Over at Monuments Are for Pigeons, “Victor Serge” is talking about the politics of doomsterism:
And this is where the Doomsters show their class privilege. They can only posit a horrible future because they’ve enjoyed the benefits of living in a rich, capitalist country. For the majority of humanity, barbarism exists today, something socialists have been pointing out for over a century. The megalopolises of the poor, imperialist wars, climate change-induced droughts – these are happening now. A couple of years ago I saw Time of the Wolf, about an unnamed disaster that hits France, reducing survivors to internal refugees fighting for food and water. The only difference between that scenario, and a dozen stories on the news, was that the survivors were white. I was incensed: when it happens to the world’s majority, it barely merits a glance. When it happens to white people i.e. ‘us’: the horror, the horror. (And I reference that deliberately: Conrad and Coppola’s Kurtz got to see first-hand the barbarism that imperialism created, and didn’t handle it very well.)
Doomsters are animated by this ahistoric sense that the world has gone wrong and, unlike the previous 400 years of slavery, imperialism and colonialism, this time it will affect us. But if you want to see barbarism, go to Gaza, where there’s precious little water or food, and Israeli jets murder with impunity from the skies. Go to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where factions linked to resource capitalists have battled each other for years, killing millions. Try Iraq, Afghanistan or any of the other places ‘our’ troops have been slaughtering civilians and resistance movements. Yet faced with real, existing barbarism, the most the Doomsters can find to worry about is the eventual slackening off of oil supply. I’d argue this is myopic at best, and racist at worst.
If you believe catastrophe is inevitable from industrialism, technology and size, then the answer is to keep people from pursuing those things. Local communities for local people. Self-described left-winger Lyle Estill has this to say of people who come from far away: “People who live in a community have a vested interest in strengthening that community. Those are the ones who accept and receive local currency. People who live far away take their expertise, and their spending power, home with them each night.” (173) Why not make it simpler and just say, “Immigrants take our jobs.” Because that’s the racist, anti-immigrant argument Doomsterism boils down to. If you think that people can choose their own role in capitalist economy, then they are at fault for choosing to move – for being too greedy and wanting to consume more. Workers don’t have a right to travel where capital does: they should stay put and starve.
The Doomsters live in a comfortable bubble inside the imperialist world. They don’t see the barbarism that envelopes the poor everywhere and can posit their fears of collapse as something unique. They substitute industrialism, technology or people’s stupidity for the inherent drive of capitalism to expand. If you can’t see the cause, then you can’t see the solution – ergo, there is none, and catastrophe is the inevitable result. None of those things can be changed by collective action: on the contrary, the mass of people are to blame. All we can do is wait for the collapse. The misanthropy close to the surface of every Doomster’s heart quickly turns to racism.