Ware's book is an attempt to grapple with how we understand extinction philosophically and the limitations of what he calls "progressive liberalism". In other words the book is a critique of how we think about the end of the world and what we imagine can be constructed instead. I will admit that I approached the book with some trepidation - I am not someone for whom philosophy comes naturally. That said Ware's book was accessible, stimulating and I was carried along by his easy prose.
At the heart of the book are two related discussions. The first is the aforementioned inability of liberal political thought to construct an alternative to capitalism that can avoid catastrophe even in the imaginations of the liberals. The second is the concept of revolution. Revolution is an essential alternative to capitalism's logic of accumulation ("moses and the prophets", says Marx). It is capitalism that is dragging us under, but it is also the only framework most people have - witness a host of books written by well meaning academics and writers anxious about the future, but ideologically unable to imagine anything different.
Ware says that in 1921, the Marxist Waltar Bejamin described "capitalism as a demonic cult, 'perhaps the most extreme that ever existed'." Capitalism is, for Benjamin, a celebratory cult where there is no break, no holiday, every day "demands the utter fealty of its worshippers". Ware contines:
In the first instance, the demonic figures as a kind of bad infinite: it is surplus-producing activity without cessation - activity that threatens the complete destruction of human existence... a crucial second sense... [capitalism] establishes guilt/debt as the organizing principle of social relations."
The second demonic sense Benjamin explains is that this guilt/debt causes the "exapansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world." What does guilt/debt/despair mean in this context?
Our guilt/debt is part of the compulsion to behave in a particular way. To spend, to work, to obey. And in doing so we acccept we will live in a system of exploitation and oppression, war and homelessness, poverty amid plenty. But for the capitalist it might refer to the compulsion they experience to endlessly accumulate due to the competition inherent in the system. We have seemingly no choice but to sell our labour, and buy their commodities. They have to behave in a particular way too. Ware analyses this through a brief study of the popular series Squid Game (which I haven't seen). The winner of that (imaginery) game carries with them, the "guilt-burden" of everyone else's failure. Or, "their new-found wealth remaining permanently indebted to a system of suffering, exploitation, and sadistic enjoyment". That at least is not fiction.
Ware concludes however by saying that "we might say that the only thing one is certain of under capitalism is one's guilt... but this then creates an issue that Benjamin does not exxplore... how to deal with accumulated guilt."
Ware points out that for Marx the vampire of capitalism sucks the life blood from the worker, it is a "mechanical monster" whose "demonic power", "drains the life-energy from the body of every man, woman and child". But crucially for Marx the worker is also the "active agent of political change, the potential motor of world history". For Marx this potential for revolutionary transformation is the hope. But for many revolution is not about fundamental change, it is about internal change.
Ware looks at this through a discussion of Kant. Ware says:
For Kant, one becomes morally a 'good' person onky through a 'revolution' in one's 'disposition';, through a kind of 'rebirth' or 'new creation'... political enlightenment, but contrast, can only be achieved 'slowly', by a gradualist movement from worse to better... In relation to the French experiment, what matters is not the revolution itself but instead the way in which it allows enthusiastic spectators to extract moral and aesthetic capital form it. What Kant thus appears to want is revolution without Revolution.
Here I think Ware nails things exactly in relation to contemporary politics:
What we encounter here then... is a version of torday's 'progressive' left liberalism: a politics that is bringin with enthusiasm when it comes to 'looking at' the burning issues of the day - ecological devastation, accelerating inequality, the threat of nuclear war - but which... has not the slightest intention of activiely participationg in anything that would change the political and economimc conditions from which these problems emerge.
Think of all those failed COP meetings, the heart-searching articles and books by the likes of Bill Gates, or countless academics, whose hope is to reinvent capitalism or defang it to make it all nicer. The alternative has to be revolutionary. Here Ware returns to despair, but this time reconstructed as a potential force to encourage change:
By opening outselves uip to the force of despair, we arrive (potentially at least) at a properly political truth: the problems we confront cannot be resolved within the existing framework, and so it is the framework itself that must be transformed.
Its a powerful conclusion and reminds us of the power of philosophy. Ware's book is a polemic, but it is not one that I expected - it left me enthused and stimulated, and enlightened (in the best sense). But it is also encouraging that at least in Ware's response to extinction the working class, as a class, is at the heart of his answer. On Extinction covers a lot of ground in its 150 pages. Ware touches on a host of philosophers and thinkers, and many cultural milestones (some of which are quite obscure). Nonetheless this is a stimulating book that will provoke plenty of debate, argument and inspiration too.
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