THE GEO-SOCIAL CLASS STRUGGLE INTENSIFIES

Nikolaj Schultz reports… 

As the ongoing climatic mutations continue to make great swaths of the earth uninhabitable, billions of people are further deprived of the basic conditions necessary for their survival. As a result, the geo-social class struggles for territory are intensifying all across the planet.

The unequal access to prospering earthly, material conditions of existence still proves to be the primary illusive factor of differentiation in todays global society, as well as the main political battlefield for the Green Left.

 Alas, long gone are the days when such political collectives could manifest their ideals around Marxist analyses and its distinctions between “capitalists” and “proletariats” to make sense of society’s main structural conflicts.

The social class struggle of 2132 is no longer economical, but territorial.

 Every day we open The Oracle and other (less noteworthy) newspapers and we see the consequences of human civilisation overstepping the interconnected, systemic planetary boundaries that began to fall apart in the 2020’s.

Tsunamis, drought, rising sea levels, out-of-control-storms were the norm and even now they continue to spur millions of people weekly to hit the intercontinental highways from their climate-ravaged homes.

It is estimated that today, around one third of the world’s population are looking for a new ecological habitat to settle in. The global landless are on the run.

Today, it has become clear to all, that it is no longer the access to “the means of production” which defines the privilege of social groups, but rather access to a wider array of material conditions of existences such as water, air, a stable climate, energy and technology.  

In the meantime, the billionaire escapists are finally beginning to settle on a terraformed Mars, and those of the geo-social elite who have not yet booked their interstellar adventure are still enjoying their earthly privilege in the mythical and heavily guarded New Zealand, still functioning in the antiquated mode as a ‘nation state’.

 If we still wish to pursue a politics of earthly justice, then these are the eco-spatial inequalities that sociologists of today need to continue investigating. Without such descriptions of what power, domination, and social class means in the late-Anthropocene, such collective, political practices will remain impossible.