Perfect Storm & Apocalypse

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things are passed away.

— Revelation (John’s Apocalypse) 21:4

It’s easier being a Christian right now than a socialist. At least when focusing on the final reckoning by a vulnerable God, the story ends well. The capitalist epoch? Not so much.

As I write this, the United States finds itself utterly unprepared for a pandemic, to say nothing of peripheral societies with little to no medical infrastructure. The pandemic began during a burgeoning financial bubble that has itself augured catastrophe since its reflation began immediately after the 2007–8 meltdown. Debt bubbles are neoliberalism’s means of kicking the catastrophe-can down the road. Unlike tin cans, the risk of said bubbles increases with each passing day.

Debt bubbles also increase social inequality by subsidizing stupidity among the rich to ensure continued and increasing return on investment while ignoring “the fundamentals.” Let’s be clear: the economy was already overdue for a crash based on the inability of the capitalist class to renew accumulation through material production. Material production itself is based on biospheric destruction; and not only has the capitalist class used up a good deal of the world, it has destroyed topsoil, polluted land and water, acidified the oceans, and induced what threatens to become runaway climate change.

Remember climate change? We were already entrained within capitalism’s final stage: exterminism. Where we accelerate the annihilation of biospheric order, where we burn continents, where we rip open every fissure in search of renewed accumulation. After five centuries of capital itself spreading like a pandemic, it has captured seven and a half billion dependent souls within its structures. To quote the ironic church graffiti in one scene of the film 28 Days Later — a contagion narrative — “The end is extremely fucking nigh.”

Nassim Taleb coined the term “black swan” to signify sudden, unpredictable events that upset socio-economic stability. Many call Covid-19 such a black swan; but in 2005, Mike Davis wrote The Monster at Our Door — The Global Threat of Avian Flu, and he wasn’t alone in sounding the alarm that global urbanization combined with capitalist agriculture is working with bomb materials. Given that these kinds of concerns have always been set aside in the interest of accumulation, perhaps it was unpredictable . . . to those who can’t see past the next business cycle.

The black swan concept is closely associated with an axiom from chaos theory: sensitivity to initial conditions. In shorthand, seemingly insignificant changes you see today can grow into big changes later, and not predictably because every other change will interact with that change creating “chaotic” developments, disruptions of stability. Inside a pangolin — one exotic wild animal trafficked for profit in a crowded marketplace — a single virus mutates. Seems like a pretty insignificant event, like one dead whale washing up on a beach, or one canary falling dead off its perch.

Insignificance is a myth. So is compartmentalization. Reality doesn’t divide into epidemiology on the one hand and economics on the other and ecology on yet another. Capitalism doesn’t want to deny the myth of compartmentalization, because that’s been its rhetorical strategy all along. Liberal philosophy was predicated on the refusal of interconnection, on atomization, on reduction, and compartmentalization. Our predicament today is a demonstration of liberalism’s abject failure. When you’re being managed for profit, the ruling class doesn’t want you to make connections. They want you to work and buy and stay quiet.

Right now, one of our daughters is raising a child alone in a city with no family. The schools have been closed, so in order to continue working she has to rely on a daycare center, which is costing her money, and which itself could soon close . . . and which is itself a potential disease transmission center. She is imbricated — as are we all — in this so-called system. Right now, she is trying to figure out how to pay bills, eat, and sleep indoors, because her every need is supplied through an exchange of money. That in itself is cause for profound worry; but what no one dares mention is that a catastrophic cascade such as we are witnessing right now could — I don’t say will, but could — cause money itself to become worthless. What happens then? I’m nearly seventy, and I can only face this prospect for my wife and I — as elders — with dread. We have no way to eat without money. We’re even getting too old to grow our own food (as if we had the land for it). Medicines?

You can easily cite your own experiences and those of friends and family. The veils of simulacra are falling, and what is revealed is something barren, horrifying . . . and seemingly hopeless.

Socialists like to talk about the redistribution of money, blissfully unaware of the ways money itself, combined with a general dependency on it, is what built this house of cards as well as what will light a match to it (See Mammon’s Ecology for a detailed explanation).

Merely using money for exchange, in the overwhelming majority of cases, contributes directly to biospheric destruction; and the generalized dependency on money in a world system means there are no firewalls, no mountains, forests, or oceans that can protect us from contagion . . . biological or economic. One terrible misstep, one unforeseen outcome, can lead to catastrophe that spares none. Socialists aren’t immune to this either, because, yes, it is capitalism but it is also mass society — something socialists themselves dream about — managed Utopia. They are as captured by the delusion of control as the most reptile-minded capitalist. Money-dependency is the connective tissue of great-scale, modern societies, where one catastrophic error or one “unpredictable” event covers us all like a flood.

It’s more than a little disconcerting that we are witnessing the crash of the Bernie Sanders campaign at the same time, but it is also emblematic. Speaking for myself, as one who vigorously pushed this candidacy, the Sanders campaign was always a desperate last ditch attempt to find a tiny social democratic window through which we might begin triage on the gravest wounds of late capitalism. I grieve over this loss, as many do because we came closer than we thought possible; but the electoral movement around Sanders was not yet strong enough to beat them at their own game. We couldn’t know unless we tried, but it’s become clear now that this movement has to pivot: it was always an anti-austerity movement, albeit rooted in the rotten soil of America. Whether people realize it or not, the only thing left in our playbook now is the general strike . . . and our insufficiency in the face of this pandemic is showing us how utterly unprepared we are even for that.

What will you do without money? Where will you get food if the grocery stores empty and the state fails to fill in the blanks?

There was always going to be a pandemic. There was always going to be a financial crisis. There was always the ever more high-velocity unraveling of the earth’s capacity to self-repair. Any window left is now closing, and one black swan will beget another and another and another. What’s on the other side of it all is certainly suffering in a world permanently impoverished by this demonic perversion called capitalist modernity.

Covid-19 is not Covid-19, it is Covid-19/debt bubble/climate change/insane clown fascism. None of it can be separated. Ironically, the only valid responses to Covid-19 are non-market responses. Anti-market responses. If we would but point it out (the big taboo), if we could but annul America’s most precious right — denial — all could see now that “market solutions” are not only ineffective, market solutions are the wellspring of our predicament.

It looks like doom. Especially to those of us who have been spared in the metropolitan cores. For many around the world, this doom arrived three, four, five generations ago. The world for many millions is already what many “developed” nation’s denizens think of as post-apocalyptic. If those of us who have been spared thus far in America look but a little way, we have post-apocalyptic scenes developing around us right now in our failing cities and abandoned towns. We’ve looked away; we’ve denied, denied, denied. It’s the American way.

It’s easier being a Christian now than a socialist; but even that is difficult in America, where the majority who claim devotion to the vulnerable God have traded their fealty to the one crucified for a demonic counterfeit . . . for racial capitalism, male conquest, and Fortress America.

For the rest of us, those fewer who refuse the idolatry of macho nationalism as well as the thin broth of the “liberal” churches adapting themselves to the pernicious myth of progress, at least we have our own apocalypse. Apocalypse here meaning revelation, the revelation of the empty tomb — that “former things have passed away.” The fool’s hope of suffering servants.

There will be no grand, sweeping transformation of this broken world — one that was broken long before capitalism, though without capitalism’s terrible contagions, medical and otherwise. What succeeds exterminism — here in this veil of tears — will be built out from within the interstices of a dying order. What will be accomplished will be accomplished with calloused hands, agile minds, practical speech, and hopefully with love. Love, hope, and charity decoupled from the ostrich optimisms of yesteryear. We have to turn away from our idols and turn again to our neighbor — not just the one’s we like. This was what we missed again and again, and now we’re living through a period when survival and the touch of others — that invaluable gift — are antithetical.

Let that be a lesson to us.

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death. Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me. Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs.

Psalm 22: 14–20