Schwab, Gates, Rossmann, Elon Musk-when billioniares want to save the world

Schwab, Gates, Rossmann, Elon Musk-when billioniares want to save the world

In the last months some important billioniares made up their mind how to change the global economic and politcal system for a post-Covid world andin order to save the planet and mankind from global warming and climate change. „COVID-19: The Great Reset“ is a guide for anyone who wants to understand how COVID-19 disrupted our social and economic systems, and what changes will be needed to create a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable world going forward. Klaus Schwab, founder and executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret, founder of the Monthly Barometer, explored what they think the root causes of these crisis were, and why they lead to a need for a Great Reset. Theirs is a worrying, yet hopeful analysis. COVID-19 has created a great disruptive reset of our global social, economic, and political systems. But the power of human beings lies in being foresighted and having the ingenuity, at least to a certain extent, to take their destiny into their hands and to plan for a better future. This is the purpose of this book: to shake up and to show the deficiencies which were manifest in our global system, even before COVID broke out.“Erudite, thought-provoking and plausible“ — Hans van Leeuwen, Australian Financial Review (Australia)“The book looks ahead to what the post-coronavirus world could look like barely four months after the outbreak was first declared a pandemic“ — Sam Meredith, CNBC (USA) „The message that the pandemic is not only a crisis of enormous proportions, but that it also provides an opportunity for humanity to reflect on how it can do things differently, is important and merits reflection“– Ricardo Avila, Portafolio (Colombia) „A call for political change in the post-pandemic world“– Ivonne Martinez, La Razon (Mexico)“History has shown, the book argues, that pandemics are a force for radical and lasting change“– Mustafa Alrawi, The National (UAE).

If you believe Schwab or Marc Benioff, politicians like Merkel and Macron are not the world’s problem solvers, but business leaders like himself. „CEOs are the real heroes of 2020,“ said the founder of the software company Salesforce at Video-Davos. The corporate executives had brought in their financial resources, the resources of their companies, their workers and factories and reacted quickly to the crisis – not for their profit, but to save the world, said the tech entrepreneur, whose private assets amounts to nine billion dollars. Benioff is one of the business leaders who are committed to so-called stakeholder capitalism: Companies should be run in such a way that they serve the well-being of customers, employees and the community – the latter is a vague term that would probably be translated too specifically with the German word Gemeinwohl or“common good“ . It signals a departure from the shareholder value doctrine once advocated by US economist Milton Friedman in the 1970s. Friedman said there is only one social responsibility for companies and that is to use resources to increase profits. Unsurprisingly, managers and investors willingly followed Friedman’s dogma for decades. But now a fundamental change is needed, says Klaus Schwab, who started the forerunner of today’s WEF in 1971. He called for a Great Reset. Schwab understands this to mean a rapid joint effort by the world to overtake all aspects of our society and economy. Every country and every industry, from the USA to China, must undergo this renewal. The Covid-19 crisis showed that our old systems no longer fit the 21st century, explained Schwab. The world must convert to the stakeholder principle, explains the 82-year-old in his new book. If this green capitalism with a human face really ever becomes reality or is not just greenwashing empty talk remains to be seen. Till now most CEOs still prefer the shareholder value and maximal profit in the capitalist competition.

After Davos chief Schwab´s new book “The Great Reset”,  Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates wants to slow global warming with the help of new technologies. His new book “How to avoid a climate disaster” he envisions a new futurism that would save the planet and mankind. Naive technical optimism like in the fifties. Did Bill Gates also own a Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory suitcase in his youth and do experiments with real uranium? Technical solutions for societal problems are currently very popular, as can be seen in the Covid-19 pandemic. Tests in schools and in companies are supposed to contain the pandemic in a miraculous way, and where the one app for contact tracing did not help, a second app is supposed to be produced, Luca, which is advertised as innovative. The main thing is that there is no need to think about social changes and capital accumulation can take its course in peace. That Bill Gates is also promoting nuclear power as a green energy source is somewhat surprising – if you don’t know that he is one of the main investors in the nuclear company Terrapower. This is fatally reminiscent of the way global warming is dealt with: even to limit it, people tend to refuse to intervene in the economy to steer it, but rather hope for technical innovations that should fix everything as if by magic.

A typical representative of this attitude is Bill Gates, who in his book „How o avoid a Climate Disastser”“, published in German in February, praises technical progress as a solution to the climate problem. Gates is considered by many, perhaps with the exception of conspiracy believers and advocates of free software, as a good guy among IT billionaires: He is in favor of higher taxation of the rich and, with his soon-to-be ex-wife, founded the Bill  Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world , runs projects on global health, poverty reduction and the promotion of education. Of course, an entrepreneur like Gates cannot be expected to prefer eco-communism, but the problem of climate change is too urgent to postpone its solution until after the world revolution. Instead, pragmatic interim solutions have to be found, and the Microsoft billionaire does seems to offer them too tightly: page by page he spreads figures and presents possible measures to achieve that global CO2-neutral management which shall be achieved by 2050. But the vaunted solutions are not as promising and unproblematic as Gates suggests.

The future lies in “green” electricity not only for Gates. Despite the reluctance of German car companies, the trend is already moving towards electric mobility in road traffic. Other areas could be added, for example the steel industry, which with its coal-fired blast furnaces is currently responsible for around eight percent of German CO2 emissions. When it comes to climate-friendly electricity, most people think of wind and solar energy, which, at least in theory, could cover more than double the current German electricity demand. However, the weather is a capricious diva: In order to cope with lulls on the one hand and power peaks on the other, you need efficient storage technology and a „smart network“ in which the energy is used precisely when it is in abundance. Both are being worked on, but major breakthroughs are still a long way off. Geothermal and hydropower are more reliable. But these technologies could only cover just under 30 of the more than 500 terawatt hours currently consumed annually in Germany. In order to use natural geothermal energy – unless you live in an area like Iceland with its volcanic underfloor heating – you have to drill deep into the earth and pump water or other heat transfer media into the rock, which can annoyingly trigger earthquakes. Hydrogen is particularly popular in Germany, perhaps because it sounds so futuristic. Hydrogen cells could power cars, trucks, and even trains; when the hydrogen is burned, no CO2 is produced, but water. But this great advantage comes at the cost of all sorts of disadvantages: hydrogen, usually in gaseous form, first has to be liquefied under high pressure or at low temperatures and is then transported in bulky special tanks. In addition, the substance is highly explosive, as you can easily understand with the relevant oxyhydrogen experiment from chemistry class.

The production is not only complicated, but also energy-intensive. New storage methods, in which the hydrogen is bound to a liquid carrier substance in order to transport it more easily, also require a lot of energy. If hydrogen is to serve as an environmentally friendly fuel, this energy would have to come from solar, wind or hydropower plants. However, hydrogen could at least be used as a storage medium for the aforementioned current peaks

Gate´s “new” alternative: Small Modular Reactor(SMR) and nuclear power. The fact that Gates is also promoting nuclear power as a green energy source is somewhat surprising – if you don’t know that he is one of the main investors in the nuclear company Terrapower, which works on small reactors, among other things. Gates wants to see this not only on the power grid, but also as a propulsion system for container ships. In terms of carbon footprint, nuclear energy doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Nevertheless, climate researchers such as the chairman of the German Climate Consortium (DKK), Mojib Latif, and Volker Quaschning, co-founder of the Scientists for Future Initiative, are not enthusiastic about it.

On the one hand there is the unsolved – and presumably unsolvable – problem of how nuclear waste can be safely stored, and on the other hand the so-called residual risk, which we learned about in Chernobyl and Fukushima. In addition, nuclear reactors of any size are ideal for breeding plutonium for atomic bombs. There is still hope for nuclear fusion, in which atoms are not split but rather fused. This creates radioactive waste, but within a manageable range. Also, the power plant cannot smelt like a conventional reactor, because the fusion comes to a standstill immediately if something goes wrong. There is one problem, however, and that is feasibility. When research into this technology began in the 1950s, commercial use was expected in 30 to 50 years. It is still like that today. In professional circles this is ironically called the fusion constant.

Given these uncertainties, it is reassuring that there would be ways to reduce CO2 emissions even without breakthrough technology. But here, too, Gates thinks too short – true to his motto »Continue as usual, but in green«. This can be seen in the question of traffic: after pages of discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of electric cars and agro-fuel, there is only room for a dry paragraph about the possibility of getting around on foot or by bike. The author has apparently never heard of public transport at all. It seems that in many places the so-called traffic turnaround, which is supposed to minimize dependency on the car, and even the new US Secretary of Transport Pete Buttigieg wants to invest in the expansion of long-distance trains in order to wean US citizens from the carbon dioxide-laden domestic flights, seems to have long been underwayand  not having arrived in Gate´s mind yet.

 In other areas, too, there are pragmatic ways of doing business with less energy consumption. Companies often do not like these, but one does not have to abolish capitalism in order to introduce them. For example, the Federal Ministry of Justice is working on a law that will extend the warranty for electrical appliances and stipulate an obligation for companies to provide software updates to products such as smartphones and tablets for longer than usual. Such regulations could force companies to make more durable products. Despite such projects and the technical possibilities that Gates raves about, today’s climate policy gives little cause for optimism. The technologies for emission-free energy generation are either not sufficiently promoted, like wind energy, are in their infancy or, see nuclear fusion, are not even within reach. More than four fifths of the world’s energy needs are still met by fossil fuels. And the hunger for energy, which only fell briefly last year due to the pandemic, continues to grow.

In addition, we live in an economic system with an inherent pressure to grow. In addition to green innovations, it also permanently produces innovations that are even more harmful to the climate. One example of this is Bitcoin, the energy-guzzling cryptocurrency, which is particularly popular in IT circles and which, according to calculations by the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance, consumes 0.57 percent of global energy production – more than Sweden. Gates ’billionaire colleague, Tesla Chairman Elon Musk, is one of the most famous Bitcoin sponsors and is not known for wanting to make the world a better place – electric cars or not. Apparently he is already planning the uninhabitability of the earth. „The day could come when some plants and animals die out on earth but continue to live on Mars,“ he tweeted recently. Musk wants to establish a Martian colony with a million residents by 2050. He offers jobs to people who cannot afford the trip to work off their debts. Even Bill Gates‘ mini nuclear power plant in the front yard appears to be the lesser evil.

The title of German billioniare Dirk Rossmann´s book “The Ninth Arms of the Octopus” makes you wonder. Why does an octopus have nine arms? In „octopus“ there is „eight“ as in the „octohedron“ with its eight surfaces or in „October“, the eighth month of the ancient Roman calendar. The ninth arm of the octopus symbolizes a miracle. We readers should believe in such a thing. That’s difficult because we’re told a political fairy tale. The Chinese Xi, the Russian Putin and the American Harris have teamed up under the G3 logo to save the world from the ecological catastrophe. A word in which considerations convinced the Big Three that it was a WIN-WIN-WIN situation. Perhaps you have read everything that is offered in the book as an abundant collection of material on climate protection before the action really starts.

Dirk Rossmann, who is honestly about saving the climate, does it like Alexandre Dumas the elder and employs anonymous wage clerks. Financially, that shouldn’t be a problem, because the first self-service drugstore he founded in 1972 resulted in the flourishing ROSSMANN group of companies with over 4,000 branches in Germany and seven foreign companies. However, he does not have 300 volumes in his sights like the French, but initially only this one book. Incidentally, Dumas was forgotten when he died, but that doesn’t have to be repeated. In addition, fame beckons. Will this octopus one day be mentioned in the same breath as the Count of Monte Christo and the musketeers? Rather not. The authors who come into play are masters of their craft. The plot rises from the pile of facts like a phoenix from the ashes. Because the eco-alliance takes a tough approach, it makes enemies of all those who want to continue to earn money from deadly overexploitation.

At the forefront is the Brazilian President Batista – one wonders, of course, why a name that has been used up by the history of Cuba is used. Batista is an ecological criminal like the current ruler of Brazil, but that doesn’t create any tension. The thrill in the thriller comes from people who betray their governments and thereby promote the end of the world. These are the Russian Marshal Bykov and the Chinese technocrat Dr. Yuan Zhiming, who only half trust each other and still work together on dangerous disinformation in Brazil. With Brecht’s reading worker one asks oneself whether they have no renegade American at their side. But no, there are obviously only such bad fingers in Russia and China.

There is also a balcony scene in Brazil. Unlike the one in Romeo and Juliet, it is not only unromantic, but also extremely unbelievable. Two experts from the Chinese secret service shared everything they knew about machinations against their host country on a exposed balcony. Afterwards they are wondering where the cook went. He understands Chinese and stands around the corner, listening. This is lower level than in the TV soaps and telenovellas, where explosive conversations are constantly being overheard by third parties at the half-open window or behind the bush. The  cook´s name is Ricardo and he has to fear for his life when he tries to put the information he has heard into the right place.  An female philantrophic major from the Brazilian secret service ensures a happy ending and shoots in time when a karate kick tries to kill her. By this she saves herself, Ricardo and the world „

Shaking people up“ – that’s what German entrepreneur and billionaire Dirk Rossmann wants with his debut novel „The Ninth Arm of the Octopus“. And voilà: his eco-thriller is already a selfpromoted bestseller. But also: a crude horror vision full of anti-liberal fantasies. The ending, to begin with, stunned. Dirk Rossmann himself appears there, in his own novel, and introduces himself to us as a „frequent reader“. But wait, that’s fiction! Just like the scene in the so-called end, in which Dirk Rossmann is present in an unspecified year at the side of his real friend and old buddy and fellow Gerhard Schröder at the solemn ceremony in which Vladimir Putin and the Chinese head of state Xi Jinping are present and American President Kamala Harris is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Because this „triumvirate“ – China, Russia and the United States – will lead the world in the near future and save it from climate collapse. With the use of military force. State violence against eco-terror At least that is what the „company owner“ Dirk Rossmann thought of in „The Ninth Arm of the Octopus“. Of course, he and his team of a good dozen researchers did not consider that the Nobel Peace Prize would not be awarded in Stockholm, but in Oslo. But that is almost irrelevant in view of the absurdity of awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to a „super alliance“ that takes the „ecological campaign“ against climate sinners literally and therefore positions its aircraft carriers, submarines and destroyers off the coast of Brazil brings, because the so-called „rainforest question“ can no longer be resolved otherwise and the destruction of the unique biotope by Brazilian „climate terrorists“ can only be prevented through the use of weapons. Which brings us to the central and all too rhetorical question of this ostensible „climate thriller“, which the narrator on page 248 expresses in thankful frankness: „And the climate catastrophe didn’t have to be stopped by all means, even if the means were brutal and were dictatorial? “ Yes, that’s the way it is, and so this piece of work, which lacks any plausibility and in which the USA operates as an „nervous democracy“, revolves around the thought of whether the „eco-dictatorship“ might not be the better option being confronted with all the lack of insight into the economy of its citizens and their climate-damaging behavior. Or: whether a „world government“ with far-reaching powers, if not a just war, then perhaps a climate-friendly war – the one that will save us from ruin?

I myself once wrote a blueprint draft for such a illiberal ecodictatorship scenario with the workimg title “Ecocaust: The New Green world order”, even a liitle bit more radical.

Ecofiction: Ecocaust-The New Green World Order

28. Januar 2020 Ralf Ostner


Published on April 23, 2019 by Ralf Ostner

I started writing an eco-fiction: “Ecocaust-The New Green World Order”. Rough story plot:

The ecological movement is radicalizing. Reformist forces such as Habeck and Baerbroeck, Green Peace and Extinction Rebellion are replaced by radical fundamentalist ecofanatics, the revolution literally eats its children, including Greta and the braver part of the pupils. Two new totalitarian factions are emerging within the revolutionary ecological movement: the Green Khmer- a nationalist-self-sufficient movement that sees its role model in Pol Pot’s agricultural communism, the irrigation system and the ecological communes of the Angkor Empire (Wittfogel: hydraulic model) and spreads a natural religion that encompasses a cult of natural elements, a water, wind and sun cult. We pray to the power of the sun and water, the elements! On the other hand, an eco-imperialist, internationalist faction that starts the ecological war against China’s growth dictatorship and the New Silk Road by means of an eco-NATO and bombards anti-environmental infrastructures, as well as tries to counteract the population explosion through mass massacres and wants to promote and push an international green world revolution ala, Trotsky. An era of ecological liberation wars.

Ultimately, the eco-fiction focuses on the question of the extent to which human dignity / human rights/democracy and reduction of CO2 / consumption/population controll go hand in hand. If this can be organized democratically or if an ecodictatorship is required, as could be required the case, if the measures taken so far should not work. However, I am a little worried that ecologists see people only as CO2 emitters, as disruptive factors and environmental destroyers, recyclable worthless biomass and no longer as human beings. This sounds like unworthy life. The new book by the ecofeminist, who claims that having no children is a contribution to climate protection also goes in this direction.

There are no human solutions, neither for the individual nor for world society – the worst is to be feared, therefore “Ecocaust”! The New Green World Order saves the planet through human mass destruction! We can only hope that eco-fiction remains fiction and that humanity finds more constructive and humane solutions.

Here is a sample:

The New Green World Order

After the green revolution won in the United States, parts of Europe and India, its leader and chief coordinator Green Steve emerged from the underground. Green Steve was a young i-Gen hacker who had lived in California for a long time and had close relations to Silicon Valley, had been involved in social media, algorithms and the California ideology that was technologically esoteric and futuristic. Green Steve had also had contact with old hippies who had turned to futurism, who were also representatives of an ecologism a la Club of Rome, but believed in a democratic reform and not a revolutionary overturn including ecodictatorship, and were already a fan of the possibilities of the Internet and its revolutionary potential, which he wanted to use for an ecological revolution against the growth-oriented establishment of the industrialized countries. As a awakening experience, he had read John Perry Barlow`s speech, a cyber guru who had already given a kind of awakening sermon for the Internet at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1996:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.“

Announced by John Perry Barlow in front of the World Economic Forum in Davos on February 8, 1996. According to the tone, the above sentences could have come from an awakening sermon, but in fact, they were aimed at a gathering of business leaders and politicians. With his biography, author John Perry Barlow stood for the continuity of two California movements that at first glance seem to have little in common: the hippies of the 70s and the cyber enthusiasts of the 90s. Barlow, who wrote songs for Grateful Dead at the time and was now considered one of the gurus of cyberspace, was not alone:

Kevin Kelly, the former editor of the alternative scene sheet “CoEvolution Quarterly” (or “Whole Earth Review”) and editor-in-chief of “Wired”, a kind of “Vogue” for Cyberschickeria, also stood for it and LSD apostle Timothy Leary also stood for it. But among the cyber enthusiasts are George Keyworth, who became with his protégé Edward Teller technological and scientific adviser of US president Reagan, and George Gilder, chair of multi-supervisory board of multinational companies and thought leader of the Republican right. Green Steve was strongly influenced by these circles and therefore saw the need above all to organize the Internet with social media and a mass movement that consisted of cyber activists and hackers like the Green Hats he founded, but also analog street demonstrators like his Green Guard. The Green Hats tried to paralyze the state power with cyberwar, conquer the digital space, give the Green Guards a thrust towards the mass protests and also control the analog space.

Green Steve saw both the need to connect the digital revolution with the analog revolution, and did not see them as contradictory pairs, but as mutually dependent and interacting forms of a revolution. One can´t exist without the other. In addition, he loathed pacifism and liberalism of the hippies’ previous ecological movement, especially the pupil demonstrations, who had already had doubts about skipping school or, like Extinction Rebellion, only relying on civil disobedience and sit-ins, which he also advocated, but he did not rule out the use of violence, even saw it as the best way and even found it to be the logical mean of all, and had also equipped the leadership of his Green Guard with militant animal and environmentalists, especially since he no longer relied on Habermas or Karl Popper’s democratic consensus and manageable discourse or believed in free will, but in the sheer factual power of coercion and sanctions, just an eco-dictatorship.

Unlike his predecessors, he also did not trust the spontaneous self-organizing forces of the masses. but had founded a cadre organization ala Lenin’s “What to do?” which gave the network-like and spontaneous mass movements a revolutionary, targeted impetus and power, which now led to the overthrow of the established state powers in the USA, parts of Europe and India. Neo-totalitarian China, on the other hand, remained unaffected by the ecological revolution and the “internet sovereignty” operated by Xi Jinping, including internet censorship and control, as well as the social bonus system, had prevented an ecological revolution in China. In addition, from Steve Green’s point of view, China was the most extreme example of an economic growth dictatorship, which with the New Silk Road would now also completely disrupt the ecological balance of the planet. In authoritarian Russia, the scope for an ecological revolution had also been reduced by tighter control and the establishment of a Russian Internet, although he was still undecided whether a green overthrow might be possible here.

Green Steve no longer believed in nation states and the existing capitalist economy of globalization, which competed with each other, nor in the previous population policy. The goal had to be a green world state that guaranteed everyone an ecologically compatible subsistence level and rationed the resources. To do this, population growth and quantitative economic growth would have to be reduced. Green Steve was not a proponent of the idea of ​​a completely de-industrialized world society, even a proponent of renewable energies and growth, insofar as this saves resources, increases energy efficiency, and his idea was based more on the use of a supercomputer network, which using ecological data and science using algorithms and algorithms were able to determine an acceptable balance between population and consumption and knew how to organize the distribution.

His ideas were in accordance with the accelerationists who had the cybernetic use of computers under the Chilean socialist president Salvadore Allende for managing the macroeconomy as a role model in their mind. The accelerationist wrote in the “Manifesto for Accerlationism”:

5. It is Marx, along with Land, who remains the paradigmatic accelerationist thinker. Contrary to the all-too familiar critique, and even the behaviour of some contemporary Marxians, we must remember that Marx himself used the most advanced theoretical tools and empirical data available in an attempt to fully understand and transform his world. He was not a thinker who resisted modernity, but rather one who sought to analyse and intervene within it, understanding that for all its exploitation and corruption, capitalism remained the most advanced economic system to date. Its gains were not to be reversed, but accelerated beyond the constraints the capitalist value form.

6. Indeed, as even Lenin wrote in the 1918 text “Left Wing” Childishness:

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries).

7. As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration. Similarly, the assessment of left politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration is also, at least in part, a severe misrepresentation. Indeed, if the political left is to have a future it must be one in which it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency.

03. MANIFEST: On the Future

1. We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.

2. All of us want to work less. It is an intriguing question as to why it was that the world’s leading economist of the post-war era believed that an enlightened capitalism inevitably progressed towards a radical reduction of working hours. In The Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren (written in 1930), Keynes forecast a capitalist future where individuals would have their work reduced to three hours a day. What has instead occurred is the progressive elimination of the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the emerging social factory.

3. Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least, direct them towards needlessly narrow ends. Patent wars and idea monopolisation are contemporary phenomena that point to both capital’s need to move beyond competition, and capital’s increasingly retrograde approach to technology. The properly accelerative gains of neoliberalism have not led to less work or less stress. And rather than a world of space travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations of the same basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration.

4. We do not want to return to Fordism. There can be no return to Fordism. The capitalist “golden era” was premised on the production paradigm of the orderly factory environment, where (male) workers received security and a basic standard of living in return for a lifetime of stultifying boredom and social repression. Such a system relied upon an international hierarchy of colonies, empires, and an underdeveloped periphery; a national hierarchy of racism and sexism; and a rigid family hierarchy of female subjugation. For all the nostalgia many may feel, this regime is both undesirable and practically impossible to return to.

5. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.

Any transformation of society must involve economic and social experimentation. The Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental attitude — fusing advanced cybernetic technologies, with sophisticated economic modelling, and a democratic platform instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself. Similar experiments were conducted in 1950s–1960s Soviet economics as well, employing cybernetics and linear programming in an attempt to overcome the new problems faced by the first communist economy. That both of these were ultimately unsuccessful can be traced to the political and technological constraints these early cyberneticians operated under.“

In this idea, Green Steve agreed with the accelerationists who had the use of computers under the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, to plan the national economy as a model. Green Steve did not reject the use of computers, even had the vision of a green world state, which was modeled on the social bonus system in China. He also considered whether people’s lifetimes should not be awarded and based on ecological and health bonuses and should accordingly be limited. He was aware of the conflict of interests between population and consumption, but conversely he knew that stopping the population explosion or reducing the population was a necessity, even with lower consumption. He valued Malthus very much because he was wrong at his time, but not in relation to the present and the future.

From Green Steve’s point of view, it was clear that the population explosion should be a top priority, since humanity could grow from the current 7 billion people to the predicted 12 billion between 2030 and 2050, provided there is no trend for reversal. The only question is how to solve it. China’s one-child policy may have served as a role model for some, but China, like western industrialized countries, has struggled with the problem of aging and pension systems because it would have better followed a two-child policy that produces the reproductive rate. Basically, there were 3 options: Cut humanitarian aid, let people starve and die of epidemics, and even deliberately destroy people who are not ecologically sensible, which contradicted the previous humanitarian claim and ideal of the West, but in which Green Steve was not interested in, since the ecological balance did not allow the proportionality of the means, but the purpose justified all means ..

Or you can rely on more education for women, contraception, economic development and industrialization, which will lower the birth rates, as was the case in Western industrialized countries, and Marx and Engels describe this secular trend from large to small to patchwork families and single households well with the development of the productive forces (see also Engels: On the Origin of the Family). South Korea followed this path, was still poor in the 1950s, had overpopulation like Egypt today, but gradually reduced it through industrialization, education of women and support for small families. China’s New Silk Road was a mega-project of economic development for disadvantaged and underdeveloped countries, which also hopes to contain the population explosion by economic development. The only problem was the consumption of resources in order to achieve equivalent living standards. And this is exactly where Green Steve and the ecological revolutionaries became the decisive enemy of China’s New Silk Road, as well as China’s growth dictatorship, which was supposed to replace by n ecodictatorship by all means.

Restrictive birth control must also be enforced against religious and archaic male macho images. The ideology that many children define the real man and bring wealth into retirement should be counteracted. It was gratifying that at least Pope Francis declared, despite the Christian “multiply and subdue the earth”: “Catholicism does not mean to multiply like the Carnicles”. It would be hoped that representatives of other religions, especially Islam, who evangelical free churches and various macho politicians who are exploding like this, but this was rather unlikely.

Green Steve therefore advocated creating a green world state, a New Green World Order by spreading the green revolution to the growth dictatorship of China, Russia and other ecologically harmful states, be it by means of a revolution, sanctions or ecological wars of liberation. First of all, the revolution had to spread, then the details had to be clarified.

In addition, the previous religions would have to be replaced by a world-unifying nature religion, which replaced God with the power of the sun, wind and water, natural elements and to reorient the education system in such a way that the ecological footprint became a moral imperative for all world citizens for a life in harmony with nature and the cosmos. In addition, the view that man was the crown of creation or a special creature in evolution should be replaced by an ecological science and religion, which should portray men as recyclable biological mass, above all as an environmental destroyer, a coincidental product, without which nature could also continue to exist and one should also teach more cosmology and astrophysics in order to clarify the nullity of human existence in the cosmos as pure dust in space. Green Steve thought of establishing prayer and cult sites at solar power plants, water systems and wind turbines, as well as old places of worship that the natural forces had worshiped and held ritual sacrificial ceremonies: We pray for the power of the sun, water, wind and all natural forces.

Green Steve wiped away the criticism that his ideas were dictatorial and deeply inhumane, arguing that the coming climate catastrophe would cost more lives, would irreversibly destroy the planet and the natural foundations of life, one would no longer passively wait and moderate symptoms and try to repair the system, but that only a radical system change worldwide and the establishment of a green world state would solve the threat to human existence in the long term. The time of the old elites was over, the liberal chatter and democratic chatter, as well as the peaceful protests, had brought nothing – no more talk, it was time to act. What is needed is not people of the word, but people of the deed. Radical living conditions and threats to existence needed radical solutions. Tabula rasa.

The power of reactionary and restorative growth ideologists and forces had to be suppressed and broken, be it by force or war. The workers in the carbon-contaminated industries, the coal workers, automobile workers, oil workers and the old industries behind them, and their lobby groups that Trump and other forces had courted, had to be smashed. On the one hand by means of the Green hats, which were based on the Black hats and were better organized than any chaos computer club. They should digitally paralyze state power through cyberattacks and render them incapable of action, create chaos and blackouts, spread information and disinformation, inflate social networks with bots, prepare the hummus for revolutions, especially since climate change as well as politics and the contradictions of the old elites laid the foundations for it anyway and were the real breeding ground. Green Steve knew that with every extreme weather event due to climate change, the mood would radicalize even more, with every drought summer the mood would heat up and every flood would wash new followers into his movement. Global warming would make the call for radical measures and law enforcement louder, but also reactionary and restorative counterforces could be organized.

For the analog struggle, Green Steve had organized the Green Guards, which were supposed to bring about a cultural revolution and analog revolution based on the example of the Red Guards Mao and which were based on the youth cult and madness of secular society. Away with the archaic relics and reactionary forces of the past, youth for the future. The Green Guards held mass gatherings at which climate offenders and environmental criminals were publicly held accountable. Green Hague wanted to convert The Hague into an international tribunal and a green People’s Court and Judgment Day against the old growth elites, who would then be charged with crimes against the natural foundations of humanity and ecocide and ecocaust.

Furthermore, Green Steve had also ensured that there were green cells in the security apparatus of the police and military, which were to persuade the state monopoly on violence to do nothing or desert in an emergency. Defense degradation, especially since parts of the security apparatus liked the authoritarian thoughts and structures, and the military itself had written studies on peak oil and climate change as a security risk, which also played a key role in dealing with energy and environmental crises such as rising sea levels and the like assigned to civil protection. This is where Green Steve started to find comrades-in-arms and ensnared young officers and soldiers in the ranks of the security apparatus. Green Steve saw in the military not only an upcoming power support and environmental protection organization but also his foreign policy instrument for waging global ecological liberation wars. He envisioned an eco-NATO that would then wage ecological wars against growth dictatorships and mass extermination campaigns against the population explosion.

The nationalist-self-sufficient Green World Order, the Green Khmer and Green Saloth Sar

Green Saloth Sar was a former member of the ecological movement and Attac. Like Green Steve, he did not believe in reforms, liberalism and civil disobedience, but was in favor of a revolution by all means, including violence, and had built his Green Khmer for this. Like Green Steve, he believed in an ecological dictatorship. Unlike Green Steve, he believed that you had to start a green revolution in nations, in local and national communities, not in a green world revolution. While Green Steve was neither for a massive de-industrialization nor an enemy of modern technology, Green Saloth Sar was for a massive de-industrialization, the depopulation of rural cities, for physically healthy work, he wanted to bring the decadent modern urban people again in contact with nature, its harmony and beauty instead of modern technology, wanted to build agricultural communities based on irrigation systems like the ancient Cambodian empire of Angkor Wat and like Green Steve promoted a natural religion that worshiped the elements of nature, the water, the sun , the wind. Green Saloth Sar had read a lot about Wittfogel and his theory of hydraulic societies and empires and thought that this was a good thing and that Pol Pot had failed because he was too dogmatic. The urban people had to get used to the new necessities and the environment of the rural area to live in a re-education and transformation phase and one should not kill them because they were academics who wear glasses. Like Pol Pot and Mao Zedong, he believed in the mass line and in the will of people who could free themselves from the decadent chains of urban life and create a new dynamic when they rediscovered real natural life. Some criticized Green Saloth Sar for his volunteerism, but for him these critics underestimated the productive power of free people and their will to create something new when they were liberated and where there is a will, there is a way. Unlike the atheistic secular Pol Pot and Mao, and in agreement with Green Steve, he believed that such agricultural communities should have a religion of nature that unites and inspires them, giving them real spiritual strength and energy, and bringing them in harmony with nature . While Green Steve was a supporter of futuristic ideas from Silicon Valley, Green Saloth Sar was a friend of Rousseau and his idea of ​​the natural-born “noble savage”, a species that lives by nature and is not affected not by decadent, corrupt, anti-moral and modern urban -urban life. He was a friend of Rousseau like Pol Pot during his time in Paris and also a friend of postmodernity, while Green Steve more of the futuristic-modern urban Silicon Valley, the ideas of John Barry Barlow and his followers and the anti-postmodernism of the accelerationists who wanted to build a post-capitalist society by the acceleration of modern technology and the cybernetic management of a world society. But Green Saloth Sar was just the opposite: bringing humanity back to its roots and in harmony with nature and ultimately liberating it. Do not wait until a world revolution occurs, but simply start with the green revolution at local or national level to be a role model. They had to build local cells that would spread across the planet or would be sustainable and self-sufficient if others did not. Everything else would follow.

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