“Capitalism was here even before human existence, waiting for a host.”

a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle

Although they are different types of ideas, petromarxism and sentient oil both have the same point: that hydrocarbon energy moves the social and economic processes that we are used to thinking of as human. Specifically, it moves those processes towards extinction.¹

We are used to thinking of the consequences of these processes—breakdown of earth systems, pollution, catastrophic weather—as well as their achievements and benefits—as human phenomena. Technological progress. Civilization. Commodity production and exchange. Which feel so immutable and inescapable, but are today very different than they would have appeared in the mid-19th century, that is to say 175 years ago. (For scale, the period we call The Renaissance unfolded around three hundred years; the Mughal empire lasted in the Indian subcontinent for 336 years; the Babylonian Empire lasted 1,355 years; the Holocene has lasted nearly 12,000 years; and the Carboniferous age lasted 60 million years.)

“[Capital] constructs and erects itself on a contempt for life and from this foundation: the body, the time of living. Which does not cease to amaze: that a society, a civilization, a culture is able to construct itself from such disdain.”—Lefebvre, Rhythmanalaysis, 62

But these—industrialization, capitalism, and catastrophe—are not actions that we, mere animals, could have taken alone. They are tied up at every step in complicity with a much older entity—or rhizomatic collection of entities—that we found beneath the surface of the earth. Real but more than real, larger than us in every measurable sense, vastly older than us. The anaerobically decomposed remains of the mass of life from the vastly more fecund ages that preceded our own by millions of years. Composed of molecules that could only be made by life and yet are dead; the material of death, the full realization of decomposition; the entities at metabolism’s end. If that entity taken a as a whole or in parts, does not contain spiritual power, than nothing does—certainly not we mortal animals. Power, taken in any meaning of the word: energy, control of labor, creative capacity: power to bring into being new regimes, new eras and aeons, to perpetrate the mass extinctions that mark the end of a geologic epoch; new regimes including this brief flare of industrial capitalism as well as the long silence it will leave behind, while life slowly metabolizes the novel synthetic substances and landscapes of the petrocapitalist frenzy, while new adaptations take hold in a Ballardian drowned and parched world. There will probably be people there, but they might not anymore see themselves as the dominant species, the apex predators of the living world. Because there will also be new entities that grow with the young jungles that will cover the ruins of our infrastructure, to be shaped by the contours of the catastrophe that is our coming collective death, the dramatic conflagration of the mid-21st century that ended it all, when the steady assault of climate catastrophes became indistinguishable from war: The Conflict.

I think I’m not supposed to be thinking of that future. So that I can function today, get through my days, and support my son through his childhood, it only hurts me to think of what’s coming for us on a collective level. Futile, also, because I will not be able to imagine or describe it better than JG Ballard could. And because, like all Americans, I truly believe that me and my family may remain exempt from the Catastrophe; that we will be able to live in our little house and work our little jobs to buy ever-more-expensive groceries while we watch others sacrificed in their millions to the Conflict, exactly the same way I now witness the hundreds of thousands of sacrifices in Palestine.

My son doesn’t know what’s going on. He hasn’t developed to the point where he can perceive the world around him, not truly, and he is entitled to his innocence. He is in his period of naivete enforced by a still developing brain, a recursively and slowly developing brain forced to find constant workarounds to accommodate an overly reactive nervous system. The least we can do, the minimum that we owe him as parents, is to keep him safe while this unfolds in its own time. But then, when he does inevitably awaken from his period of exclusive self-focus, will he be able to be adequately horrified by the world I’ve brought him into? Perhaps not at first, but the horror will catch up to him one day; I can only hope that I’ll still be there to help. Because Gaza is but a microcosm of the world that is being created around us all; The Conflict will turn vast swathes of territory into such sacrifice zones. But as I said, it will—it must—continue to miss us here in our little house in middle-California, the region considered by most to be precarious because of earthquakes; well, earthquakes aren’t made worse by climate change, at least in its early stages.

“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming serpent which surrounds the World. But in the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, ‘The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,’ is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that ‘productivity’ and ‘earnings’ keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.”—Gravity’s Rainbow.

1. “The fear of extinction named Pölker knew it was the Rocket, beckoning him in. If he also knew that in something like extinction he could be free of his loneliness and his failure, still he wasn't quite convinced...So he hunted, as a servo valve with a noisy input will, across the Zero, between the two desires, personal identity and impersonal salvation." — GR