WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE -(en) France, OCL CA #350 - Editorial: Capitalism is the planet plus electricity. (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Since its formidable first industrial revolution, capitalism has relied

on the extraction, transformation, and widespread use of so-called
fossil remains. Present everywhere beneath the Earth's surface-including
at the bottom of the sea-their exploitation has contributed to the
endless development-or so it was believed-of its energy applications.
One of these has coevolved with the ever-increasing demand for
automobiles. Since hydrocarbons became abnormally dirty in just a few
decades, capital had to adapt: continue to explore and sell
(expensively!) fossil fuels and put researchers and developers to work
to give energy-intensive industrial sectors a green makeover. The
miracle solution will be super-decarbonized: electrifying cars, thus
mass-producing batteries, battery after battery, battery after battery.
The corollary is the loss of jobs, from sustainable regional development
to a center of excellence.

The collateral damage is that we'll have to continue shamelessly
rummaging through the Earth's crust to find "rare earths" at any human
cost and under any conditions, and tinkering with all this in smoking
factories. The end result is always the same: to be competitive, to
profit from a greenwashing perceived by the bourgeois bohemians as as
non-dystopian as possible. The unremarkable northern region, once
populated by polluting "blackfaces," is poised to bring about the
economic, social, and environmental miracle that the ruling bourgeoisie
has unashamedly made a priority, thanks to the good-natured acquiescence
of its new-look industrialists.

The hope of industrial, economic, and ecological reconstruction that
capital dangles before it barely masks the intentions of a profitable
new turnaround. The greenwashing veneer will quickly crack under the
gigawatts of superbatteries. As for the conditions of their production,
they will be just as good as those of Revolution 1.0. Because the
infrastructure, the labor pool, the geographical location, and the chain
of hubs essential to the operation at the national level are all
available in Hauts-de-France. The management of the battery industry for
electric cars will therefore establish itself as PSA did in
Aulnay-sous-Bois in the 1970s for gasoline cars: "a company arrives, it
structures the territory to meet its needs, it exhausts the resources
and finally it leaves elsewhere to find better profitability. The region
is then left in the lurch, drained, devastated." These words come from
an interview with members of the Mega Bits Per Second (MBPS)
association, authors of the documentary film "We are not our parents."
This film retraces the struggles of PSA employees through those who
experienced them; a mirroring of the strikes of 1982, the first, and
that of 2013, the last. The stories of the mine and its mining villages
in Pas-de-Calais, or of the Fives-Cail-Babcock factory (where
locomotives, bridges, steel frames, and tunnel boring machines were
manufactured) and its adjoining brick neighborhood where the families of
5,000 workers lived in Lille, are no different.

France Travail, the latest incarnation of the Pôle Emploi (Employment
Center), has undertaken a serious cleanup. The unproductiveness of its
"clients" turns them into parasites receiving minimum social benefits...
and it's up to the employees to do the dirty work. Resistance and
solidarity are being organized, but establishing a real balance of power
in the face of a public machinery that is in the process of privatizing
its workforce and over-controlling its unemployed is no easy task...

The fight against war is more than necessary in these dark and foggy
times. War and its lucrative trade in traditional demolition equipment,
from King Ubu's "face knife" to the tech and AI of the guaranteed
"green" and surgical electro-cybernetic industry. This same artificial
intelligence, infiltrating every nook and cranny, replaces or
disintegrates entire sections of our private and work lives. Tasks are
made so easy that it's the worker who assists the robot. The fight
against algorithmic totalitarianism is all the more difficult to wage
because its potential harm is unconscious, even consented to. Likewise,
the anti-nuclear struggle-civilian and military being Siamese
twins-persists and takes on its full meaning in these times of latent or
actual war.

Another lasting struggle is that against the privatization of water,
whose opponents, savagely repressed in Sainte-Soline, are paying dearly
physically and psychologically for their refusal to allow megabasins.
"Commemorations" were held for the "2 years of Sainte-Soline", of which
CA presents a report.

On a global scale, a look back at the situation in the Comoros helps
lift the thick veil that has fallen over the archipelago's realities.
The essence of Gamal Oya's article is based on a controlled confusion on
the part of the state and the media between Mayotte and the chain of
islands of which it is a part.
Here again, hypocrisy and deliberate attacks on the population are the
rule. The state's desire to equate them based on their institutional
rather than cultural origins is worth all the ghettoizations, in the
historical sense, organized in Europe. Any excuse is valid: catastrophe,
ecology, water detention... In the same vein, traditional colonial
reflexes are at work. At the same time, the state and its proxies take
advantage of cyclones to abandon, marginalize, and criminalize people
rendered foreign for not being from the "right" island. A rhetoric as
old as the division of the world, nation-states versus peoples...

 From truncated democracies to asserted authoritarianism, ancestral
lands, once shared or rich in "rare" goods, are being confiscated; from
smart cities to startup nations, new tech is the future.

A blindingly white future in a radiant world...

Lille - Boulogne/Mer, April 21, 2025

* name given to underground miners with faces blackened by coal

https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4432
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