Climate crisis and social transformation in the age of Corona

Climate crisis and social transformation in the age of Corona
by Norbert Trenkle, 3/28/2020

https://www.krisis.org/2020/climate-crisis-and-social-transformation-in-the-age-of-corona/

The entire framework for the production of abstract wealth is unraveling. This is why state activity in more and more countries is increasingly reduced to authoritarian crisis management. The less the state can ensure its legitimacy as the guardian of the general welfare by safeguarding public utilities, the more prominently its authoritarian essence stands out.

In order to be able to fight back against this menacing development, the participants in the disparate forms of social and political resistance that it will provoke – or has already provoked – will have to work together. That is not as obvious as it may seem at first. The various struggles against the intensified austerity and state surveillance policies, against the destruction of the natural elements and car traffic, against the unaffordability of housing and the precarization of labor, etc. will shift very quickly into particular competing interests within the system of abstract wealth production. Those separate interests can then be played against each other, for instance if the climate movement demands a high CO2 tax that would hit the poorer segments of the populace harder than others. So it has to be made clear that these struggles and conflicts, however different they may be at first glance, always negatively converge on one point: they are all an effect of the self-perpetuating and destructive logic of the production of abstract wealth and the underlying contradictory form of asocial sociality.