Mx Jay BakerAs the dominant global economic model of supposed never-ending profits, never-ending growth, and never-ending extraction of resources has led us to the brink, the small gains and minor progress of recent decades have faced an inevitable last gasp backlash from Late Capitalism's acolytes -- leading to a scuppering and smearing of even mild social democratic alternatives in the hierarchical electoral state systems, and therefore a promotion of fascism that offers an authoritarian protection for their precious capitalism's perpetuation. We may think of fascism as some bygone ideology snuffed out by the good guys, but Nazism was largely confronted when it threatened opposing imperialist interests. Today, most capitalists are on the same page.
So we are witnessing, all around the world, the rise to power of fascistic governments. The system was not broken, though - it has in actuality been working as designed: a hierarchy that enables power to be held by a few over the many. However, the doomed projects of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn et al have only exposed the system further as what it is, and despite media blackouts, masses of people (more than we often comprehend) are realising, rejecting and rebelling against centralised state power; instead, focusing on an intersectional anticapitalism of horizontalism, mutual aid, workplace organising, renters' unions, and ways to proactively de-legitimise and undermine the state. It isn't easy, and it's far from glamorous, but it's damn sure romantic. And it's all we've got. Time is running out. We must resist.
All we can do is try. It's capitalism, or care. Of course - we can't have both. Let's keep setting examples, from the care of micro-interactions as well as the larger forms of solidarity and collective resistance. We can't vote out power; in every election, the state always wins. And no state has ever liberated all its people from oppression - and no state ever will, because it cannot; it is impossible. Power and hierarchy are inherently oppressive. No wonder capitalism got this far. But take away that system, and it's doomed.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, with enough resources on the planet to provide clean water, food, clothing, shelter, and all the requirements for a dignified life for every single person, fuck each and every politician and capitalist that claims otherwise; all of them who claim some of us don't deserve it; those who seek to divide and rule further. Capitalism is a death cult, and we'll keep rejecting them. Capitalists can buy up media and put their spokespeople in power and pass policies that demonise and police us, but they can't build prison cells in our minds. Ideas, as the saying goes, are bulletproof. We will continue to write and speak and shout and oppose them.