green century

The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they’d like to put us to work rebuilding it, and—to add insult to injury—a a profit... And in our bewilderment we’re ready to leap into the arms of the very same ones who presided over the devastation, in the hope that they will get us out of it. ... Ecology isn’t simply the logic of a total economy; it’s the new morality of capital. The system’s internal state of crisis and the rigorous screening that’s underway demand a new criterion in the name of which this screening and selection will be carried out. From one era to the next, the idea of virtue has never been anything but an invention of vice. Without ecology, how could be justify the existence of two different diets, one “healthy and organic” for the rich and their children, and the other notoriously toxic for the plebes, whose offspring are damned to obesity. The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie wouldn’t be able to make its normal lifestyle seem respectable if its latest whims weren’t so scrupulously “respectful of the environment.” Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag every objection to the exorbitant progress of control ... Everything is permitted to a power structure that bases it authority in Nature, in health and well-being. ... The new green asceticism is precise the self-control that is required of us all in order to negotiate a rescue operation where the system has taken itself hostage. –The Invisible Committee, THE COMING INSURRECTION (2009) pp 75-79