Letter from an occupier

Climate change is real

Extreme weather is settling in on us as the new normal weather. Disasters caused by weather-related events are skyrocketing. The conservative card is to point toward skepticism – in this case the only skepticism that will suffice is distrust of science itself. There are still questions of how soon and how severe the alterations of our climate will be. These are only matters of when, not if. With each year that goes by, our chances of maintaining a climate which will be continually livable for massive numbers of humans decreases – any year that industrialization could be halted and the conversion of production to sustainable methods could begin would be a great boon to the continued existence of mankind. Are not those wealthy industrialists who refuse to allow this conversion to less capital-centric sustainability thereby committing violence on a massive scale toward all humans?

Financial damages wrought by these changes in the climate are one of the factors contributing to the overall decline of the market. Another one is the logic of peak oil, which suggests that we reached the peak of oil availability a few years back and from here on out we are chipping away at an extinguishing supply. Less supply means increased prices, which in turns means diminishing returns.

There are additional issues caused by the debt bubble cycle which has plagued capitalism for so long. A few large sectors of capital speculation – student debt, the Euro – are likely to implode in the near future. The question is whether capitalism will survive these inevitable problems. We suggest that, at the very least, the techno-industrial globalized American form of capitalism is on its way out. The time to begin planning and orienting ourselves towards this eventuality is now. Such a dramatic transition won’t be easy. It’s up to all of us to begin forming a new world that we actually want.

Looks a lot like totalitarianism

We, who were not part of any “activist” or political culture before the events of 2011 changed the international conversation, have both learned and shown the rest of the world what those politically engaged have know for a long time: we are not so far from the totalitarian states of terror of the 20th century. Many of those who lived through any of the great persecutions of the people by their government will warn you that Stalin or the SS were not individual aberrations; they represent an elaborate network of tendencies which are persistently evident in the relations between men and contemporary society taken in a particular direction. The governments of the so-called liberal nations have shown beyond a doubt in 2011, if not before that, that the authoritarian police state is already here and they are not afraid to hide it. Anyone who has been present or has witnessed the footage of what happens when the police interact with their own citizens engaging in actual democracy knows what is going on. They brutally assault us. There is no dancing around it. Those who have never been in such a situation and have avoided looking at footage or firsthand accounts continue to pretend that there are complicated relations occurring here. Anyone who takes the time to actually look at the reality of these events has no doubts. The police assault and inflict huge amounts of physical pain on protesters for no reason at all, again and again. Combined with multi-million dollar systems of surveillance and biometric tracking, the police force represents nothing less than open war of the rich against the people.

Included in this system is of course the crime against humanity that is America’s carceral justice system: over 3% of the population is actively being punished by the criminal justice system. America’s prisons account for almost 24% of all of the prisoners in the world (while accounting for less than 5% of the population of the world) – is not this indication the clear mark that America is trending more toward a totalitarian police state than most places in the world?

What lengths the rich will go to in order to continue their violent suppression and exploitation of the masses remains to be seen. So far they have made it quite clear they are willing to go very far into the realm of physical violence. What is even more frightening is the prospect of how this totalitarian tendency will interact with the dynamic shifts in our economic situation. As Naomi Klein has so clearly documented in The Shock Doctrine, totalitarian neoliberalism loves a crisis. Given the extent of the crisis we are now starting to face, there is a definite possibility that the nakedly corrupt corporate propaganda that we call “mainstream press” will pull the wool over our eyes just long enough to install networks of violent repression that we really cannot fight.