Losing hope

@TeezyZeezy · 1 year ago

Losing hope

@redtea · 1 year ago

I hope you feel better after your sleep, comrade. I’m sorry you’re feeling so down and that I can’t sit with you in person. From what you’ve shown of yourself on here, I’d happily do that if I could.

I’m glad you’ve used your spoons to connect with us. I want to say as well that as hard as it can be (due to social pressures), it’s okay to save some spoons for yourself. It’s okay to make yourself a priority and rest, eat as well as you can, and sleep for as long as you need to every day.

Your summary of last year’s shitshow is useful, but it might be worth ignoring the news for a while. I get depressed reading about climate change, too. I can do it for a month but then I need a month off – you still know it’s happening, but not hearing the details helps.

I’m not sure if we are fucked, even those in the global south. If industry continues as it has been going, sure. I mean, things aren’t looking too rosy. But things are changing. The west won’t go easily but it will have to face the reality of multipolarity and climate change within the next two decades, maybe even within this one.

In the global north, people will begin to organise more and more. We’re already seeing it. The global south is organising, too. The Black Star Line (an early BRI but for Africa and the African diaspora) was never allowed to take off, but the BRI will achieve a similar goal.

Once the global south is empowered through the BRI, the West will lose access to ‘cheap’ resources – the source of its power and the fuel for its militaries (the oppressed pay a heavy price, so those resources are only cheap for some). This could happen in time for the global south to save itself from total climate catastrophe. I hope it does.

Being in the global north at this time and knowing revolutionary ideas is crucial. It is we who will need to build communities of care; the right won’t do it. Our voices will be needed to explain that a free global south does not have to mean that living standards plummet in the global north; if the global north can move towards socialism. A bourgeois north will pit itself against a free south, but a socialist global order can work together to build a new prosperous world with a habitable environment. In the meantime, we need to look after ourselves and then build relationships, the kind of relationships that help us look after each other and ourselves.

That new order becomes possible once the south liberates itself. It makes me sad to know how much more the south must struggle for that liberation, as it has struggled, suffered, and won before, but I can be happy knowing what freedom will mean for billions of people.

If we look around, it does seem like things have never been worse. But what’s the difference between the threat of climate change and being poor in Europe or indigenous to the Americas, Africa, Asia, or Oceania from the fifteenth century onwards. Life is threatened by capital one way or another. I know the scale of climate change makes it feel different. In a sense it is. But we’re not the first to face this danger, we’re just the first to face it as a planet. But that also means we can fight it as a planet – never before have we had such a unifying motivation to make internationalism work.

We must have the same hope as those who struggled for freedom and independence since the Europeans turned up. Those revolutionaries are our example: we can improve the world, no matter how stormy the weather. We can follow in their great footsteps.