The Raw New (Old) Deal

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci

There are many reasons to be pessimistic about the future. Our habitable climate is deteriorating in real time before our eyes and with it its biodiversity. The days of cheap energy and easy prosperity in the rear view mirror – squandered in one way or another due to conflict and competition. The death of multilateralism and mutual cooperation hangs heavy in the air and with it the rollback of human and civil rights and proliferation of weapons and war just as peace emerges as an existential precondition to surviving these tumultuous times.

Each of these crises are individually enough to keep anyone up at night, but are terrifying when considered concurrently. These concerns are especially acute for the globe’s youth, who in many cases have struggled to enter the workforce, have little influence over shaping their futures and are so behind compared to their predecessors at their age that many adult milestones such as home ownership and parenthood seem like distant dreams rather than rites of passage.

The world as we knew it was already failing many of us for centuries. Rampant inequality and barriers to the full realization of human potential are not new phenomena for those in the Global South. Though the climate crisis was once seen as a problem primarily for those in the equatorial regions, the Earth has proven to be less partial than human imagination could fathom and has spared no latitude. In reality, the poles warm faster than the tropics and the temporal climates expose those living in the Global North to seasonal extremes. Yet, in these crises and their universality, there were reasons for optimism.

Unlike the usual ills hampering the collective well-being of the developing world - racism, colonialism and pollution - never before had the Global North been equally affected by a crisis. This universality contained the seeds of collective recognition of the need for transformational change, not as a means of charity this time but as a necessary strategy for survival. In these concurrent crises, there was for the first time an (almost) universal understanding that the status quo could not hold and transformational change was eminent, whether planned or imposed through cascading disaster and the collapse of the Earth’s ability to continue to support the dominant economic and consumption patterns.

The climate crisis presented a unique opportunity, in that there was demonstrable, scientific, measurable evidence – the only kind not devalued or denied in a world where STEM is valued over the humanities – that the systems long subjugating the Global South would equally be the undoing of those that long benefited from existing structures.

This was not to be. Beyond the compartmentalized conceptualization of the ecological crisis that blames one greenhouse gas or the next, with little to no critique of the underpinning ideologies that drive their production, the climate crisis could also be understood to be caused by settler colonial expansionism. The very same logics of super-exploitation of the environment and the people living therein that dispossessed them of their lands opening them up for capitalist extractivism, contain the seeds that frustrate a just, coordinated, global response. Rather than a collective unity to face these crisis, what has instead materialized has been a new Scramble for the Earth and a race to rule over its ashes.

Like the Scramble for Africa in the 19^th century before, this new scramble is a response to the dying of an anachronistic system and a rush to maintain its benefits even as it becomes clear that it cannot be maintained. Like colonial empires before, the superpowers of today fight amongst themselves for resources – oil, minerals, water – unbound by geography or conscience. In the resistance to adopt new ways of existing, they hasten the collapse of their own societies by stripping them of welfare systems and the infrastructural means to adapt to the coming disruption of the accelerating polycrises.

An understanding of the climate crisis that sanitizes it of all social and ideological contributions narrowly constrains the imagination of those trying to solve it to technical solutions over ones that decouple societies from capitalist logics. Where there existed hope that in tackling the crisis, we would tackle existing developmental crises due to their shared causes, we have instead been sold on techno-optimism that presents climate change and the sixth mass extinction as technological problems rather than the more broad view that sees them as symptoms of the civilizational and societal failings.

The truth takes a backseat insofar as it challenges entrenched systems and the proposed solutions are so inadequate that they neither mitigate the problem and in fact accelerate it in many cases. Adaptations that are technologically and developmentally appropriate are eschewed for experimental technologies, using blood minerals and metals that come at a great cost to the public purse and are only available through expensive financing and debt instruments further starve the commons while bringing little benefit to society beyond a small group of land owners and investors. Rather than reconceptualizing land use and re-enfranchising populations, austerity and societal neglect pushes them further into poverty, dispossessed them of their assets and makes them even less resilient despite the coming climate shocks. Where domestic production of food and goods would shield societies from the shocks of fragile cross-border interdependencies, trade wars and the high cost of energy smother any chance of resilience in the cradle. At the very time where we should be ensuring that citizens should guard their agency to shape their futures, we see the public’s greatest assets – prime land, state owned enterprises, farmland – partitioned to the highest bidder in a race to the bottom for short term superficial monetary gains.

Technology has become an end unto itself, and the dangers of embracing those that further weaken labour are embraced with a zeal and heedlessness that alarms all with the necessary critical thinking to realize a techno-feudal order replace the capitalist one. We increasingly are willing to hinge our wellbeing on devices and logics we neither own, understand or influence. No longer will the average citizen be able to barter their knowledge to make a living, they now must compete against the collective, uncompensated stolen knowledge repackaged as artificial intelligence and deployed to make them redundant. Even as the ability to migrate to greener pastures is frustrated, those in developing countries see themselves being even further disenfranchised within their own borders, now with no means to escape. In this Scramble for the Earth, its wretched are being locked into a burning future by the arsonists with the spigots of transformational changed locked to limit their ability to adapt or survive.

The youth of today face the grim prospect of watching on as any chance of a just response to the ever more eminent polycrises are eschewed and they are further locked into an intolerable future that increasingly rewards the beneficiaries of the previous order - the culprits with the remaining spoils while they shield themselves as best they can from the consequences.

Rather than the climate crisis becoming the wake up call to build a better world, it has been used to cement the inequalities of the post-colonial order while the wealthy dismantle the ability of the general public to hold them accountable or chart a new path forward. The underinformed publics fall victim to denialist demagogues or worse yet, the proliferators of lifeboat politics encouraging every man to fend for himself, even as those with good will are ushered towards cosmetic solutions enabled by an inadequate understanding of the threats at hand.

It is the old rotten deal dressed up in new technological garments creating the same distorted outcomes that leave the many to suffer in precarity and deprivation while a few monopolize the commons and extract value from our shared home planet. In the Anthropocene, the proto-fascist Futurist vision of the early 20th century as articulated by Marinetti has been realized beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations: a society that venerates speed, war, domination and the machine beyond even its own survival.