Teotwawki and Other Neoliberal Gods
A Reflection on End-of-the-World Politics
Abstract
Why is it easier to imagine the End of the World than the End of Capitalism? As a contribution to the (as yet) hypothetical discipline of Apocalyptology, which would be devoted to studying Capitalism’s multiple connections with the End of the World, this essay seeks to answer that question through a historical and critical analysis of what American Survivalists call Teotwawki as a meta- narrative framing for a variety of political discourses, ranging from Survivalism itself to the insurrectionary anarchism of the Invisible Committee, or the anarcho-primitivism of the Deep Ecology Movement and some accounts of the Anthropocene. Ever since the end of the 1970s, in a context where Capitalist Realism polices the boundaries of collective imaginaries, pre-empting any alternative to the Neoliberal order, end-of-the-world plots and tropes have been displacing end-of-capitalism narratives by redirecting the desire for radical social change towards the imagery of catastrophe and collapse and away from visions of revolution.
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References
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