This year, Salome met a client in Zurich who she said ‘maybe’ planned on going to WEF, but she remained tight-lipped about the circumstances of the meeting as discretion is valued above all in her line of work. ‘The elephant in the room is climate change. […] Link

Recently I had a conversation with a relative where I was more candid about my political leanings than usual. My surviving family are my mother’s half-siblings, who grew up as middle-class white Texans. One sister has the panicked and confused schizmotic ideology you get from a diet of 100% Fox news, the other is a bland centrist (They’re family, I love them both, yada yada). Anyway, in conversation with the liberal, I tried to timidly suggest that centrist liberalism rachet-effects with fascism, enabling it in a good-cop, bad-cop relationship. To this she asked me point blank if I was a “capitalist” and when I said no, she said of course she was. I asked her if I could borrow some money.

The suggestion here is of course, that a “capitalist” isn’t someone who holds an ideology, it’s some one who holds.. you know… capital.

But there is an attendant ideology. If you believe, or hold the sort of proxy-for-a-belief that these people do- that we must quest for an infinite-money-printing-machine that continues to enrich shareholders indefinitely, since the assurance of investments returning is their means of existing in a state of luxury— you must also secretly know that eventually no more ‘value’ can be bled from this earth and its hapless inhabitants, your servants. And at that point, when the line can’t go up any more, even with forced convulsions of disaster-crash, reinvestment and cash-out, that the world must end. That’s why the bizarre cult of evangelical christianity has been promoted to Church of America, because it pushes this eschaton, where a depleted world population is sorted into winners and losers some day very soon. Because they consider collapse is implicit, material (not allegorical). To them the world was meant to be used up and those who used it up will be rewarded with an infinite-money-printing-machine in heaven that could not exist on earth.

So when people put to me the false dichotomy that “capitalism” and “communism” are ideological opposites, all I can think is that these are only opposites in that they hold two opposing end-states that are never actually reached. The capitalists will degrade and devalue everything on earth waiting to be declared winner on a judgement day that never arrives, and whatever beleagured “communist” they might imagine as their counterpart is also waiting for a messianic moment when class consciousness creates a homeostatic system that will enshrine and protect life and human rights in perpetuity, rather than those small beachheads built after catastrophe— washed away by the next wave of capitalist murder, opression and consolidation.

Anyway, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will… The people who own everything and force us into busywork servicing them (in every sense of the word, as evidenced by this article) are pessimistic at the core, and not because this is all a foregone conclusion. Because they cannot imagine anything else, and they cannot use their vast wealth to allow us to do the incredibly necessary work of preparing ourselves and the land for the future they forced on us by never looking it in the eye.