Leave Capitalism Behind

“There is no end / To what a living world / Will demand of you.” – Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower 

Science fiction has entered our dialectical dystopian reality. Climate catastrophe, war, violence, the rise of fascism. Capitalism harms and destroys nature, human beings, and the possibility of a future. The capitalist imperialist US-Israel-UK axis has murdered thousands of Palestinians, displaced even more, and is currently carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people. How do we, as revolutionary socialists and abolitionists, find hope in each other and the world?

You will not find that hope in the Netflix’s “Leave the World Behind.” Unlike Julia Roberts’s character, Amanda, who declares before the opening credits “I fucking hate people”– we fucking love people. We love the people. The poor people, the queers, the misfits, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. People with disabilities, homeless people, sex workers, the working poor, the international working class. Leave the World Behind is misanthropic, nihilistic, neoliberal defeatist, pro-military propaganda reinforcing racism and ecofascism.

As socialists and revolutionaries we are called to be “tribunes of the oppressed” because we are indeed oppressed ourselves, but also because we possess the radical empathy needed to change the status quo. Leave the World Behind says the opposite: we don’t need people or each other, but rather reinforces the hyper individualistic US phenomenon of “go it alone,” exemplified by the horrific ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza perpetuated by the US imperialist settler-colonial nation. 

Polarization, USA

Julia Roberts’ “Amanda” is in advertising and Ethan Hawk’s character (Clay) is a city college professor that take a trip to semi-rural New York where they meet G.H. Washington (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth Washington (Myha'la Herrold), the owners of the house they have rented. They flee the city and retreat to their Long Island home amid a blackout and subsequent series of cyberattacks, ecological oddities, airplanes and Tesla self-driving cars crashing, and observable changes in animal migration patterns.  They encounter doomsday preppers as rational heroes, and bourgeois neighbors who built underground bunkers in anticipation of such a crisis. Amanda’s daughter Rose (Farrah Mackenzie), perhaps representing “Gen Z” and this generation’s ability to perceive and point out the obvious problems unfolding in the world that others cannot seem to see or grasp, tries desperately to get others to notice the danger in their midst.

The plot focuses on the oppositional relationship between Julia Roberts’ miserable and overtly racist character Amanda, who cannot contain bitterness, fear, and resentment towards the Black family that has now asserted their presence in “her” space. The story is written in such a way that Amanda’s character walks a line that gives her behavior some credence from the point of the viewer. For instance, information about the G.H. and Ruth Washington is purposefully vague and revealed incrementally in a way that makes the viewer also question their motives.

Nevertheless, Amanda’s fear of G.H. Washington and his daughter Ruth is unwarranted and steeped in narrow-minded misperceptions and MAGA-like notions of white victimhood and resentment. Even though she is in their house, she feels that she has the natural right to be there, and the people who actually own the house are invaders who want to harm her and her family. 

For his part, G.H. Washington’s character is so underdeveloped he becomes a head-scratching mystery. We learn in fleeting and limited exchanges tat he is part of the east coast “liberal elite,” a Wall-Street broker, connected into the “deep state,” and has direct access to ruling class billionaires. Through his class position, we gradually learn that he is apparently aware of everything that is happening, but for some reason does not feel compelled to explain it to anyone. Instead, he acts submissive and mysterious; he patiently withstands Amanda’s abuse like a tolerant old friend who believes she “means well”—but for no apparent reason. 

The story attempts a forced reconciliation between these two forlorn representatives of polarized US bourgeois politics, without justification, plot progression, or believability. This may be a clumsy attempt at a variation of Horseshoe Theory, that the farther left you progress you end up to closer to the right; or that only by moving closer to the bipartisan “center” can these two camps survive the uncertainty at play. In this film, it plays out more like a fishhook, whereby the center loops you around back to the right once we feel our security is threatened. While the dizzying camera angles can be amusing, and some long shots are eerily intriguing, these do not overshadow the mediocre acting, poor writing, and wide gaps in the story development.

Capitalism’s Lack of Accountability 

“No one is in control…The best thing powerful people can hope for is a heads up.” This is what G.H. Washington offers to explain the predicament, insinuating that there is no way to understand the crises of capitalism leading to the breakdown of society. Like the billionaires building space programs to be able to flee the planet once it is no longer inhabitable, he returns to seek out his rich neighbor’s abandoned bunker. Kevin Bacon’s character “Danny” is a self-proclaimed survivalist, libertarian doomsday prepper, and a stereotype of the camouflage-wearing racist that blames “the Koreans, or Chinese, one of them” for the series of unfolding disasters on the west coast. At the same time, an inordinate number of Arabic-language flyers are inexplicably dropped from a light plane on Clay’s car while driving through an abandoned rural road, ostensibly to blame Middle Easterners for the attacks in the east of the country.

The racializing of the alleged culprits of the attacks as Arabs, Chinese, and North Koreans is deployed in a subtly tongue-in-cheek way, as if to show how easy it is to dupe Americans using racial tropes; and used as a foil to the more plausible idea that it is a military-led coup from within being orchestrated by the Far Right. Nevertheless, the storylines are so vague and incomplete, it is almost impossible to decipher what exactly is going on, allowing the perceptions of the viewer to fill the void. The obfuscation of the back story is also an attempt to direct our attention back to the personal conflict between Amanda and G.H., which holds the key to their survival amid collapse.   

In one scene, Amanda and G.H. share a more intimate conversation where Julia Roberts’s character comments on a small group of people running the world. Mahershala Ali’s character states that the reality “of no one being in control” is even scarier than the implied “fiction” of a capitalist ruling class that pursues profit and accumulation with all its destructive cost—even as existential crises envelop larger parts of the globe. If the terrible and horrific state of the world has no real leaders, then that means there is no accountability. No one is in control so we can’t do anything about it accept adapt and survive. Many conspiracy theorists, individualists, preppers, and eco-fascists subscribe to this type of rightwing thinking that embraces a defeatist and nihilist view towards system collapse as some kind of way out.  

At one point, Amanada suggests they move to a military base, which converges with the fact that G.H.’s client and confidant who helps them understand what is happening, is a top corporate military contractor. This turn to military solutions to preserve the “world as we know it” coincides with the real world of US imperialism. The Biden administration’s recent plan to allocate more than $114 billion dollars as part of an emergency military allocation to conduct the genocide of Palestinian people by the Israeli state, increase arms flows the Ukrainians against Russia, and ramp up capacity for the next war with China are the “solution” to the crisis and changing mathematics of global imperialism.

Inside the settler-colonial United States, war, invasion, genocide, and exploitation are the currencies of nation- and empire-building and how the ruling class attained their positions. The state polices, kills, and incarcerates Black, Brown, and Indigenous people so that the rich can expand their fortunes, and so the middle classes can have a common enemy and pursue their aspirations to rise in their class position at the expense of those who don’t deserve what they have and want. Amanda and G.H. begin to understand each other better as they realize they want the same things amid this crisis.

This vague reconciliation represents the way “liberals” and “conservatives” can stand together to preserve the American way of life that they see as being threatened by a host of bogeymen (foreign states, Trumpian authoritarianism, and obscurant fascism). In the absence of a radical and anticapitalist analysis of decaying bourgeois politics, this film attempts to show how bourgeois bipartisanship is the best chance for survival amid a changing world full of dangers and uncertainty. Instead of addressing how capitalism is the real culprit for the host of real threats we face, the state instead represses and persecutes climate change resistors, human rights and antiwar activists, and anticapitalist organizers—rendering them invisible in this dystopic reality portrayed in the film.

Without agency in the struggle against our dying world, we can only find ways to adapt as individuals, and any attempt to reform the capitalist system can only occur through the capitalist parties themselves. As the crisis deepens, so too does the capitalist state become more defensive and oppositional to any threat to its existence. This is expressed in how the film offers no solutions or ways forward, and instead embodies the rightward shift in US politics. This includes the manifestations of ecofascism and genocide as a progression along the path of capitalist individualism. 

Emergent Ecofascism

Ecofascism is the idea there should be fewer people to improve and maintain the environment for those who have a “natural” right to the land. This concept is a feature of white supremacist ideology. It is also an outgrowth of settler colonial and Zionist conceptions of “environmental sustainability,” especially in protecting or maintaining nature against those deemed racially or socially unfit, undeserving, and incapable of proper stewardship. The 18th-century aristocrat and economist Thomas Malthus was an originator of this way of thinking, which contributed to development of racist and eugenic ideology over the next century. He claimed that as the economy grew, the population would grow faster than available resources, and that the “excess poor” would have to die off (or be allowed to die off) so that the system could find a natural balance under the stewardship of those most “fit to rule” and exist. The white supremacist notion of the “Great Replacement Theory,” that there is a conspiratorial process through which people of color threaten and replace white dominance and primacy through higher birth rates, mass migration, and political demands for a larger share of national resources. This runs as an undertone through the film: racism and eugenics wrapped in end of days panic and paranoia. 

In Leave the World Behind, which was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, the message of ecofascism is expressed in various ways. The unexpected arrival of the Washingtons is the first indication of their impingement on the sanctity of the white homestead. Amanda vigorously and fiercely defends their exclusion tinged on racial grounds, while verbally calculating and asserting that they are more entitled to the Washington’s property as the rightful paying consumers.

Secondly, when Clay is driving back to the Washington’s home from the abandoned town, he comes across a person walking along the side of the road. Salvadora (Vanessa Aspillaga) is a stranded person who desperately appeals to Clay in Spanish to help her. Ostensibly, she is a displaced Latina woman who works for one of the rich inhabitants of the area and has no “sanctuary” of her own, she observes all the odd events taking place and is frightened and abandoned. She expresses in Spanish that she is in need and that they should help each other and figure out what is happening and find safety.

Clay instantaneously figures her for another uncertainty, a potential threat and danger. His ignorance of Spanish is used to heighten the tension in the exchange. He sees that she is in distress and calculates that she does not deserve to be rescued, as she and those like her may either be “part of the problem” or an “undeserving migrant” that will only consume scarce resources that they need to preserve for themselves. The ecofascist thread culminates with the daughter Rose, who as the original “seer” of impending trouble, individually finds her way to and enters the rich neighbor’s bunker as bombs start raining down on New York City.

There are far-right climate change deniers and those who think climate catastrophe is real. They find commonality in targeting BIPOC people as the “problem of the land,” and in their most extreme form violently attack and murder in a modern variation of “Manifest Destiny” re-conceptualized as white replacement theory. Mass shooters and other activated fascists that adhere to this ideology take it upon themselves to violently establish their “rightful ownership” of the land by wiping out people of color to clear and protect the “purity” of the land and nation.

Ecofascists weaponize ecology by advocating a Malthusian racism, sexism, violence, and oppression to rid the world of who they deem as “inferior populations” to “save the planet.” This abhorrent approach has been used since the 1980s and has manifested in the growing frequency of mass shootings. As Noami Klein pointed out, the 2020 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand was carried out on the same day as the start of the International Youth Global Climate Strike (March 15th), and the killer identified himself as an ecofascist. 

Moreover, Trump’s ecofascist appeals were revealed when he blamed Puerto Ricans for their blackouts, and Californians for the drought-induced wildfires—and not climate catastrophe. Ecofascists falsely blame immigrants for pollution, scarcity, and resource exploitation and insist that the end times will necessitate saving the white people, or more specifically, white Christians. Hence the term Christofascists became synonymous with the rise of Trumpism, and its convergence with Christian Evangelicalism. Evangelicals are typically zealous supporters of the genocidal Israeli entity and occupy the far and extreme-right terrain on racial, gender, and class issues. The far-right shift in US politics underscores the existence of ecofascist concepts within the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Revolutionary Politics Matter and People are (mostly) Terrific

Julia Roberts’ character insists “people are terrible.” Misanthropes, petty-bourgeois libertarians, doomsday preppers, and even many self-described liberals think this way. People are selfish, right? In this neo-Hobbesian view, people only care about their own selves and immediate nuclear families. People are complicated and can demonstrate anti-social behaviors. But people are in fact shaped by their material conditions. Human nature exists as a social relation between the socio-economic and environmental factors. Our consciousness exists because we are social beings.

Because we exist inside the ideological frameworks of imperialism and capitalism, people who do not succeed or thrive economically are conditioned to believe that it is because other people are taking what is rightfully theirs—rather than because of oppressive and exploitative systems in which we are constrained and forced to exist. Like in this film, we are conditioned to believe there is no rational way to understand, explain, or challenge the dystopian crises we are now watching take place in real time. We can only save ourselves by turning away from others or by punching downward at others who are also trying to also get into the lifeboats. There is a source to the crises that we can collectively identify and overturn; but it requires a rupture with the US capitalist system and the bourgeois political parties. 

This starts with recognizing that Democratic Party is also a right-wing capitalist political party that has enabled and allowed for the flourishing of fascism – specifically eco-fascism where most people see the world (and the people in it) as unsalvageable. The Democrats are strikebreakers and warmakers. They are also the party of genocide and war. Over 25,000 people (mostly children) have been killed in Palestine by US-backed Israeli state. They are funding the war in Ukraine at an astronomically high rate and procure the largest imperialist military budget in world history.

What we need is revolutionary optimism and working class people power. The “go it alone” notion is a politics of despair that reflects how the bourgeois would rather destroy us and the world rather than concede power or allow capitalist to be challenged or overturned. In order to combat both climate change and ecofascism, we need to stop looking to those that are allowing for us to be casualties so that capitalism can persist.

We need to organize for socialist and abolitionist revolution worldwide. Leave the capitalists behind. Leave the slumlords behind. Leave the predatory class, the bourgeoisie, behind. Leave Kissinger behind. Leave the Bushes behind. Leave the Clintons and Obamas behind. Leave Jeff Bezos behind. Leave the Sackler family behind. Leave Bill Gates behind. Also, leave this film behind, and start organizing in your community for revolution.

Tina Trutanich is a queer communist worker and poet from Spain and California. They write about food, nature, revolution, love, and liberation.