There’s no way I would even attempt to “sum up” Kai Heron’s longform look into “capitalist catastrophism” for ROAR Magazine, and normally I would not quote passages from near the end of an article, but these bits have been lingering so I’m going to share them here.
(I found this via Nothing Here; thanks to Pocket for figuring out why it wasn’t saving properly.)
From the perspective I am advancing here the problem with Klein’s theory is that it presumes there is a normal to return to. Disaster capitalists use crises as smokescreens to consolidate their power for the post-crisis times to come. But what happens when there is no post-crisis? What happens when the catastrophic convergence of capitalist exploitation and ecological destruction leads to what David Wallace-Wells calls a “climate cascade,” a scenario in which “natural disasters” cease to be discrete events and start to overlap and compound one and other?
The coronavirus gives us an insight into what this might look like. The capitalist class still uses the crisis to advance their post-crisis interests but they also start to take leave of the rest of us. They retreat to their private jets and holiday homes, they take their personal doctors and their nannies with them into lockdown and they let “low-skilled workers” take the risks of maintaining global supply chains. They start, in other words, to assemble the infrastructure to support the coming climate apartheid. States, meanwhile, work to conceal the severity of the situation, to give an impossible to maintain modicum of stability to those of us living in the First World.
[…]
This is the paradox of capitalist catastrophism: a crisis in government becomes a form of government, the capitalist state’s epidemiological and climatic failures turn back on themselves to become their own solution. In the absence of a genuine left alternative to capitalism, the system now promises to protect those lucky few from events that are of its own making.
Emphasis added. Good night, everyone!