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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <a
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href="https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/slavoj-zizek-climate-change-global-warming-nature-ecological-crises-socialism-final-exit">jacobinmag.com</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">Slavoj Žižek: Last Exit to Socialism</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Slavoj Žižek</div>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">13-16 minutes</div>
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<section id="ch-0">
<p>The latest data make it clear that, even after the
(very uneven) spread of vaccination, we cannot afford
to relax and return to the old normal.</p>
<p>Not only is the pandemic not over (infection numbers
are rising again, new lockdowns are awaiting us),
other catastrophes are on the horizon. At the end of
June 2021, a heat dome — a weather phenomenon where a
ridge of high pressure traps and compresses warm air,
driving up temperatures and baking the region — over
the Northwest of the United States and the Southwest
of Canada caused temperatures to <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/06/27/heat-records-pacific-northwest/">approach
50°C</a> (122°F), so that Vancouver was hotter than
the Middle East.<span> </span></p>
<p>This weather pathology is just the climax of a much
wider process: in the last years, northern Scandinavia
and Siberia regularly see temperatures over 30°C
(86°F). The World Meteorological Organization had a
weather station in Siberia’s Verkhoyansk — north of
the Arctic Circle — record a <a
href="https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/04/world/canada-us-heatwave-northern-hemisphere-climate-change-cmd-intl/index.html">38°C
(100.4°F) day</a> on June 20. The town of Oymyakon
in Russia, considered to be the coldest inhabited
place on Earth, was hotter (31.6°C [88.9°F]) than it
has ever been in June. In short: “Climate change is
frying the Northern Hemisphere.”</p>
<p>True, the heat dome is a local phenomenon, but it is
the result of a global disturbance of patterns which
clearly depend on human interventions into natural
cycles. The catastrophic consequences of this heat
wave for the life in the ocean are already palpable:
“‘Heat dome’ probably killed 1bn marine animals on
Canada coast,” <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/08/heat-dome-canada-pacific-northwest-animal-deaths">experts
say</a>. “British Columbia scientist says heat
essentially cooked mussels: ‘The shore doesn’t usually
crunch when you walk.’”</p>
<p>While weather is generally getting hotter, this
process reaches a climax in local extremes, and these
local extremes will sooner or later coalesce in a
series of global tipping points. The <a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/germany-rhineland-floods-climate-change-green-transition-christian-democrats-merkel-laschet-gradualism">catastrophic
floods</a> in Germany and Belgium in July 2021 are
another of these tipping points, and who knows what
will follow. The catastrophe is not something that
will begin in the near future, it is here, and it is
also not in some distant African or Asian country but
right here, in the heart of the developed West. To put
it bluntly, we will have to get used to live with
multiple simultaneous crises.</p>
<p>Not only is a heat wave at least partially
conditioned by reckless industrial exploitation of
nature, but its effects also depend on social
organization. At the beginning of July 2021 in
southern Iraq, temperatures swelled to over 50°C
(122°F), and what occurred simultaneously was a total
collapse of the electricity supply (no air
conditioner, no refrigerator, no light), which made
the place a living hell. This catastrophic impact was
clearly caused by the enormous state corruption in
Iraq, with billions in oil money disappearing to
private pockets.</p>
<p>If we access this (and numerous other) data soberly,
there is one simple conclusion to be drawn from them.
For every living entity, collective or individual, the
final exit is death (which is why Derek Humphry was
right to entitle his 1992 pro–assisted suicide book <i>Final
Exit</i>). The ecological crises which are exploding
lately open up a realistic prospect of the final exit
(collective suicide) of humanity itself. Is there a
last exit from the road to our perdition or is it
already too late, so that all we can do is find a way
to painless suicide?</p>
</section>
<section id="ch-1">
<h2>Our Place in the World</h2>
<p>So what should we do in such a predicament? We should
above all avoid the common wisdom according to which
the lesson of the ecological crises is that we are
part of nature, not its center, so we have to change
our way of life — limit our individualism, develop new
solidarity, and accept our modest place among life on
our planet. Or, as Judith Butler put it, “An
inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing
earth that does not have humans at its center. We
oppose environmental toxins not only<b> </b>so that
we humans can live and breathe without fear of being
poisoned, but also because the water and the air must
have lives that are not centered on our own.”<span> </span></p>
<p>But is it not that global warming and other
ecological threats demand of us collective
interventions into our environment which will be
incredibly powerful, direct interventions into the
fragile balance of forms of life? When we say that the
rise of average temperature has to be kept below 2°C
(35.6°F), we talk (and try to act) as general managers
of life on Earth, not as a modest species. The
regeneration of the earth obviously does not depend
upon “our smaller and more mindful role” — it depends
on our gigantic role, which is the truth beneath all
the talk about our finitude and mortality.<span> </span></p>
<p>If we have to care also about the life of water and
air, it means precisely that we are what Marx called
“universal beings,” as it were, able to step outside
ourselves, stand on our own shoulders, and perceive
ourselves as a minor moment of the natural totality.
To escape into the comfortable modesty of our finitude
and mortality is not an option; it is a false exit to
a catastrophe. As universal beings, we should learn to
accept our environment in all its complex mixture,
which includes what we perceive as trash or pollution,
as well as what we cannot directly perceive since it
is too large or too minuscule (Timothy Morton’s
“hyperobjects”). <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/timothy-mortons-hyper-pandemic?fbclid=IwAR0qbxs2y57TIQsOloIW9MrBtqleIMIFK3SsfBQeCcWXiGIKRpnUmRAiNTk">For
Morton</a>, being ecological</p>
<blockquote>
<p>is not about spending time in a pristine nature
preserve but about appreciating the weed working its
way through a crack in the concrete, and then
appreciating the concrete. It’s also part of the
world, and part of us. . . .<span> </span></p>
<p>. . . Reality, Morton writes, is populated with
‘strange strangers’ — things that are ‘knowable yet
uncanny.’ This strange strangeness, Morton writes,
is an irreducible part of every rock, tree,
terrarium, plastic Statue of Liberty, quasar, black
hole, or marmoset one might encounter; by
acknowledging it, we shift away from trying to
master objects and toward learning to respect them
in their elusiveness. Whereas the Romantic poets
rhapsodized about nature’s beauty and sublimity,
Morton responds to its all-pervading weirdness; they
include in the category of the natural everything
that is scary, ugly, artificial, harmful, and
disturbing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is this not a perfect example of such a mixture as
the fate of rats in Manhattan during the pandemic?
Manhattan is a living system of humans, cockroaches, .
. . and millions of rats. Lockdown at the peak of the
pandemic meant that, since all restaurants were
closed, rats that lived off the trash from restaurants
were deprived of the source of their food. This caused
mass starvation: many rats were found eating their
offspring. A closure of restaurants which changed the
eating habits of humans but posed no threat to them
was a catastrophe for rats, rats as comrades.<span> </span></p>
<p>Another similar accident from recent history could be
called “sparrow as comrade.” In 1958, at the beginning
of the <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward%22%20%5Co%20%22Great%20Leap%20Forward">Great
Leap Forward</a>, the Chinese government declared
that “birds are public animals of capitalism” and set
in motion a large campaign to eliminate sparrows,
suspected of consuming approximately four pounds of
grain per sparrow per year. Sparrow nests were
destroyed, eggs were broken, and chicks were killed;
millions of people organized into groups, and hit
noisy pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting
in their nests, with the goal of causing them to drop
dead from exhaustion.</p>
<p>These mass attacks depleted the sparrow population,
pushing it to near extinction. However, by April 1960,
Chinese leaders were forced to realize that sparrows
also ate a large number of insects in the fields, so,
rather than being increased, rice yields after the
campaign were substantially decreased: the
extermination of sparrows upset the ecological
balance, and insects destroyed crops as a result of
the absence of natural predators. By this time,
however, it was too late: with no sparrows to eat
them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the
country and compounding the ecological problems
already caused by the <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward">Great
Leap Forward</a>, including widespread deforestation
and misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological
imbalance is credited with exacerbating the <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine%22%20%5Co%20%22Chinese%20language">Great
Chinese Famine</a> in which millions died of
starvation. The Chinese government eventually resorted
to <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign">importing</a>
250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish
their population.</p>
<p>So, again, what can and should we do in this
unbearable situation — unbearable because we have to
accept that we are one among the species on Earth, but
we are at the same time burdened by the impossible
task to act as universal managers of the life on
Earth? Since we failed to take other, perhaps easier,
exits (global temperatures are rising, oceans are more
and more polluted . . .), it looks more and more that
the last exit before the final one will be some
version of what was once called “<font size="+3"><b>war
communism.</b></font>”</p>
</section>
<section id="ch-2">
<h2>By Any Means Necessary</h2>
<p>What I have in mind here is not any kind of
rehabilitation of or continuity with the
twentieth-century “really existing socialism,” even
less the global adoption of the Chinese model, but a
series of measures which are imposed by the situation
itself. When (not just a country but) all of us are
facing a threat to our survival, we enter a warlike
emergency state which will last for decades at least.
To simply guarantee the minimal conditions of our
survival, mobilizing all our resources is inevitable
to deal with unheard-of challenges, including
displacements of dozens, maybe hundreds, of millions
of people due to global warming.<span> </span></p>
<p>The answer to the heat dome in the United States and
Canada is not just to help the affected areas but to
attack its global causes. And, as the ongoing
catastrophe in southern Iraq makes clear, a state
apparatus capable of maintaining a minimal welfare of
the people in catastrophic conditions will be needed
to prevent social explosions.</p>
<p>All these things can — hopefully — be achieved only
through strong and obligatory international
cooperation, social control and regulation of
agriculture and industry, changes in our basic eating
habits (less beef), global health care, etc. Upon a
closer look, it is clear that representative political
democracy alone will not be sufficient for this task.
A much stronger executive power capable of enforcing
long-term commitments will have to be combined with
local self-organizations of people, as well as with a
strong international body capable of overriding the
will of dissenting nations.</p>
<p>I am not talking here about a new world government —
such an entity would give opportunity to immense
corruption. And I am not talking about communism in
the sense of abolishing markets — market competition
should play a role, although a role regulated and
controlled by state and society. Why, then, use the
term “communism”? Because what we will have to do
contains four aspects of every truly radical regime.<span> </span></p>
<p>First, there is voluntarism: changes that will be
needed are not grounded in any historical necessity;
they will be done against the spontaneous tendency of
history — as Walter Benjamin put it, we have to pull
the emergency brake on the train of history. Then,
there is egalitarianism: global solidarity, health
care, and a minimum of decent life for all. Then,
there are elements of what cannot but appear to
die-hard liberals as “terror,” a taste of which we got
with measures to cope with the ongoing pandemic:
limitation of many personal freedoms and new modes of
control and regulation. Finally, there is trust in the
people: everything will be lost without the active
participation of ordinary people.</p>
</section>
<section id="ch-3">
<h2>The Way Forward</h2>
<p>All this is not a morbid dystopian vision but the
result of the simple realistic assessment of our
predicament. If we don’t take this path, what will
happen is the totally crazy situation which is already
taking place in the United States and Russia: the
power elite is preparing for its survival in gigantic
underground bunkers in which thousands can survive for
months, with the excuse that the government should
function even in such conditions. In short, government
should continue to work even when there are no people
alive on the earth over whom it should exert its
authority.<span> </span></p>
<p>Our governments and business elites are already
preparing for this scenario, which means they know the
alarm bell is ringing. Although the prospect of the
mega-rich living somewhere in space outside of our
Earth is not a realist one, one cannot avoid the
conclusion that the attempts of some mega-rich
individuals (Musk, Bezos, Branson) to organize private
flights into space also express the fantasy to escape
the catastrophe that threatens our survival on Earth.
So what awaits us who have nowhere to escape?</p>
</section>
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