Apocalypse Now

How to confront the present moment.

It’s a boring cliché to talk about how depressing the world is and how we want to ‘switch off’ from all the bad news. Imagine how depressing it was in 1940 or for a Palestinian today. So let’s toughen up a bit.

It is bad however. Awful and unprecedented fires in LA, undoubtedly exacerbated by climate change. And it will only get worse. The slaughter in Gaza continues, every day affirming over and over again the utter impotence of international law in stopping unashamed war crimes and the impunity of the powerful, whether in Palestine or Ukraine. And then there’s Trump, who begins his dread presidency in a few days’ time. And Musk, whose interference in British politics including - incredibly - an overt campaign to ‘overthrow’ the Starmer government is also without precedent. The grovelling Zuckerberg’s decision to fire Facebook’s fact-checkers. We could go on.

New dangers are appearing fast, faster than many of us expected.

I’ve been watching the excellent Netflix series ‘Narcos’, some years after it was first broadcast. One of the things that makes it so good is that it acknowledges the political context very clearly, that the ‘war on drugs’ is but a function of broader US hegemonic policy in Latin America, where the series takes place. But it also tells the equally political story of the drug lords themselves and how they brutally maintain power. But brutality is only part of the story. The narco-bosses are constantly scheming, making and breaking alliances, in a complex and fast-moving chess game. Above all, they adapt. The sudden collapse of the dominant cocaine cartel opens opportunities for another. The old cartel then responds with a campaign of targeted and wickedly-inspired violence. Smuggling routes are constantly explored and shifted. It is like watching an adaptive system in real time.

And here is Narcos’ lesson for us. Changing circumstances, and the rapidly-evolving threat to our societies, demand a change in strategy.

Instead of adaptation, however, what I see is complacency. The Starmer government claims that it is ‘delivery’ on its policies that will see off the threat from the Far Right (in Britain’s case, the Reform Party). This apparently means more growth and better public services. Fat chance. The fiscal and structural circumstances of the UK economy make both goals unattainable, as in most of Europe. An aging population is putting constantly rising (and arguably unaffordable) burdens on the state. Immigration of nearly one million per year is more or less unstoppable and will probably increase as the depredations of climate change make huge swaths of the earth unliveable. The government should be upfront about this and thus have a chance of maintaining its credibility, but instead it hews to the unkeepable promise of better ‘delivery’. Even in its own terms, then, it will lose the battle with the Right.

In any case, with the (big) exception of immigration, the Right doesn’t fight on the battlefield of policy delivery. Instead, as Ben Tarnoff points out in the New York Review of Books, its principal argument is against ‘the system’ i.e. that the whole thing isn’t working and is corrupt (witness the proliferation of online claims that the LA fires are much worse because wealthy donors to the Democratic governor have taken all the scarce water needed to fight the fires). The centrist parties, not least because they actually constitute ‘the system’, have allowed this ground to be occupied by the Trumps, Farages and Le Pens. And because they have until now been the beneficiaries of this system they have no idea how to fight on this territory, indeed I’m sure that they don’t even realise that this is the battle they are now in. They are therefore doomed to lose unless they change strategy which, I suspect, they are incapable of doing.

I have tried to persuade the Green Party here in the UK to adopt an ‘anti-system’ approach but from the left and with better prescriptions than those of the Trumps and Farages whose solutions are horrific including, in Trump’s case, the potential violent deportation of millions of immigrants. I didn’t succeed. Political parties, being the types of beast that they are, are too committed to parliamentary democracy as the way forward. That’s what contemporary political parties do, and it’s naïve to expect them to change. I’m sure the Democrats are now focusing on how they can beat the neo-fascist Republicans at the next election rather than thinking about the deep forces driving the disillusionment with the status quo and indeed, with them. In any case, I’m not sure that political parties are the right vehicle for the counter-strategy.

This blog will in coming weeks look at elements of the counter-strategy, basing ourselves on the analysis that the problem is systemic not party political i.e. there is widespread disenchantment with the political-economic dispensation of ‘the West’ and beyond (for this survey has found declining support for ‘democracy’ - by which the surveyors mean so-called representative democracy - worldwide, and particularly amongst young people). Why is this and what can be done?

The obvious answer is this: change the system! Accept that it isn’t working and adapt it, just like the drug lords in Narcos alter their strategies when circumstances change. The reactionary Right in reality have no solutions to the systemic crisis. They simply shout that they stand up for those who feel disadvantaged - often white men - and then go and replace the current lot of apparatchiks with a new crowd, who are supposed to be better, but who are in fact even more corrupt and unrepresentative of the ‘little man’. They don’t change the system, much as they promise to. Herein is their greatest weakness, if only we would see it. Instead of structural and fundamental change, they claim billionaires and hedge-fund traders will remedy the deficits of the economy and polity. It’s nonsense but people believe it; they want to believe it.

The systems change that’s needed is described in my forthcoming book, Gentle Anarchy, which I am trying to persuade the publisher to get out soon (hi, Jonathan!) even though I’ve only just finished it - on the last day of 2024. Earlier elements of this thesis are explained in my last book, The Leaderless Revolution. But this isn’t (only) a self-interested plug. I don’t claim to know all the answers and this, in part, is the answer. For genuine self-determination, which is the heart of anarchy, requires us each to take our own path - but together. I may have an idea of my own utopia (and this is described in the book) but that distant territory is for each of us to imagine and then strive for. For one element of the systemic crisis is the chronic denial of personal and collective agency in a capitalist and supposedly ‘representative’ democratic dispensation. It’s not the only thing that matters (material circumstances matter too) but it is central.

This is part of Trump’s ‘offer’, that he will give agency back (though he won’t, of course), give power back to the guy who feels overlooked and overtaken both economically (through inequality) and culturally (through alleged ‘wokery’, another name for equal rights and respect). And this is the central part of the system that we must fix. There are other parts too, of course, but fix this and the other parts begin to fall into place, because government, or rather self-government (as for instance we see practiced in Rojava, Syria, or in Zapatista-controlled areas of Mexico), will become about the stuff we care about, including the ineffable stuff that makes life worthwhile, not the stuff - profit-making, planetary destruction, consumerism, individualism - demanded by a capitalist economy. This systemic change must therefore be our own if it is to succeed.

More on this to follow but for now, please do comment. As I say, this challenge belongs to all of us.