Richard Seymour, the unthinking man’s Marxist, is back:
For Seymour, then, comradeship isn’t just between humans, but between species and the living world. This is surely the bedrock of not just socialism, but eco socialism.
To better understand this and what we’re losing, it makes more sense to talk about mass extinction than just climate change, he tells me. “It pertains to the destruction and decay and etiolation of life across the board and all the evidence suggests we’re in what some call the end – Holocene mass extinction.” And extinctions reveal all our unacknowledged dependencies; we need plants and other animals. We, human beings, do not sit at the top of a grand hierarchy. Continuing as we are, exploiting other animals and the rest of nature, is unsustainable.
“If you want a less fancy way of putting it: love,” says Seymour. This isn’t necessarily where all Marxists might end up but he adds, “if we’re talking about socialism, what else are we talking about?”
That’s the product of 9 years of deep thinking on hte subject of climate change and the rise of the far right.
This shit is going to be everywhere over the next fwe months.
Sigh.
99% of all life that has ever existed is extinct.
Whenever the more lunatic greens start banging on about fellowship with other species, I find myself wondering if they’d have the same feelings towards an infection by drug resistant gonorrhoea.
jgh
I think we’re the form of life that they’d really like to see extinct.
“If you want a less fancy way of putting it: love,” says Seymour. This isn’t necessarily where all Marxists might end up but he adds, “if we’re talking about socialism, what else are we talking about?”
Nationalsozialismus, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; all brimming over with love.
He urgently needs a socialist fraternal meeting with a hungry polar bear.
But in 2015 that changed. Walking in a local park on Christmas Day, he couldn’t ignore how noticeably warm it was. He started to think about not just what has already been lost but what global heating means for the losses to come. “Some sort of defence just went down,” he says, “and I experienced a preliminary bit of climate mourning.”
“It was revealed to me while taking my dog out for a shit.”
Seymour grew up in a small town in Northern Ireland surrounded by farmland, rivers and woodland but for years he’d been flexing what he calls a “hyper urban” attitude – it was in New York and Paris where the labour movement historically flourished and so it was in those kinds of environments that he felt he and his politics most belonged.
From Hicklib to Small Souled Urban Bugman in one Kafkaesque leap.
Now he is, arguably, one of the UK’s foremost thinkers on the politics of climate breakdown and nature loss
He is, arguably, little more than a talking animal that squawks slogans.
“Climate change BAWK!”
“Racist! Racist! *whistles*”
It’s a little warm for the time of year so we’re all going to DIEEEE!
A pity he didn’t go for a walk in the park on Christmas Day 2010, presumably because it was too cold.
“… it [December 2010] is thought to be the coldest December across Great Britain since before 1659 …”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_2010%E2%80%9311_in_the_British_Isles
The thing about treating all other living things as our equals is that it’s also one of socialism’s current justifications for euthanasia: “we do it to cats and dogs, so what’s the problem with it, you fascist?”
Paul, I’m sure he doesn’t include conservatives, libertarians and Reform voters among his equals.
“For Seymour, then, comradeship isn’t just between humans, but between species and the living world.”
Ummm yeah…. While species interact and have relations to each other, “comradeship” ….. is not on the menu.
In fact, nearly all organisms interacting beneficially do not even have a neural network, let alone a brain that could develop such an association.
Moronic….
I seem to recall that there are accounts of unseasonably warm winter weather in the diaries of Samuel Pepys. I also remember the ignorant becoming hysterical about warm winter weather in Canada which is a normal feature of the local climate and is caused by a warm wind from the south known as a chinook.