POLITICAL CONCEPTS IN WAKE OF GEONTONTOP

It’s hot and it’s getting hotter. As the machinery of capital extraction, industrialism, and consumption refuses to relinquish its grip, meteorological temperatures continue to rise and chemical hot zones spread. Tipping points threaten regime shifts in which the qualitative nature of the earth’s biosphere will alter. But until then, and even after then, hot zones occur in the aggregate only in abstraction. In reality they form like weather clouds over specific places—toxic smog over Beijing, lead poisoning in drinking water in Flint, Michigan, uranium exposure in Navajo and Hopi lands. Marx thought the social dialectic was leading to the purification of the fundamental opposition of human classes. No little evidence can be mustered to support the claim that we are nearing this moment—the world seems to be splitting into ever more extreme halves—the one percent and the ever-increasing precariate. But what many believe we are witnessing a new form of antagonism and which demands new modes of solidarity. The new swelter seems to them less fundamentally a war of class—although also a class war, although definitely not a clash of civilization—and more a clash of existents. And in this new war of the world everyone must decide with whom (or what) we are making ties of solidarity. With whom or what will we stake our claim?