It may be asked why the European and White Settler elites are pushing us all towards a globalised War. Now Macdara admits that this is not a conscious process, or at least not in its entirety. But when future generations ask whether it was not obvious that the white regimes were driving toward destruction, the survivors will have to respond that yes, it was obvious. One hears of the various powers sleepwalking towards the 1914-18 war. This is no sleepwalking. Even walking seems the wrong verb. This is a mad dash, eyes open.

Macdara is fond of the phrase Late Capitalism, which on the one hand gestures towards the ecological catastrophe through which we are living—though it will get much, much worse—meaning that we can properly be said to be late in, or at the end of, what we have known, and on the other hand also presents us with a choice for what comes next, one often referred to by the present writer, following Luxemburg: Socialism or Barbarism. Whatever we experience when the planet breaks down, when we have billions of climate refugees, constant extreme weather, novel diseases, famine, water and energy shortages, it will be something other than Capitalism. 

There is no secret to the above, and those who deal with futures might be expected to engage with the total likelihood of ecological collapse. The elites, in other words, know that we have entered the catastrophe already, and all the indications so far are that Barbarism will win out—their preferred option of course. They must use every moment before things get even worse to grab what they can. This involves maintaining and furthering the mass robbery that is rent-seeking, as poor quality housing that does nothing productive to justify an increase in value, is nevertheless constantly forced upwards in value through manipulation of supply. Of course to speak of value here is already to fall victim to the neutralising effect of market discourse; what is actually happening is that younger people are forced into handing over more and more of their entire life’s earnings to live in whatever shoddy home they can find. But it is wrong to think of the elites as stealing only our money: under the conditions of Late Capitalism, everything is data, and data is capital. We bleed data with everything we do, and it is all sucked up by the familiar corporations of control, some of which we voluntarily surrender to as the condition of entry into comfortable living—Google and such—and some of which are nightmarish vampire entities to which we have not meaningfully consented.

The irrational US administration is most obvious in its brazen use of the State to enact a theft of resources from everyone but the very rich, a transfer that the elites hope will help them survive the inevitable crash of the State, when the world no longer wishes to give its money to the US. This is one of the many dynamics of the Capitalist End Times: by virtue of being so powerful, the US State has been a safe bet for capital; in less neutral terms, the wasteful and luxurious lives of US Americans are funded by those with less money. 

All of this represents a time-limited approach to extraction, and as such the elites are in effect in a race with each other to grab as much as they can of the lives of the rest of us. What better circumstance, they think, than a war, to thin out the poor, close down dissent of any kind, and secure a constant stream of cash from their friends in Government. In fact wars are often levelling phenomena, socially-speaking—for those who remain. But each oligarch is only thinking of himself (Macdara uses the male pronoun deliberately): each one will look to rob as much as he can to survive the chaos, though he will have to live underground, or on a distant island or yacht, or at the top of a tower. Hence too the absurd obsession of the oligarchy with leaving the planet.

But let us not forget that they may all be found, and what they have taken from us may be shared once more.