Chapter 7: The Dialectic, History, and Climate Change: Part VI

Social democracy and fascism are the driving ideologies of this era. The Republicans call themselves conservatives, but that's their base. The Republican establishment is clearly fascist (or "neoconservative" if you don't want to trigger them in their wine caves). Trump, through his blundering, has managed a less fascist foreign policy than either Bush. The Democrat base calls themselves liberals, but their definition of "liberal" is the rest of the world's definition of "social democracy," and thus Bernie's real sin wasn't even his policies, but saying the word "socialism" out loud in America. The point of these bipartisan lies in both cases is manipulation. The GOP wants decent conservatives to back fascist plunder, so they dress it up as something else. The Democrats wanted social democrats to think they're really liberals so that a generation after the New Deal, they could revive plutocracy, make the base think it was their idea, and still coast off that New Deal street cred.

But as Marx points out, capital always uses up its two inputs: labor, and resources. To subsidize the social democratic dreams of millions on the back of the capitalist system it remains fundamentally in bed with, the labor of the whole Third World was not enough. Additional energy inputs, in the form of fossil fuels, were required. Now that China's population is belatedly demanding the gains Mao's generation won them, an additional 1.3 billion people will live like Americans. This on top of the continuing Atlantic petty bourgeois decadence is clearly unsustainable, so it isn't being sustained. The planetary climate is breaking down, with rapid warming causing wildfires, hurricanes, drought, and floods. This is soon going to overwhelm society's ability to cope, and in parts of the Third World, already has.

For just one example, sometime within the next twenty years, two massive Antarctic ice sheets are going to break off, causing massive tsunamis across the southern hemisphere and permanently raising sea levels by about fifteen feet. How many millions of people live within fifteen feet of sea level? More to the point, how many millions are fed off of farmland within fifteen feet of sea level?

To say there will be refugees is a virtuoso performance in understatement. To say that humanity will be compelled to use literally every trick imaginable to survive the next century is obvious, if you think hard enough about the issue. We will have to move millions, probably billions, inland at the same time as we organize water delivery to the deserts on a massive enough scale to grow the forests to soak up an appreciable fraction of the carbon we've already burned.

In other words, the global social order that comes after this petty social democrat one based in the desert wets is, dialectically enough, to be based in settled dries. That confirms the best immediate concrete aims of our basic strategy, already apparent through the application of Marxism-Leninism in the material conditions of climate change. If we can build an organization capable of housing and employing millions of climate refugees while the bourgeois governments of the planet sit helpless, we will build political power dramatically. If we can do so in a way that absorbs massive amounts of carbon, we may prevent even worse climate deterioration before the assumption of competent global socialist rule.

Through our earlier examination of American history, we know that we must build a patriotic militia loyal to the American constitution in order to help socialism prevail in these material conditions. We know we must appeal to the working class via conservative methods, a synthesis of Marxism-Leninism and American conservativism I've called Marxism-Lincolnism. We know we must count on bourgeois overreaction to start a civil war, and not start the revolution ourselves. We know that in this instance, our organization's activities are not only legal, but actively encouraged by constitutionalists.

Therefore, if we are confined to legal methods until finance rises again, the most effective way to achieve the stated goals of resettling and employing climate refugees, and mitigating climate change, and organizing to be ready for the coming civil war, is by establishing a collective enterprise, or a series of them. Or to put it in capitalist-speak, we must start a corporation whose shareholders are all its workers, and who own the stock and vote on corporate governance in equal measure. How we do this... is its own chapter.

Onwards to Chapter 8!