What is currently occurring, then, is the mass murder of the Global South by much of the Global North. This trend in world affairs is sadly not without precedent, given neoliberalism, formal colonization, the Atlantic slave trade, and the process known as the Columbian Exchange. Under prevailing assumptions, humanity is little more than an instrument or object by which to advance capital accumulation, or else “unpeople” whose interests are to be dismissed entirely.[32] Individuals in general are afforded the same regard as that shown to K. by his murderers at the close of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, when the protagonist is simply murdered “like a dog.”
Prevailing society’s relationship to the climate predicament can be described as upholding a sort of climate barbarism reminiscent of fascism. Fascism—the violent defense of authoritarian social structures, maintained by the silencing of suffering—is hardly the exclusive mantle of the Nazis, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, or imperial Japan. In the view of Tunisian anticolonial theorist Alberto Memmi, fascism refers to “a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few.”[33] On Arendt’s account, totalitarianism originated precisely from imperialist liberalism; for Marcuse, the “total-authoritarian state” is the form that corresponds to the monopoly stage of capitalism, to which liberal capitalism inevitably gives rise.[34] As Horkheimer argues, “They have nothing to say about fascism who do not want to mention capitalism.”[35] The stubborn refusal by those in power to commit to mitigating future climate change and making resources available for humanity’s materially impoverished societies to attempt to adapt to the destruction wrought by climate change amounts to collaboration with the future death of a decidedly overwhelming number of human beings on a scale far greater than any other in human history. In this is seen the irrationality and barbarism of capitalism—its total authoritarianism. Given that present climate change has been observed to be contingent on the rise and perpetuation of the capitalist system, deaths due to climate destabilization would result not from “natural” causes but rather human-induced ones, and should be considered homicides. Humanity thus “waits to be woken one day by the memory of what has been lost”—principally, the three hundred thousand individuals currently killed each year by capital-induced climate change, and a sum that could well rise to a million annual deaths within the near future if matters are not radically changed.[36]
As Marx insists, shame can be a revolutionary virtue.[37] Shame regarding humanity’s marked failures to protect itself along with the other forms of life with which it shares Earth could help contribute to the radical reconstruction of global society—for this society, though ruled over by the repressive order of statist militarism, is “after all constituted out of us,” Adorno observes, “made up of us ourselves.”[38]
The response of the world’s peoples to the massive suffering brought about by climate change—dramatically illustrated, for example, in the extreme devastation seen in the 2011 “children’s famine” in the Horn of Africa, which has caused tens of thousands of deaths and imperiled the lives of millions, mainly in Somalia—must not ape that of the old manservant at the close of the The Misunderstanding by Camus. In Camus’s work, the character Maria, having just learned of her husband’s murder at the hands of the servant’s managers, desperately asks him to aid her, to “be kind and say that you will help me”: his response is a rather pointed “No.”[39]
Among many other considerations, the problem of climate change raises serious questions about the place of progress in history. “However passionately we may desire the elimination of fascism,” asserts German Marxist Franz Neumann, “we cannot close our eyes to the possibility that it may not be wiped out.”[40] The many horrors promised by climate change, with their potentially fascist implications, may well not be prevented and averted. It is hardly inconceivable that the present course toward a climate-devastated Earth will not be arrested and radically redirected. While human history would have likely fared far better were it not subjected to events such as European colonialism, World War I, or the invention and proliferation of nuclear weapons, the fact of the matter is that such horrors did in fact come about. The “astonishment” Walter Benjamin notes in the realization that “the things we are experiencing in the 20th [or 21st] century are still possible” is tenable only if one subscribes to philosophical orientations that see, like Hegel, the steady march of progress in the passage of historical time.[41] In words written by journalist Ulrike Meinhof before her questionable collaboration with the Red Army Faction, “Recognizing that something is unreasonable does not necessarily mean it will not happen. There has already been a time in Germany when people thought ‘This can’t be true,’ and it was true, and cost millions of them their lives.”[42]
Adorno writes that “there is horror because there is no freedom yet.”[43] The Chinese Marxist economist Minqi Li is correct to note that “there is no hope whatsoever to achieve climate stabilization so long as the world is organized as a system that is based on production for profit and structured to pursue endless capital accumulation.”[44] Against this radical lack that characterizes the forms in which humanity is at present entrapped nonetheless stands the chance for what French aesthetician Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “advent of humanity,” or what Adorno terms “a rational establishment of overall society as humankind”—a possibility that in the latter’s view “opens in the face of extinction.”[45] Global human society must come to “abandon blood and horror,” both as an intrinsic and instrumental end, for the “debarbarization of humanity is the immediate prerequisite for survival.”[46]
Fortunately for our prospects, humanity has long resisted. The revolt of the Helots against Sparta as well as the slave rebellions led by Spartacus and Toussaint L’Ouverture are in ways continued in modern times by the efforts of the Spanish anarchists, the anti-Nazi resistance, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), the Naxalites of eastern and central India, and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, among other groups and collectives. This tradition, advanced in Cancún by Anti-C@p, involves “resistance of the eye that does not want the colors of the world to fade.”[47] It has been continued by activists in recent years through, for example, the attempted shutdown of the city of San Francisco the day after the commencement of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the blockading of an Israeli air base during the July 2006 war on southern Lebanon, the “decommissioning” of an EDO MBM weapons production plant in the United Kingdom in January 2009, the direct actions to defend and liberate oppressed nonhuman animals, the antagonistic fury expressed in Greece against the state and capital in December 2008, the destruction of police stations in Egypt and popular storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo, and the peoples’ rebellions that have gripped much of the Arab world since December 2010, in addition to the popular occupations of public space that have followed in many Western societies.
As can readily be seen through reflection on the fate to date of these revolts, though—and generally on the “failed culture” that has allowed for genocide, the possibility of nuclear warfare, and potentially catastrophic climate change—the specter of despair is far from illusory. While it is to be hoped, as Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin suggests, that the recent waves of popular revolt against oligarchy and tyranny will amount to the “autumn for capitalism and the springtime for the peoples of the South”—or that, as world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein writes, the global protest movement of 2011 will carry the revolutionary “1968 current” into the future—the outcome remains uncertain.[48] An orthodox Marxist faith that the subordinated necessarily will be victorious in history—that the abolition of capitalism follows from “the premises now in existence”—cannot itself be justified.[49] On the contrary, the fear Adorno observes in Marx regarding a “relapse into barbarism” is a rational one, considering that “the relapse has already occurred.”[50]
In light of the problems posed by the threat of capital-induced climate destabilization, it remains clear that if humanity does not “determine itself,” it will “bring about terrestrial catastrophe.”[51] The dark choice presently faced by humankind, in the prognosis of Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, is that of suicide or revolution.[52] Contemplation