🇬🇧 Changing the Guard in the Gas Chamber - The UK Election
A new party is in power but it's the same old story. Only a revolution will free us from society's suicidal prison.
Note: This was the last article Roger wrote before being sentenced to 5 Years in Prison.
If you go to prison (or should I say when?), you will get a clear understanding of what a guard does. They enforce rules. You can walk around your cell - fine. But walk around the prison yard after time is up and they drag you inside. You will get a few scrapes and bruises (or worse) and then be put in an isolation cell as punishment. There are many rules, but only one main rule - break the rules and you will be punished.
It's the same with politics at the end of the world. You can vote for whoever you want to as long as they don’t try to stop the project to destroy the human race over the next two decades. To quote those hysterical idiots at the UN, we have “two years to save the world” or economies will be “devastated”.
Of course, saying something revolutionary like this has been called an ideology for a good 200 years now. In fact, the idea that the end is coming has always been part of human culture. An ideology is the imposition of an idea upon reality. More often than not the ideology is actually contradicted by reality - the end of the world is not coming. But not always. Read that again - not always.
The exception does exist. It is there in the historical record. Civilisations do destroy themselves - they “commit suicide” to use historian Arnold Toynbee’s famous phrase. Actually, they all destroy themselves eventually. Nothing lasts forever it seems. The cruel paradox is that they destroy themselves in large part because they are so sure they will not destroy themselves. Sometimes the “ideology” is the opposite view: the ideology of “progress” - the imposition of the idea that the end will never come.
There are, however, facts. Things which exist independent of our beliefs - as I am trying to inform the judge in my trial this week. There is no chance he will accept it as his ideology trumps reality. The facts are that capital controls the world in the 2020s. International capital, to be more precise, has escaped control by the state. This is not an observation - it is an empirical statement. It is historically situated - now in this decade. As such it is an ideological statement. Capital does not always trump the state - in fact usually in history, it does not. And soon capital will lose again.
The deal is this. If you try to interfere structurally with the central character of capital - the ability to engage in economic activity that externalises the social and ecological costs - then capital will punish you. Tinkering is fine - you can always linger a while before you’re forced to leave the prison yard - but a structural challenge to capital's ability to cut costs will be punished. You get capital flight and increased debts to a global power - just look at Greece after the 2008 financial crash, they lost €4 billion a week as they resisted a European bailout. Your country will be poorer and you will be voted out of office and then someone else will have a go at squaring the triangle.
What is the endgame here? There are two outcomes. The state collapses, hollowed out by the social costs of capital’s externalities, which leads to social collapse. Or the state forces capital to submit to its will through its monopoly of violence. Do what we say or we will put you in prison (or worse). In this case, the boot is on the other foot. Both endgames result in what everyone was trying to avoid - getting a lot poorer. "Make a stitch in time to save nine", but you know what dear old humans are like - they always end up making nine stitches. In universities, they call this the collective action problem.
What's the upshot? Whoever you vote for, you will get the same outcome - the rule of capital. Say this to half the population - maybe it's only a quarter now, and soon it will be a tenth - and they will tell you you are mad. Tell the growing other half and they will say “Yeah, obviously”. It's not like people don't know the score. It's just that these people never get to speak in the public sphere - in the media. That’s another one of the rules.
Then there is the gas chamber. “Oh that Roger is always talking about the Holocaust”. To which I reply “No comment” (I have learnt that rule!). It's you making the comparison, not me. So maybe it's you who is being “anti-semitic” for merely thinking that there could be a comparison. This is how ideologies finally eat up their children, by the way. The very awareness of system critique becomes a crime itself. The accusers become the victims. The guards are punished for guarding. Think about the great show trials.
No, what I am saying is that the world we literally live in is a gas chamber - I am making no “comparison”. That is what it is. We are surrounded by gases and these gases are confined in space. Go outside this space - by digging too deep or climbing too high - and you run out of oxygen and die. Life depends on that small sliver of habitable space, the Goldilocks zone.
Let me illustrate this by telling you about my farm. My farmhouse is situated 150 metres above sea level. I can grow food from 100m to 200m. Above 200m it is too cold and windy. Below 100m is too wet and swampy. We live in a sliver - around 100 metres thick - and outside of that we starve. It’s this sliver that also exists within the gas chamber.
Capital has been externalising greenhouse gases to the point that it is significantly changing the composition of this gas chamber. These new gases will not allow you to grow food reliably at scale, even within the sliver. As we will soon find out, no food means no life. In other words, unfettered capital has created the endgame of all endgames - extinction.
You might have noticed that none of this was discussed in the election campaign. When you go to prison they don't tell you the rules - that's another one of the rules. You have to learn them gradually and painfully. In the 2020s you realise the rules are getting worse and worse. Yet eventually a spark will fly and you will have a prison riot. In societies, which turn into prisons, we call this a revolution. In the endgame of endgames, you will get spiritual transformation - a change in how we see the world and the self.
You don't know exactly when this will come about - but you know it will happen as surely as night follows the day.
Or, thinking about spiritual transformation, maybe we should say, as surely as day follows the night.
THE ELECTION IS OVER, BUT TRUE DEMOCRACY STARTS NOW
More than 60,000 people voted for candidates that stood for an updated politics. But now the election is over, we can’t afford to be locked out of Parliament for another five years.
We can reclaim our power by holding assemblies – big community meet-ups – where local people decide on their priorities themselves.
Only 1 in 5 people voted for Labour but they got two thirds of the seats.
— Roger Hallam (@RogerHallamCS21) July 6, 2024
So fucked.
As always, you can sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with Just Stop Oil in the UK or via the A22 Network internationally.
