How Our World Will End
The Final Spiral is how I believe the world as we know it will end. What comes after that world is unpredictable, and likely rather a bit sad.
The Final Spiral is how I believe the world as we know it will end. What comes after that world is unpredictable, and likely rather a bit sad. I will leave that work for future me to scribble in his prison cell.
The Final Spiral is a series of almost inevitable events that will trigger a continuous self-reinforcing cycle toward death, environmental collapse, and fascism.
Climate collapse is here and we are not on a path to avoid the worst of its capitalism-made consequences. Listen to the desperate whisperings of climate scientists and you will hear that we are likely to miss the benchmarks necessary to avoid an absolute shit show.
Unless something changes, it is likely that climate change will continuously drive immigration to the countries best able the weather the storm. There will likely be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. Most of the countries that people will flee to will be Western nations that have fortunately spent the last century looting the rest of the planet of resources. The Wild White West will of course not be immune to environmental immiseration. Internal immigration shall too occur, and exacerbate growing tensions between states like Florida and New York. But the external immigrants are what will be presented as a threat, even more than how we—I am an immigrant after all—are already presented.
Florida has already given a glimpse at this from the Republican side, if the party had gotten its wish, housing an undocumented immigrant would land you and your best buds in prison. It's as if the right heard our chants of "no human is illegal" and responded, "you wait and fucking see!"
On the Democratic party side, you already have over a decade of child detention centers and armed raids as a signal as to where they are going. This precedence set up Trump’s administration to engage in the quiet sterilization of immigrant women. I believe the Democratic party will continue this path, one increasingly adopted by center right parties in Europe like France's En Marche! and Germany's Christian Democratic Union—and now even liberal parties like the Green Party—as a means of boxing out their right wing opponents and ensuring that the labor force stays cheap and terrified.
Environmental collapse increases, immigration increases, right wing politics increase. And thus far it seems that adopting right wing politics–adopting is a generous word here, much of this already exists within the politics of liberals–is not sufficient enough of a strategy to keep the ever growing far right out of power. Liberals–due to their inherent marriage to wealthy capitalists–are simply unable to deliver enough wins to working class or middle class people to keep them out of the clutches of their white robe kin. And this fascism will change and adapt, as it always has. I use fascism here as a shorthand of terrifying governments that are prepared to kill millions, not just for profit like liberalism does, but for societal catharsis. I believe American fascism will be a multicultural affair, with light skin Latinos being the first to carry the burning cross.
That same marriage to capitalists will slow down liberal attempts to stem the literal rising tides of climate disaster. And their conservative kissing cousins will do even worse, Biden will restart the oil drills, and President Marjorie Taylor Greene will reopen the coal mines. This will drive further immigration for decades–or centuries if we're both lucky and unlucky–and drive the ever growing home grown fascism here and everywhere else that has the capacity to survive the floods, famines, earthquakes, droughts, and hurricanes.
This will drive liberals and conservatives further to the right. The concentration camps will grow, their purposes may change, new populations will be scapegoated to distract the public—likely some combination of trans people, queer people, refugees, Jewish people, and Muslims. I believe women will be scapegoated and men of all colors will move to the right in response to their alienation from others and the dearth of organizations aimed at combating that.
Left wing candidates will be blamed for Democratic party losses, the party will lurch to the right, the right will lurch farther into cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The left will continue to stumble, caught between protecting the Democratic party–our daddy–and remembering what it looks like to build revolution.
So on and so forth. Unless we build a movement now. Something beautiful and sweet and kind and vicious. Something that can be a home for the immigrants and the workers who already call here home, something that will strike at the heart of both political parties and break up their little dance.
This is why I organize. This is why I don't yet have children. This is why I'll be late to my nieces’ birthday parties. This is why I might miss your funeral. This is why I need to find a better balance so that my own funeral is later rather than sooner.
This is why we need a revolutionary movement, sooner rather than later. There are so many birthdays and funerals that I would like to attend.