The point of this diary is to alert the Orange-reading public to the “McKibben-Hedges debate,” from a recent piece in Alternet. Yeah, I know, it’s not really a debate. The Alternet piece makes some important connections and I think you should all read it carefully. What this core contention between the two writers is really about, I argue, is power.
The history of power is a record of how various forms of power consolidated themselves into the current global state of domination. The outcome which the history of power has been preparing up until now will be a sort of massive humanity-wide global murder-suicide. The fundamental leap which will make the drama of human self-extinction possible, I argue, was capitalism. Capitalism made capitalist discipline possible as a form of power, and capitalist discipline will bring power to a point of confrontation between the global complex of control and the simplification of the biosphere which will signal our failure as a species at the art of taking care of nature. Thus it’s time to end capitalist discipline. Capitalism will take care of itself.
(Crossposted at Big Orange)
