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putting into crisis the Liberalism – or the rise of fascism and the far right – comes with the collapse of global capitalism of the multicultural empire led by the United States. This crisis is giving rise to the restoration of white supremacy and misogyny inseparable from the intensification of predatory structures to sustain life on the planet, leading us at full speed to planetary collapse. Technofeudalism and extractivism are consolidated as the forms of post-pandemic capitalism.
Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis’s term, means that the private and corporate infrastructure that sustains our lives is completely dependent on the servers of Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This keeps us as servants of the digital platforms of the unicorns feudals of Silicon Valley. Extractivism, for its part, is based on intensified forms of extractivism through agroindustry, legal and illegal extraction of oil and natural gas, in the thirst for metals to access platforms. Technofeudalism and extractivism involve making money by destroying human and non-human life by disseminating and normalizing planetary atrocity.
The normalization of the ubiquity of genocide as a structural part of our contemporary dystopia is based on the fact that mass deaths are made invisible because they have been tacitly accepted as a result of the production of capital. This sensitivity presupposes structures of domination and contempt for the female and feminized body, racism and the modern principle that the (white) man has the right to put the human and non-human systems of the planet at his service, through structures based on coloniality. We inhabit a system of expropriation, humiliation and submission of bodies subject to a constant process of dispossession and dispossession. I am going to provisionally call this the self-destructive genocidal episteme or the way of inhabiting the world that makes the structural intersection between capitalism, gender violence and environmental destruction illegible.
This intersection is the origin of destructions of different, but intertwined, qualitative origins: femicidal violence is linked to the ongoing destruction of Palestine and the destruction of the planet. These are processes that impact and form others in a relationship of reciprocal causality. As Andreas Malm says, the destruction of Palestine was announced since 1948 in the Dalet Plan, but unlike 77 years ago, the genocide is unfolding in the scenario of a different, although related, process of destruction: that of the planet’s climate system from the Arctic to Australia. If the Amazon lost its jungle, it would be a different type of the Nakba, the end of the world of some 40 million people.
Malm points out a morphological similarity between the events in Gaza and Derna, for example, the Mediterranean city in Libya less than 100 kilometers from the storm-hit strip. Daniel on September 11, 2023. But we can also talk here about the destruction in the Yucatan Peninsula due to agribusiness or megaprojects or in El Bosque, Tabasco: a community that the sea swallowed in 2020. However, these events remain invisible the moment we get on a plane, drink water from a plastic bottle, do a banking transaction on the phone.
Our optical gaps in the plots of ongoing planetary destruction speak not so much of our lack of perceptual capacity but of the self-destructive condition of contemporary existence linked to our inability to imagine the end of the world, but not the end of capitalism. These optical gaps also have to do with the fact that the frameworks for talking about atrocity fall into two dominant discursive registers: on the one hand, a humanitarianism that evokes compassion, but leaves untouched the frameworks of dispossession, destruction and dispossession. On the other hand, resistance is criminalized; In the case of Palestine, it is hollowed out because it is reduced to an emotional pathology or excluded from the field of political rationality, criminalizing it as a terrorist (here there is evidence of Islamophobia). The struggles for the recognition of rights leave untouched the misogynistic and predatory frameworks of dispossession, destruction and dispossession. And feminist resistance tends to be hollowed out also because we don’t have enough allies. Like the Palestinians, we remain gaslightedour illegible fight.
Resisting atrocity implies conceiving resistance on multiple scales: from the individuated body exposing the horror beneath the skin, conceiving care as the disposition to life. From there, the resistance moves to the immediate environment, to the community, to the territory until it reaches the planetary scale. Living lives oriented to naming, caring, not forgetting, defending like bitches the right to life of human and not human from all over the planet.
* Author of the book The sky is incomplete: Travel notebooks in Palestine
