It’s a chronic condition of capitalism that lower-income people in the income distribution of any city are not going to be able to house themselves decently and legally. That’s true if you’re in Nairobi or Lima or New York.
With the increasing concentration of corporate power in the food sector, it’s very difficult to see how it can really shift unless we decide to put pressure on it by abandoning it.
As we rolled back the welfare state, policing became a primary way of controlling dispossessed populations while at the same time shoring up the interests of the middle class.
It’s now become so brutalizing and so cruel, and so obvious and so visible, that it makes no apologies: some people should die so that the GDP can go up and the stock market can revive itself. Can you imagine?
Climate change and pandemics are not just functionally integrated in the sense that the planet warms and it changes the geography of pathogens. They are integrated through the ideological totalitarianism of neoliberal capitalism that has been imposed on the planet. Not only are we as humans alienated from our work, but from nature itself.
When the present becomes impossible, rupture becomes inevitable. The question then becomes whether it breaks left or right, not whether it breaks. History has been un-canceled.
Neoliberals were not only clueless about the extent to which markets never really worked the way they described in their ideal. They were also clueless about the political, social, cultural, and theological ramifications of a radically marketized world in which we have not justice, not democracy, but only winners and losers.
Organizing outside of American nationalism means organizing with an increasingly international consciousness regarding the working class and proletariat on a global scale, and finding ties with projects and efforts that are happening throughout the world.
We’re up against the new global capitalism. We need to link resistance movements across borders. We can’t confront this system just in our own countries. We need to link up around the world.
We have to think much more carefully about the system, broadly understood, and whether this system is in any way equipped to get us out of this situation.
