Recent years have witnessed a terrifying ramping-up of the earth’s water crisis, anti-migrant rioting and pogroms across the UK, and civil war-like conditions in US cities like Minneapolis, created entirely by Trump and his paramilitary ICE squads.

The sense we all have that things are falling apart, that the wheels might be starting to come off the contemporary world order, is no delusion. Things really are as dire as they look. Yet, rather than taking decisive action to put a halt to ecological and economic crisis, the wealthy and powerful use scapegoating and obscurantism to entrench their stranglehold on earth’s diminishing resources.

 Rather than waiting for the class war, skyrocketing living costs, and the impending wars over water and other scarce goods to devour us, the many must begin to wrench back power from the few – but we will have to act fast.

Obscurantism and the water crisis

As reservoirs across the UK continue to fail and hosepipe bans come into effect, the British state is playing its usual blame game. Consumers are again footing the bill for the monumental negligence of the public utilities cartels. Allotmenteers risk being fined while water company shareholders continue to enrich themselves. Crops begin to fail while AI firms guzzle water for their data centres. Workers and tenants, as we always have, are bankrolling the profligacy of the unproductive rich.

It is not just the state that stands to gain from obscuring the root causes of the water crisis. Right-wing conspirators are also exploiting the effects of ecocide for political gain. A complex web of newspapers, podcasts, and social media communities is feeding off fears of the so-called ‘migrant crisis’, nourishing itself on the idea that foreign workers and oppressed and marginalised asylum seekers are to blame for the water shortages.

Never mind that an estimated fifth of our water is lost through leakages in the supply chain. Never mind that life-sustaining infrastructure remains in the hands of profiteering robber-barons who have no incentive to properly maintain it.

 If the courts were to convict and imprison the criminally negligent executives who enrich themselves at the expense of people and planet, and if water companies that pump sewage into the UK’s rivers were treated as criminal organisations, we would soon see the water crisis brought under control.

 This is a manufactured disaster, not a natural one, just as the media spectacle surrounding the ‘migrant crisis’ has been manufactured to obscure the predatory behaviour of the super wealthy. But, in the absence of an ecosocialist movement capable of building the democratic alternative to fossil-fuel capitalism, scapegoats must be found. Refuges and other migrants, then, necessarily become the first victims of the water wars.

Ecocide and the ‘migrant crisis’

The so-called crisis of mass migration that we have been witnessing for years is, in reality, a crisis of elite overconsumption and war. Large-scale relocations of the economically deprived and the politically oppressed, such as occurred recently in the city of Ceuta, are symptomatic of multiple, international, and interconnected crises, of a state of permanent, global ‘polycrisis’.

Drought has already intensified sectarian violence in Syria and political instability among its neighbours, which, alongside economic chaos and civil war, have caused internal and international migrations which have seriously unsettled the economies of the Middle East.

Control of the Nile has long been a sticking point between Ethiopia and Egypt, such that all-out water-wars amongst the Nilotic nations are not inconceivable. At the same time, colonialist projects such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and inter-imperialist conflicts like the undeclared (but very real) Cold War between the USA and China threaten to destabilise global supply chains, driving up fuel and food prices already inflated by an unstable ecosystem.

As war and agricultural crisis proliferate, we should expect to see large-scale migrations increase around the world. Movements of climate refugees are a predictable and increasingly normalisedby-product of ecocide, and the far-right will be able to weaponize the migration spectacle for as long as world leaders refuse to take the ecological crisis seriously.

We should also expect to see drought conditions impact the ability of British citizens to live, with the UK on track for one of its worst recorded cereal harvests in history. The climate crisis and the cost of living crisis are, therefore, inseparably interlinked, just as the twin travesties of imperialism and the refugee cycle are interlinked. All of these intersecting crisis are fuelling political instability and violent unrest in the UK and around the world, and will continue to do so at an accelerating rate.

Against the billionaires

This vast confluence of catastrophes has a very simple cause. Tiny fractions of the ultra-rich are presently overexploiting the water, land, and rare minerals of our finitely exploitable planet. Doing away with the billionaire class and making better use of their hoarded wealth is entirely possible. We do not need them, and they give nothing back in return for their extractive lifestyles.

It is work that generates value; wealth and privilege merely accumulate, almost always at the expense of people and planet.

There is enormous capacity to directly resist the ecocidal practices of the wealthy. Data centres, detested by local residents for their noise pollution, water consumption, and the strain they put on the energy grid, can be blocked by community-based activism and by Greenham Common-style sit-in protests if necessary. The Green Party, with its growing base of young, highly motivated activists, is in a perfect position to lead these kinds of struggle. Typically, the party opts for compromise and shallow parliamentary politics, but there are many radicals within the grassroots of the Greens who are prepared to go much further.

Bringing essential utilities under public ownership could also go some way to stemming the haemorrhage of water from our undermaintained infrastructure. However, it will require an empowered electorate and large-scale protest movements to ensure that the state does not behave as negligently as the private sector in its management of services that should be controlled by the people, not bureaucrats acting of our behalf.

The Left can also help to resolve the polycrisis by the working to shift the narrative around migration and war. Neither refugee flight nor foreign invasion pose the biggest risk to national security. Rather, it is the dire state of food insecurity in the UK, and the dual crisis of cost of living increases and rising temperatures, exacerbated by imperialist wars and colonialism, that pose the most immediate threat to the safety of citizens in Great Britian and the six counties of the occupied north of Ireland.

Things to come

Should the earth fail to shed the suffocating crust of wealthy elites which eclipses it, then the polycrisis is bound to intensify. Wars both international and civil will continue to break out across the world, as imperialists scramble to secure earth’s dwindling resources for themselves.

The monopolisation of the earth’s water supply will soon become the main focus of the ruling class, with mass starvation events and world-historic acts of state-sanctioned violence and oppression the inevitable results. We should not imagine that the United Kingdom will escape the consequences of these globally destabilising forces.

On the contrary, Western Europe and the United States, the chief beneficiaries of imperialism, are already at the centre of the polycrisis. If some of us find our lives to be moderately stable when compared with conditions in Syria or Ukraine, it is not because we have escaped the water wars or the effects of the global scramble for fossil fuels, land, and rare minerals. In the heart of the empire, relative calm prevails (for now) only because we are in the eye of the storm.

As fossil capitalism gives way to hydraulic despotism, as the Mad Max films become increasingly resemblant of documentaries, political and economic instability in the richest countries will increase, mounting eventually to ruinous levels. The choice between socialism or barbarism is really no choice at all. Either we build the environmentalist alternative for ourselves, or the billionaire class will institute barbarism on our behalf – and, no doubt, find a way to make money from it.