But before going on, I want to play with the word "catastrophe" for a bit. And I consider only the past here, not some predicted future. The last two centuries have been a catastrophe and a horror beyond the power of human imagination to grasp; beyond belief had they not actually happened, & as Aristotle pointed out, that something has happened is evidence for its possibility. And prior to these two centuries, there have been almost unimaginable but more limited catastrophes: the mass sucideds by which the population of Hispaniola escaped the brutality of Columbus and his men. The Egyptian gold mines and Spanish silver mines of antiquity. The Black Death. Various periods of intensified oppression and exploitation in peasant societies. But nothing in pror history matched, on a global scale, the catastrophe which humanity has suffered in the last two centuries. (I have seen no estimates of the total death toll but the horror in Africa alone is representative.) To sum up: I assume "catastrophism" (to make sense ) has to be the prediction of or even hope for catastrophes which, if not avoided, will in effect constitute the end of the world for humanity. As Leo Pantitch put it at the RM2013: "The World will not End." It is indeed fatuous and reactionary to attempt to stir up resistance by predicting the inevitable destruction of humanity as a spur to resistance. Panitch continued: There will be sea walls around London & New York to keep the 1% safe and happy. There will be room for further human struggle even if we do not move immediately to bring an end to global warming. We have time to struggle.
But let's be clear. The goal of that struggle must be the global overturning of capitalism. And this is where Doug in his Froward is, I believe, disastrously wrong: " But capital typically finds its way out of crisis." (I won't try to analyze a logical error here: the personification of capitalism.) To begin with, it is not clear that capitalism has ever confronted a crisis in the sense of a serious challenge to the existence of capitalism! (Perhaps we need a book on Crisisism.) An economic crisis (even of the scale of those one or two now labeled "Depression" is not necessarily a Crisis of Capitalism: that is, a crisis that must be resolved for capitalism to continue. In fact, I think that is the most dangerous form of Catastrohism, the belief that economic crisis endangers capitalist hegemony.
Humans shackled by capitalism are not going to be able to resolve the ecological as well as military disasters that are bound to continue indefinitely so long as global capitalism endures. The world is not going to end if we do not stop fairly disastrous climate change. It will not be resolved under capitalism. Our task is to destroy capitalism: to achieve the human freedom, the actual democracy, that will open up the possibility of resolving or finding a decent way to live under climate change.
A struggle against capitalism will of course involve struggle over concrete ecological crimes, such as fracking. But that is another topic. The core of struggle cannot be ecology: it has to be capitalism.
Carrol
But capital typically finds its way out of crisis, otherwise