I recognize that I know far from everything, even as I'm taking my best shot at saying where I really think the climate crisis will take us. I'll start with what there is to actually do because I don't want anyone to mistake any of this for what I would do if I was in charge. We should never be asking ourselves this because we never will be and it's the most basic way that the ruling class keeps us locked into a perpetual capitalist realism and manufactures our consent for their utterly inhuman decisions.

[02:01:50]The only way we could even vote to stop climate change would be if there was enough organized worker power that there were a possibility of a party getting in whose platform were to stop capitalism.

[02:02:01]So even the question of voting becomes a somewhat trivial matter of harm reduction until we do the things to take care of each other first. We can't dictate policy without first changing the nature of society to be more democratic. We can't get world leaders to listen to what is moral rather than the interests of the ultra wealthy. What we can do is build structures and communities of care beyond capitalism while even within it. Workers unions, yes, but tenants unions, mutual aid networks, and feminist collectives, too.

[02:02:31]Organizations that help people manufacture the supplies they need for crisis, like the Common Humanity Collective does with face masks and air purifiers. Collectives that take care of the needs of minorities in ways that majorities will ignore, like so many in queer communities the world over, or the way the Black Panthers worked to provide free meals and education to children.

[02:02:50]Moreover, we need to reach out to our neighbors in ways that are flexible, asphilless, and forward thinking, so that even the unexpected can be mitigated. Beyond that, we should be ready for our communities to work together with others to build something bigger and better than the sum of its parts. If people do the things they can to prepare for what climate change is doing to the planet, organize in ways that withdraw from the sovereignty of capital and take care of each other instead, bring together and unite the fronts on which we are fighting, show enough people that the solidarity we can have for each other is also a platform on which to build a better world. Then together we could have socialism on a planet with a wounded ecology, but with the supply chains and technologies to both provide for everyone and start to stabilize the damage capitalism has done to the planet.

[02:03:35]If that doesn't happen soon, then conditions are going to get much, much worse. More and more people are going to become precarious.

[02:03:43]And I honestly think the most likely outcome of that is also socialism. It obviously doesn't look like the world that we could build right now.

[02:03:53]I'd call it salvage communism after Singh's salvage accumulation. The communities of care that are already emerging and will continue to emerge as a result of procarity have the power to knit together people into a stable and secure society. Any states that first reckon with capitalism's inability to deal with crisis and then undergo radical reform towards socialism will become a part of this that in some ways carries on the forms and structures of the world today. The states that try to protect the sovereignty of capital will be left behind by their own collapse as more of their population find themselves on the short end of the everinccreasing gap between the ultra wealthy and the working class. As for states that resort to reaction and fascism, while it may not be a pleasing or reassuring answer, they have no endgame. Fascism is a death cult. The overall emergent social relations of the next hundred years are going to be socialist. Whether it means an abundant socialism now or salvage communism in the decades to come, it's a sliding scale. The reason I say that I'm not here to provide hope is that I think hope has a lot to do with what you're hoping for. If you're hoping for the world to stay the same and not change, I can't offer that. My perspective doesn't preclude all melancholia. I walked through London and I burst into tears because I saw a cherry tree and the thought hit me like a bus. I really hope we save cherry trees.

[02:05:09]I soberly wonder if our sky will remain blue or be blue more often than not. But as for human beings surviving, taking care of each other, living rich and meaningful lives, we've been doing it the whole time so far, I can't imagine why we would stop now. We need to consider for a minute what the end of the world actually means culturally, historically, philosophically.

[02:05:32]The end of the world means the final tally of the struggles that have shaped our lives. If the world ends, the worm wins.

[02:05:41]I don't think you're sad. I think you're angry. I think this kind of depressive pessimism comes out of being mad as [ __ ] and feeling like there isn't anything you can do about it. I'm angry, too. And I know that my anger sometimes comes from looking at how much we would have to do to make a difference. And then it extends out to other people who are looking at the task ahead with tired eyes. I've gotten angry looking at Doomer's talk because I think if they just stop believing the world would end, then they could actually stop the world from ending. It's all their fault. But it's not their fault. And it's not them who deserve my anger. It's the Parliaments of the world who act as a special organ of the greater parasite, the worm, shutting down all radical thought as a self-preservation mechanism. They're doomers because they're invested in electoral politics, a purposely distracting [ __ ] machine that eats all your time and energy and will never bear fruit. I'm actually writing this because I want people to be angry. I want people to be as angry as I am when I hear people defeatedly declare, "We're all going to die." I want you to hate the future eater and to understand that when we say we're all going to die, what we're actually saying is that capitalism is going to win and humanity is going to lose. I can't stomach saying that anymore. I can barely even stomach hearing that anymore because I think humanity is going to win and humanity winning means there is no end, no final judgment, no closing score. I know there will be more after capitalism chokes to death on its own excretions and exhaust fumes and after it takes millions, perhaps billions of us with it. And all we have to do to make what comes next beautiful and loving and kind is start now to imagine the end of capitalism and not the end of the world. For people like me who others look to as some kind of thought leader in leftist politics, our job doesn't have to be to lead anything.

[02:07:39]just talk about it because mass unrest is coming. Our job is to imagine a better world together and wholeheartedly reject the idea that the world is going to end because we believe that we will win.

[02:07:53]I believe that we will win.

[02:07:56]Our job as influencers, leftist content creators, political educators, philosophers is to talk about how we can do things differently and always to remember that the future is unknowable and determined by how hard we fight now for a loving world. The only people who think that influencers have the kind of social capital to actually meaningfully lead something politically don't really understand how being an influencer works. I'm not rich or particularly wellconed and I I can't be involved in particularly radical stuff because my face and name are all over online. Like if dickpicks were dollars, I'd be able to afford my prescriptions. Hope this clears things up. For my part, I've been making a weekly show for over a year now called Red Planet. The tagline is capitalism has failed. Communism is coming. Let's talk about how we get there. And that's what we do. We hold discussions about how to live in a better world and how to take care of each other. We cover protest and resistance news and we interview activists and organizers from around the world about what they do and how they do it and how our audience can do it as well.

[02:08:56]In our work, you know, we have one foot in the activist world and one foot in the art kind of world or the art time art space active space.

[02:09:04]And in art space, you can spend three years rehearsing, finalizing a performance that lasts three minutes and where you pull a tulip out of your ass and everyone's happy.

[02:09:17]uh if in the activist world you're in emergency emergency all the time. You know, there are people dying in the in in the Mediterranean. The the sea levels are rising, temperatures rising, the droughts are coming. You know, you've got to act now. Now, now now for just a little bit of what we've done so far, we interviewed one of the founders of Just Up Oil. We talked to some people in prisoner solidarity networks. And we interviewed an anarchist chemist who gives people the instructions on how to make abortion medications in places where they're illegal. you see it starting uh in the diabetic communities now because it's been so critical that people are um dying in ways that are more visible.

[02:09:58]But um a lot of people I think haven't really thought more about our relationship to land as um not just some you know like I guess like the decommodification of land you know and it's like that's like the the next step and is like you know it's it's it's it's crucial to I would say any kind of like larger long-term leftist project. It feels like an uplose look at those fronts we're all fighting on. Mutual aid, anti-fascism, fossil fuels, finance, capital, border abolition, justice, and I feel really lucky to be a part of it. We're just reporting on what seems obvious and inevitable to us.

[02:10:36]We're not advocating for anything other than people to take care of themselves and each other. Obviously, I'm just plugging my show right now, but also I think there's a really good reason to talk about it in this essay because I think this is what the online left really needs more of. a real and meaningful connection to the offline left, to the real world, and to direct action, not just a space for abstract ideological discussion. For that reason, please also check out It Could Happen Here and Everything Made on Cool Zone Media and Popular Front. They seem to be the other main people doing this. The vast majority of work to be done is in taking care of each other. The other fronts of leftist politics will keep on drawing attention because of their urgency and danger like the climate, like the threat of fascism. But it's reproductive labor that keeps a society ticking over. The real work in defeating the sovereignty of capital, whether because we are pushed into procarity or because we start preparing against it now, is in refusing to let it dictate our lives. Refusing to delegate our power and responsibility to each other to capitalist states. We must care for each other like nodes in a mcelium and then we could see what wonderful fruits could be borne out. Does the wheat move from the field to the mill to the baker's oven to the plate to the mouth because of money?

[02:11:53]No. The infrastructure we have right now is enough to feed all of us already. Is a crying baby comforted, swaddled, and fed because it pays its family. Okay.

[02:12:05]Does a parent see nothing in their child's eyes except a future return on investment? the way a banker looks at a stock. No, money is a system of instructional tokens we don't actually need in order to act like human beings normally act towards each other. A metaphysician might tell us nothing is as desirous as desire itself. Nothing as beautiful as the platonic ideal of beauty.

[02:12:30]Along similar lines, it makes some sense that money, the real abstraction of the concept of instruction and obedience, would be so able to reshape the world around it. In short, cash rules everything around me. Nonetheless, we are the ones who carry out the instructions, and money may be instructional, but we could refuse those instructions.

[02:12:52]Money means nothing if we can feed each other for free. For something to be free, we understand. It means that it doesn't cost anything. But to put it a different way, you could say it's free of money. And when you think about it like that, doesn't it sound nice to be free of money?

[02:13:11]Well, if we had everything we needed for free, we ourselves could be free, too.

[02:13:17]The reality of our world is that one class in society has all the money and so all the ability to instruct. And by giving the subjugated class just enough to get by, but never enough to do more than instruct others to give them their essentials for survival. They are telling us to perform society the way they like it. And we do it because they tell us to and because they give us a little token that says we must, but we could just as easily not. Ours is the class that makes everything happen.

[02:13:48]When the choice is between obedience and extinction and survival and freedom, I'm willing to bet that humanity will choose to free itself.

[02:14:00]Are you?

[02:14:02][Music] After all my grows, after my successes and failures, my complications and discoveries, I realized something was still missing. growing mushrooms at home. It's deeply special to be able to nurture them to grow in these controlled conditions and they still come out beautiful. But what makes mushrooms special, the reason I fell in love with funguses, mosses, and molds in the first place wasn't there because I was trying to take the mushrooms out of their context, out of their community.

[02:14:38][Music] What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?

[02:14:46]I go for a walk and if I'm really lucky, I find mushrooms.

[02:14:56][Music] When you go foraging, always go with friends. Make sure to be with someone who's been before so they can show you how. And then when you've been enough times, you can show other people. Each one, teach one.

[02:15:20][Music] Pack smart, not heavy. Bring just the right things you need to get the job done. And remember, there are things out there that look like what you want, but aren't, and they can get you sick. So, it's really important to know the difference because the smart forager doesn't necessarily come home with lots of what they want, but none of what they don't.

[02:15:56]The world is not ending. It's changing.

[02:16:01]And a better world is not only possible, it is already out there waiting for us to find in each other.

[02:16:11][Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Okay.

[02:16:59][Music] Heat.

[02:17:13][Music] Hey everyone, thank you so much for watching. I'd really like to start by thanking everyone who gave their voices for quotes in this video. Abby Thorne from Philosophy Tube, Alice Cwell Kelly from Fresh Future and Kill James Bond, Sarah and Neil from The Leftist Cooks, FD Signifier, Big Joel, and Pamplier.

[02:17:33]I'd also like to thank Patty Taxon and Toga for letting me use their music. The links to all of these people will be down in the description. I would immensely like to thank Nat, my partner in life, love, and political writing, who uh helps me write everything that I write and who isn't often seen on this channel, though is working on some stuff of her own. Um, it's hard to think of anything to say here in in this portion on a video I've been working on for nearly 2 years now with Nat. Um, it's been immense. Uh, to my eye, the video is still very messy and I'm sure in a long enough timeline I would pick over it infinitely and then simply never release it. But I'm very proud of it and I I really hope that people like it and that you will also go and support my work because this has been a lot of work. Uh, you can go to patreon.com/sopforars and support me there. You can see the names of all my patrons scrolling by right now. I will carry on working on really big projects like this with smaller, more frequent videos in between. And the inevitable thing with projects this large is that life ends up getting in the way. And a lot of [ __ ] has happened to me in the last couple of years that has delayed this video. So getting out feels like a very confusing and complicated relief. Anyway, uh lastly, I guess I'd like to thank uh KL Marx and Friedick Engles for inventing being gay and transgender. Uh, and you the viewer for watching all the way to the end. So, I have already told you how to support my work on patreon.com/safrom.

[02:19:04]And if it's not already apparent how very tired I am right now, I am going to wrap things up here. And I guess go to the movies. Um, please take care of each other, everyone. It's really what we're all here for.

[02:19:21]Heat. Heat.

[02:19:27][Music] [Music] Heat. Heat.

[02:20:04]Heat. Heat.

[02:20:07][Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]