42 degrees in some parts of the country. The elderly are dying in their apartments, which have turned into ovens. Construction workers are collapsing on their job sites. The homeless are dying on the paved streets of our showcase cities. Women are enduring a surge in domestic violence, exacerbated by overcrowding and the heat. And meanwhile, in their air-conditioned living rooms, the scoundrels who serve this system and their media lackeys spin tales, joke around, and downplay the situation—when they aren’t outright patting themselves on the back for the “hard work” they’ve accomplished.
A smug president who praised the “great work” of adaptation carried out during his term, a smug minister, a TV pundit who justifies inaction, a technosolutionist who sells us air conditioning as a path to emancipation, and a boor who mocks—without a shred of shame—“those who live under the eaves”: such is the spectacle. It is the spectacle of a ruling class that has fully internalized the fact that nothing—not even mass death—can call into question the marvelous order it has established. These people will not be held accountable. Class selfishness runs through their veins just as it does through the veins of the capitalism they serve—and they have not the slightest intention of taking any responsibility for the disaster they are orchestrating.
For there is a word to describe the way Capital and the State manage their own disaster. A smooth, reassuring word, borrowed from biology and repurposed as a technology of consent. A word that transforms victims into actors, inevitability into opportunity, and criminal inaction into collective wisdom. You know this word: resilience.
Be resilient. Adapt. Look within yourselves for the resources to “live with” what these scoundrels have deliberately created—knowing, of course, that for those who are healthy and have the material means, it will be easier: a barely veiled form of social Darwinism. And above all—above all—do not ask yourselves about the root causes of your misfortune. Don’t blame the insane industrial and commercial development that has methodically destroyed nature, impoverished the vast majority of humanity, and dismantled the few policies capable of improving the lot of the most vulnerable. No: be good, resilient poor people, good, well-adapted citizens, good poisoned and blinded people who don’t rock the boat. Every man for himself, and Capital for all.
It is precisely this mechanism that we highlighted a little over a year ago in the “Resilience” entry of our ABCs of Social Ecology—and which, in light of what we are experiencing today, resonates with scathing relevance. For what the heat wave reveals with brutal clarity is that resilience is not a response to catastrophe: it is catastrophe continued by other means. It is the way in which Capital ensures its impunity by shifting the burden of surviving what it produces onto the victims.
Against this, there are no individual “good deeds.” There is no adaptive strategy that can save us. There is the collective struggle to tackle the root causes—capitalism and the state that serves it—while, in solidarity, protecting the most disadvantaged, precarious, and vulnerable among us right now, without delay. There is the right to withdraw as a political act of survival. And there is, perhaps, the rage necessary to transform this deadly heat into emancipatory anger.
Let’s reread this entry from the ABCs. And then let’s take action.