Roiling magma
I’m so mad. What’s happening out there is fascism, plain and simple, and it’s just unfolding in front of our eyes.
I read a piece in the Financial Times about ICE’s new funding avalanche, creating building up this police force operating at the behest of the executive and building camps to contain the people they kidnap off the street, whether they’re little kids going to school or community college students or anyone else the government might decide meets their criteria as they try to get to their ever-increasing quotas (they want to arrest 7,000 people a day—it’s about 1,000 now).
Meanwhile, the federal government and supreme court have made good on their promise to dismantle the Department of Education, but in a way that we weren’t necessarily expecting: firing everyone.
As the workforce gets gutted, the Department froze $6.8 billion of funding that was supposed to go out to school districts at the last minute. District budgets are tightly configured to meet costs and even a single percentage shift can mean firings, closures, and program cuts. Not to mention the stress on state budgets that’s coming as a result of medicaid cuts. This action was reversed in the end, but not before sending school districts into a seizure like state on top of the already-chaotic rhythmn of things.
The tax credits that were supporting a new hopeful industry of green school infrastructure, from solar panels to geothermal and electric heat pumps, LED lighting—all stuff meant to get school buildings to emit less carbon and stop ruining the future they’re supposed to prepare kids for—got sunsetted, as heat waves get worse, storms drop more rain than ever before, and infrastructure fails, and as tariffs on trading partners providing the material for these projects have to halt imports. Districts made five year capital plans for this stuff, went into debt thinking they’d be paid back. Nope.
And mass educational organs in the media like PBS got their funding rescissed, as new incursions into educational technologies by AI threaten teaching and learning, crypto running rampant…
Deeper into the school finance regime, the new budget bill created foreign entity of concern provisions (FEOC) that were called unworkable by tax experts. And yet there they are in the law: creating grounds for pointing to any entity, like a school district selling a bond, and saying they’re under the influence of a foreign entity. It’s like the crucible at every level.
What’s just as wild is that business as usual continues on. Consumers consume. I find myself going out to dinner, walking around, parenting. Is this how it felt in times past when the social formation becomes monstrous? Adam Tooze, in a lecture last year, said that we’re in one-way traffic towards the unknown and that any theory one might rely upon to understand the situation, including Marxism, is a consolation. He cites the trend on Chinese social media that names our moment “garbage history.” His concept of the polycrisis is that things are so fucked up that we need a new metaphysics to even understand it. ‘Polycrisis’ is just a placeholder for that garbage metaphysics.
Yet there’s a dialectic, if we want to take consolation in there even being dialectics anymore. Yes Zohran won the primary. Yes Superman is apparently anti-genocide. Yes communities are coming out to protect their neighbors from ICE when they can.
But where’s the big resistance? Frankly I’m just as confused as the movements must be. What do you do when a social process, formed out of the roiling magma of forever war, neoliberal ruling class extravagance, global financial crisis, and pandemic shutdown plays out around you?
You can’t vote your way out. You can’t disrupt your way out. You can’t union your way out. You can’t lobby your way out. You can’t rally your way out. We’ve seen these sorts of processes before and they have to unfurl, and it takes decades in some cases, which is overwhelming, but you can’t do nothing.
There appears to be little else to do beyond what you already were up to before this stage of crisis eventuated: keep your nose to the grindstone, don’t get too distracted, track the movements, find the cracks in the concrete and work them, plant seeds, add to and draw from the pools of possibility, experiment, ear to the ground, solidarities. Keep on keeping on, slowly, carefully, towards the brighter horizon, and when the moment of shift comes, make sure you’re ready.