It is Independence Day, 2024. A monstrous Class 5 hurricane is ripping the Caribbean islands aside. America’s summer season will doubtless be the most popular on file. The Supreme Court docket runs the US. All of that is linked. The SCOTUS’s current domination of federal establishments shouldn’t be unrelated to the escalating disasters of capitalogenic international warming. One solely has to learn this current NYT headline to see what’s actually happening in 2024: “A String of Supreme Court docket Choices Hits Onerous at Environmental Guidelines.” The story behind this headline, “Local weather Change Will Price U.S. Extra in Financial Injury Than Any Different Nation However One [India],” virtually will get the current scenario proper, however like so many financial and environmental tales, it catastrophically undervalues the actual price of capitalism.
What the Supreme Court docket understands, and why it is aggressively (and even shamelessly) growing its energy, is that the worth of capitalism’s low prices is not going to survive a democracy, regardless of how imperfect (and the US’s has been very imperfect from the get-go). And so we discover within the first novel of Octavia Butler’s Parable duology, Parable of the Sower, which was printed in 1993, that shopper costs in 2024 are hovering like by no means earlier than. And so we learn in a June 27, 2024 Clear Air Job Power publish: “The Supreme Court docket in the present day acted in haste, fully disregarding the general public well being advantages for communities which can be impacted by smog from extremely polluting upwind states.” Somebody has to pay dearly for the capitalocene, and it is not going to be the wealthy.
New robes simply dropped and we’re all screwed. #SupremeCourt #SCOTUS #SCOTUSIsCompromised #ChevronDeference #ExpandScotus pic.twitter.com/tt3qpC0hC4
— Benjamin Slyngstad (@SlyngCartoons) July 1, 2024
They may as effectively crown him king now. Ridiculous. #SCOTUSISCORRUPT #SCOTUSIsCompromised #OfficialActs #PresidentsArentKings #SCOTUS #SupremeCourt pic.twitter.com/ELiQY7H0C3
— Benjamin Slyngstad (@SlyngCartoons) July 2, 2024
What Butler may already see on the finish of the twentieth century was the tip of the street for the path the US had taken after the election of Ronald Reagan, the purpose of delivery of the SCOTUS of our time—a SCOTUS whose consolidation was accelerated by the 2000 presidential election debacle, a SCOTUS that owes its present structure to the overrepresentation of states dominated by the white vote, a SCOTUS that legalized the bribery of presidency officers and is gutting environmental/shopper protections with no eruption of alarm within the mainstream media.
However how did Butler extract this practically pristine crystal of the close to future from the tenebrous clouds of her occasions? She didn’t separate capitalism’s vaunted powers of adaptability from fiction. Butler knew then, as you need to know now, that the market system is not going to adapt to a radically completely different local weather in the best way it seemingly tailored to the radically completely different political order, democracy, that emerged with renewed power after the Second World Struggle.
In Butler’s novel, the unusual folks of 2024 can barely afford essentially the most primary commodities within the shopper basket as a result of the true price of the system that produces, values, and markets such items cannot be repressed or displaced to a different and poorer location. Consequently, these tasked with sustaining capital’s social energy assault civil establishments in two methods: financial deregulation and spiritual fascism. Immediately, the Supreme Court docket is the first belligerent within the first line of assault, and MAGA within the second.
Octavia Butler wrapped the 2 (the Supreme Court docket and MAGA) into one—simply MAGA. Within the first novel of the Parable sequence, Parable of the Sower, MAGA is represented by a president, Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner, who guarantees to return the US to “the great previous days” days by mainly asset-stripping the entire nation for the advantage of international firms and suspending “‘overly restrictive’ minimal wage, environmental, and employee safety legal guidelines.” This financial agenda corresponds with the Supreme Court docket’s current dedication to keep up capitalism in any respect prices. As an alternative of addressing local weather change, which might place an intolerably excessive value on the extraction of surplus worth from the setting and labor, SCOTUS is pushing the US in the other way: a pre-EPA regime of low-cost (or unregulated) worth extraction that transfers actual prices from non-public enterprise to an more and more powerless public. That is how capitalism makes life dearer.
However Donner performs a minor position in Parable of the Sower. And he fizzles to nothing by the beginning of the second novel, Parable of the Skills. On this work, capitalism turns to Christofascism for its survival. That is the second MAGA, the Jesus and weapons MAGA, the “Church of Christian America” MAGA. The cultural assault on American democracy is represented by a person, Andrew Steele Jarret, who defeats Donner within the presidential election of 2032. Butler offers President Jarret way more consideration than Donner. He’s all around the novel, and he sounds similar to Donald Trump.
Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “less complicated” time. Now doesn’t swimsuit him. Spiritual tolerance doesn’t swimsuit him. The present state of the nation doesn’t swimsuit him. He needs to take us all again to some magical time when everybody believed in the identical God, worshipped him in the identical method, and understood that their security within the universe relied on finishing the identical non secular rituals and stomping anybody who was completely different There was by no means such a time on this nation. However nowadays when greater than half the folks within the nation can’t learn in any respect, historical past is only one extra huge unknown to them.
And:
And “cultist” is a superb catchall time period for anybody who matches into no different massive class, and but doesn’t fairly match Jarret’s model of Christianity. Jarret’s folks have been identified to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness’ sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, however does so in such delicate language that his persons are free to listen to what they wish to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen homes of devil-worship,” he has a easy reply: “Be a part of us! Our doorways are open to each nationality, each race! Depart your sinful previous behind, and turn into one in all us. Assist us to make America nice once more.”
Not solely do witch burnings return (“Jarret supporters have been identified, from time to time, to kind mobs and burn folks on the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032!”), but in addition slavery, the actual however hidden perform of Christofacism. Capitalism continues. Surplus worth extraction from land and labor is just accelerated. The US goes to conflict with Canada, which is allied with Alaska, the primary state to “seceded from the USA… because the Civil Struggle.” (Alaska closed its borders and declared independence as a result of it may now not deal with the inflow of local weather refugees from the mainland.)
And there you have got it. After SCOTUS destroys what stays of the setting (our surroundings—life will go on after we’re gone), the escalation of violence in opposition to ladies and “the remainder,” the uncooked exploitation of the poor and homeless, and conflict. That is the way forward for Jarret’s/Trump’s MAGA:
All of us voted—all of us who have been sufficiently old—and most of us voted for Vice President Edward Jay Smith. None of us wished an empty man like Smith within the White Home, however even a person with out an concept in his head is healthier than a person who means to lash us all again to his specific God the best way Jesus lashed the cash changers out of the temple. He used that analogy greater than as soon as.
