Extremely Fucking Nigh

- the end, that is, of some things most of us have taken for granted since the 1950s (life, liberty, TV, etc.). What Haitians are experiencing right now is what our children will be facing in the very near future.

No exaggeration. And it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore:

What they don't want you to know about the coming oil crisis
- Jeremy Leggett in the Independent, January 20, 2006

"Before this century is over, billions of us will die... The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate."
- James Lovelock in the Independent, January 16, 2006

Capitalism is at war not just with humanity, but with life per se. Stan Goff borrows a term from Edward Thompson - "exterminism" - to describe the system that is currently ruling the world to death:

The biosphere is collateral damage.

The philosophy of exterminism is après moi, le deluge (“after me, the flood”). This declaration of aristocratic nihilism – allegedly uttered by Louis XV – seems particularly fitting in the wake of the US state’s response to post-Katrina New Orleans. It is – as Jeffrey St. Clair calls it in Grand Theft Pentagon – “capitalism’s last utopia.” Exterminism, in fact, marks a nihilist utopia. This is not a general utopia wrought by capitalism, as it turns out, but a kind of financial-military bacchanalia before the end, which is – as the graffiti said in the biological-apocalypse film, 28 Days Later – “extremely fucking nigh.” This utopia is the utopia of the few, perched in their redoubt, surrounded by the furious unwashed in the final days… an après moi, le deluge variety of utopia in which the rich devour everything then let future generations suffer “the flood.”

"Exterminism and the World in the Wake of Katrina"