Endgame Emotions

“Air pollution is getting worse and worse. “Everything we burn, we breathe,” as David Wallace-Wells noted two years ago. Moving north, climate scientists recently found that it is now too late to save Arctic summer ice, and the month of July saw the highest global temperatures for 120,000 years. Further east, an unprecedented El Niño event in the Pacific Ocean is anticipated in the second half of 2023.”

“As the 2022 article “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios” shows, climate change feedbacks, known and unknown, may in the very worst case “amplify to an irreversible transition into a ‘Hothouse Earth’ state.””

“This is also what the 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights in excruciating detail. The IPCC Working Group II speaks openly about the cascading or compounding effects of global warming. The authors note the dangers, sometimes to the point of painting a pitch-black picture of our present predicament.”

““Challenges,” they write, in an almost laconic voice, “include the degree to which time is running out, there is no central authority, those seeking the solutions are also causing the problem, and the present is favoured over the future.”” Commentator’s Note: This again reinforces my conviction, drawn from Wright’s Classes, that the modes of organization in contemporary multi-national corporations need to transformed toward the end of planetary socialism. We must move through our present conditions in order to solve the problems engendered by them. A retreat to prior modes of life would be to cede the ability to act at the scale required.

“In 1957, Samuel Beckett premiered a play called, simply, Endgame (in French: Fin de partie). Endgame, a concept that comes from chess (as Beckett, an avid player, of course knew), refers to the final phase of play, where the outcome and result of the game normally is decided.”

“In Beckett’s play, however, nothing is decided”

““Like time, the temporal itself is damaged,” Theodor Adorno writes in a famous commentary on the play; “saying that it no longer exists would already be too comforting.””

“Beckett and Adorno wrote in the apocalyptic aftermath of World War II, but their views are still useful for understanding the contemporary climate endgame.”

“The climate crisis has metabolized into our own bodies, showing that human health and environmental health go hand in hand.”

“Yet if climate change accumulates in our bodies, it accumulates in our minds and brains too, and in our nervous systems. It sediments as a generational experience.”

“How can we speak of utopian political forces when our situation on the global chessboard is as bad as it admittedly is? In a sense, our current situation is reminiscent of zugzwang—a German word that denotes a situation in which you don’t want to move because any move you make will only worsen your situation, but you cannot not move; you must move and thus make matters worse.”

“Ecological zugzwang—isn’t this the perfect metaphor for our present predicament?”

“Ask Antigone or any activist and they will tell you: emotions—what I call endgame emotions—are inherent in the struggle, pointing in the direction of both dystopia and utopia. Any ecological struggle is based on grief. Riveting loss often both precedes and propels revolutionary action. It is as simple as that.”

“capital is busy building its own utopias amid the dystopian reality of the climate endgame. We can’t leave the playing field to Shell and Saudi Arabia. We need to counter by creating our own utopias, emotionally and ecologically sustainable utopias.” *Commentator’s Note: Yes! But we need to think at the scale of the planetary. *