snotgreen sea

Catastrophe Without a Cut

On climate, accumulation, and the question the technocrats are paid not to ask

Stand on the seafront at Espinho in February, when the Atlantic comes in over the engineered defences and the spray reaches the first row of buildings, and you understand at once what the disaster film has stolen from us. The cinema of catastrophe trained us to expect a wave and a cut: the spectacle, the rupture, the clean edit that delivers us into the aftermath. But the storm at Espinho does not cut. It is a long take. It has the duration of Béla Tarr's rain, that unbearable continuousness in which nothing is resolved and everything is decided, and what is decided in it is not the fate of the esplanade but the question of who is permitted to act while the water rises. That is the form of the climate crisis. Not the event. The duration. And the scandal of our moment is that we have surrendered the long take to those whose entire interest lies in its prolongation.

So begin where the official discourse refuses to begin: not with the measure but with the agent. Ask by whom before what, because the two cannot be separated, and the separation is itself the first ideological operation to be undone.

It is not a market failure.

The dominant framing offers us climate change as an externality — a cost that escaped the price, a malfunction in an otherwise rational mechanism, to be corrected by the gentle re-pricing of carbon and the patient accumulation of green subsidy. This is a lie of the most respectable kind, the kind delivered in committee. The biosphere was not accidentally omitted from the ledger. It was converted into the ledger. The compulsion to accumulate, to transform living systems into surplus and surplus into more accumulation, is not a bug in the system that produced this crisis; it is the system's principle of motion. To call this a failure of the market is to mistake the market's most characteristic success for an aberration. The European Emissions Trading System is feared, on the Left, precisely because it works — it is the device by which decarbonisation is rendered compatible with capital, slow by design, regressive in its incidence, careful above all never to touch the question of ownership. A carbon price asks the system to discipline itself. It will not.

The sky has a class composition.

We are instructed to picture humanity as a single emitting subject, a species that has collectively overspent its account, and to accept therefore a symmetrical penance. But the carbon is not distributed as the guilt is distributed. The yacht and the bus do not share a sky in the same proportions. When the top tenth of the income distribution accounts for a share of emissions that dwarfs its numbers, and the private jet burns in an hour what a worker's whole year cannot approach, the language of universal sacrifice becomes an instrument of class peace — an invitation to the pensioner in Aveiro to atone for the appetites of a class she will never join. The Left's mitigation programme begins here, in the refusal of the false universal: progressive carbon levies, the suppression of luxury emissions, the grounding of short-haul flights where the rail already runs, the planned contraction not of life but of waste — the advertising, the planned obsolescence, the arms industry, the manufactured churn that exists only to keep the wheel turning. Sufficiency, not merely efficiency. And underneath it all, the decommodification of energy itself: the grid and the generation taken into public and municipal hands, because a private utility that owns a coal asset will burn it, and only a public power can choose to leave it in the ground.

Adaptation is the privatisation of survival — unless we seize it.

Here is the front on which the coming decades will be lost or held, and it is the front the market is already quietly winning. Left to capital, adaptation becomes a sorting mechanism: the private insurance premium, the climate-proofed enclave, the inland retreat of those who can pay and the abandonment of those who cannot. The sea wall at Espinho is, in this light, a small monument to another logic — the commons defending itself, collectively, in public, on behalf of everyone the wall stands in front of. That logic must be generalised and defended against the disaster capitalists who see in every flood a contract and in every reconstruction an enclosure. Adaptation as public good: flood and heat infrastructure, water systems, the retrofit of the housing stock that is at once mitigation, adaptation and the abolition of fuel poverty, the public health system braced for the heat, and — the demand the unions of the south now raise over their dead — the enforceable right of the warehouse worker and the bricklayer to stop work when the temperature would kill them. Survival is not a service. It is a right, or it is nothing.

There is no green transition built on a sacrifice zone.

And the transition must not become the next round of dispossession dressed in the colours of virtue. This is not abstract from where I write. The lithium beneath Barroso is the perfect figure of green colonialism turned inward: the electric vehicle of the metropolitan consumer purchased with the gutting of an interior periphery, the sacrifice zone relocated from the Congo to Trás-os-Montes, the same extractive relation under a cleaner flag. A Left climate politics that does not refuse this refuses nothing. It means, at the European scale, treating climate finance for the global South not as charity but as the partial repayment of a debt the imperial core has owed since the first coal was burned in its name — reparation, technology transfer, the waiving of green patents, the cancellation of the sovereign debts that force the periphery into the very extractivism we then condemn. Europe was metabolised from a carbon budget it stole. It does not get to balance the account by stealing more.

The agent does not yet exist. It must be built.

Which returns us, as it must, to by whom. Not the unaided market, which produced this. Not the neoliberal regulatory state, which administers it. The answer is a state transformed into an instrument of democratic planning — and at the European level this forces a confrontation the Left has been too timid to name: whether the Treaties themselves, with their competition law and their fiscal discipline, structurally forbid the intervention the moment demands, so that the choice is between rewriting the Union and breaking with it. Beneath the state, the new municipalism: the remunicipalised water and power, the city as the laboratory where the future is rehearsed before it is permitted nationally. And beneath that, the only motor that has ever actually moved history — the organised many, from below.

The decisive lesson is written in the wreckage of the gilets jaunes, and the Left forgets it at its peril. A carbon tax laid upon the worker while the oligarch flies free does not produce a transition; it produces a revolt, and the revolt is correct. You cannot ask those who fear the end of the month to mobilise for the end of the world unless you make the two demands one. Fin du mois, fin du monde — the social question and the ecological question are not rivals competing for the same scarce concern. They are the same question, and the work of a serious Left is to make them speak with one voice.

Catástrofe Sem Corte

Sobre o clima, a acumulação e a pergunta que os tecnocratas são pagos para não fazer

Quem estiver no paredão de Espinho em Fevereiro, quando o Atlântico galga as defesas e deixa nos vidros da primeira linha de edifícios um sal que ninguém pediu, percebe de imediato o que o cinema de catástrofe nos roubou. O cinema do desastre ensinou-nos a esperar uma vaga e um corte: o espectáculo, a ruptura, a montagem limpa que nos deposita já no rescaldo, do outro lado do pior, salvos pela elipse. Mas a tempestade em Espinho não corta. É um plano-sequência. Tem a duração da chuva de Béla Tarr, aquela continuidade insuportável em que nada se resolve e tudo se decide, e o mar regressa todas as noites como um credor que conhece a morada. O que nele se decide não é o destino da marginal, mas a questão de quem está autorizado a agir enquanto a água sobe. É essa a forma da crise climática. Não o acontecimento. A duração. E o nosso escândalo é termos entregue o plano-sequência justamente a quem tem todo o interesse em prolongá-lo, sentado na sala às escuras, à espera de um corte que não virá.

Comecemos, então, onde o discurso oficial se recusa a começar: não pela medida, mas pelo agente. Perguntar "por quem" antes de "o quê", porque os dois são inseparáveis, e essa separação é a primeira mentira, a operação que precede e autoriza todas as outras.

Não é uma falha de mercado.

O enquadramento dominante oferece-nos as alterações climáticas como uma externalidade: um custo que escapou ao preço, uma avaria num mecanismo de resto racional, a corrigir pela discreta reprecificação do carbono e pela paciente acumulação de subsídio verde. É uma mentira do tipo mais respeitável, a que se profere em comissão, de fato e gravata, com o ar contrito de quem reza. A biosfera não foi acidentalmente esquecida no livro de contas. Foi convertida em livro de contas. A contabilidade de dupla entrada tornou-se a única teologia que ainda merece crença, e o seu dogma é que tudo o que vive pode ser inscrito numa coluna e abatido na seguinte. A compulsão para acumular, para transformar os sistemas vivos em excedente e o excedente em mais acumulação, rasga o velho metabolismo entre o homem e a terra e chama progresso ao rasgão. Não é um defeito do sistema que produziu esta crise; é o seu princípio de movimento, o seu coração a bater. Chamar a isto uma falha de mercado é confundir o êxito mais perfeito do mercado com um lapso. O Comércio Europeu de Licenças de Emissão é temido, à esquerda, precisamente porque funciona: é o dispositivo pelo qual a descarbonização se torna compatível com o capital, lenta por desígnio, regressiva na incidência, cuidadosa sobretudo em nunca tocar na questão da propriedade. Vende a licença de poluir como antigamente se vendiam indulgências, e a alma continua à venda. Um preço sobre o carbono pede ao sistema que se discipline a si mesmo. Mas ninguém jejua diante de um banquete que é seu.

O céu tem uma composição de classe.

Mandam-nos imaginar a humanidade como um único sujeito emissor, uma espécie que esgotou colectivamente a sua conta, e aceitar, por isso, uma penitência simétrica. Mas o céu não é um tecto que pese por igual sobre todas as cabeças. O carbono não se distribui como se distribui a culpa. O iate e o autocarro não respiram o mesmo ar nem projectam a mesma sombra. Quando o décimo mais rico responde por uma fatia das emissões que escarnece do seu número, e o jacto privado queima numa hora o que um trabalhador não alcança num ano inteiro, a linguagem do sacrifício universal torna-se um instrumento de paz de classe: o convite à reformada de Aveiro para expiar, de camisola vestida dentro de casa, os apetites de uma classe a que nunca pertencerá. O programa de mitigação da esquerda começa nesta recusa do falso nós: taxas progressivas sobre o carbono, supressão das emissões de luxo, fim dos voos de curta distância onde já circula o comboio, contracção planeada não da vida, mas do desperdício, a publicidade que fabrica a sede para depois a vender em garrafa, a obsolescência programada, a indústria que vive de armar a morte, todo o turbilhão que existe apenas para manter a roda a girar sobre o seu próprio eixo. Suficiência, não mera eficiência. E, por baixo de tudo, a desmercadorização da própria energia: a rede e a produção trazidas para mãos públicas e municipais, porque uma empresa de electricidade privada que possui um activo de carvão há de queimá-lo até à última brasa, e só um poder comum pode escolher deixar a luz adormecida no solo, onde nunca devia ter acordado.

A adaptação é a privatização da sobrevivência, a menos que a tomemos.

É esta a frente onde as próximas décadas se perderão ou se aguentarão, e é a que o mercado já vai vencendo no silêncio em que vence sempre. Entregue ao capital, a adaptação faz-se triagem: o prémio de seguro privado, o enclave climatizado, o muro alto à volta de quem pode pagar, e a maré entregue a quem não pode. Há sempre um barco para uns e a água para os outros, e o naufrágio aprende depressa a ler o cadastro. O paredão de Espinho é, sob esta luz, um pequeno monumento à lógica contrária: o comum a defender-se em conjunto, em público, com o corpo na frente de mar, em nome de todos os que vivem por detrás dele. É essa lógica que há que generalizar, e defender dos capitalistas do desastre, que vêem em cada cheia um contrato e em cada reconstrução um cercamento. A adaptação como bem comum: as infra-estruturas contra a cheia e o calor, a água que corra para todos, a reabilitação do parque habitacional que é ao mesmo tempo mitigação, adaptação e fim da pobreza energética, o serviço público de saúde de pé diante do estio que já mata, e, exigência que os sindicatos do Sul levantam agora sobre os seus próprios mortos, o direito do pedreiro e do trabalhador dos armazéns a largar a ferramenta quando o ar se faz lâmina. A sobrevivência não é um serviço que se contrate. É um direito, ou não é nada.

Não há transição verde erguida sobre uma zona de sacrifício.

E a transição não pode tornar-se a próxima ronda de expropriação vestida com as cores da virtude. Isto não é abstracto de onde escrevo. O lítio sob Covas do Barroso é a figura perfeita do colonialismo verde voltado para dentro: o automóvel eléctrico do consumidor metropolitano comprado com a serra aberta ao meio, a aldeia esvaziada, a água turva onde antes havia truta, a zona de sacrifício deslocada do Congo para Trás-os-Montes como se a periferia fosse sempre o quintal de alguém. Um país que devora o seu próprio interior para iluminar a sua própria montra não faz uma transição: muda apenas a cor da ferida. Uma política climática de esquerda que não recuse isto não recusa nada. Significa, à escala europeia, tratar o financiamento climático ao Sul global não como esmola, mas como a primeira prestação de uma dívida que o centro imperial contrai desde que ardeu o primeiro carvão em seu nome: reparação, transferência de tecnologia, suspensão das patentes que privatizam o remédio, cancelamento das dívidas soberanas que empurram a periferia para o mesmo extractivismo que depois condenamos do alto. A Europa fez-se com o fumo de uma fogueira que acendeu noutros continentes. Não lhe assiste o direito de saldar a conta atirando mais lenha à mesma fogueira.

O agente ainda não existe. Tem de ser construído.

O que nos devolve, como tem de ser, ao "por quem". Não o mercado por si só, que produziu isto. Não o Estado regulador neoliberal, que assina a sentença e lhe chama gestão. A resposta é um Estado refeito em instrumento de planeamento democrático, e, à escala europeia, isto força um confronto que a esquerda tem sido demasiado tímida para nomear: o de saber se os próprios Tratados, com o seu direito da concorrência e a sua disciplina orçamental, proíbem por construção a intervenção que o momento exige, de modo que a escolha é entre reescrever a casa ou sair dela. Abaixo do Estado, o novo municipalismo: a água e a energia devolvidas à mão comum, a cidade como o pequeno laboratório onde o futuro se ensaia antes de lhe darem licença. E, abaixo disso, o único motor que alguma vez moveu de facto a história: os muitos, organizados, de baixo para cima, como a maré, que não pede licença a ninguém para subir.

A lição decisiva está escrita nos destroços dos coletes amarelos, e a esquerda esquece-a por sua conta e risco. Uma taxa de carbono imposta ao trabalhador enquanto o oligarca voa sem entraves não produz uma transição: produz uma revolta, e a revolta tem razão. Não se pode pedir a quem conta os dias até ao fim do mês que se levante pelo fim do mundo, a não ser que as duas pontas se atem no mesmo nó. O fim do mês contra o fim do mundo: a questão social e a questão ecológica não são duas sedes a disputar o mesmo copo. São a mesma sede. E o trabalho de uma esquerda séria é dar-lhe uma só voz, antes que outra voz, mais velha e mais suja, se ofereça para o fazer no seu lugar.

Palantir, The Technological Republic, and the manifesto as commodity-form

There is a particular vertigo that attends the moment when a corporation publishes a philosophical manifesto. The genre is not new: IBM had its THINK posters, Apple its 1984, Google its mantra against evil; but Palantir’s twenty-two-point thread, drawn from Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic, belongs to a different register. It is neither slogan nor advertisement. It is a programme. And the question is not whether one finds it persuasive but what kind of object it is, and what work it performs in the political economy of the present.

What follows is a reading in three movements: the book as it stands, the thread as a distinct ideological artefact, and the contradiction that emerges when the two are placed in the same frame. The interesting argument is not that Palantir is sinister (the company has done the work of saying so itself) but that its self-presentation makes legible something about how capital now conducts its quarrels with itself.

I. The thesis of exhaustion

The Technological Republic is, in its better moments, a diagnosis rather than a prescription. The diagnosis is civilisational fatigue. Karp and Zamiska argue that the West has lived for nearly a century inside what John Lewis Gaddis named the “long peace,” a stability secured not by virtue but by the cold arithmetic of mutually assured destruction. The peace was anomalous, fragile, and (this is the authors’ central claim) corrosive. Three generations have grown up without a great-power war, and the engineering class that once served the state has migrated into the shallow waters of the consumer internet.

The book’s scaffolding rests on three structural arguments, each of which deserves to be taken seriously before being taken apart.

The hollowing of the technologist

The first argument is that the postmodern dismantling of Western grand narratives has left a void where civic purpose once stood. Stripped of a coherent national project, the technological elite has defaulted to a thin, utilitarian morality: optimising click-through rates, compressing video for delivery, mediating loneliness through application layers. The authors are not nostalgic for empire; they are nostalgic for ambition. The atom was split, the moon was reached, and the inheritors of those projects, they argue, now build photo filters.

The diagnosis has a structural force that resists easy dismissal. There is something genuinely true about the strange asymmetry between the technical sophistication of the present and the triviality of its dominant applications. To dismiss this observation as reactionary is to miss what it identifies.

The pathology of bureaucracy

The second argument is more surprising, and is consistently underread by hostile reviewers. The book is not, in fact, a paean to state power. It is a scathing autopsy of the procurement state. The illustrative anecdote is precise: in the early 1990s, with American forces deploying into Kuwait, the Air Force discovered it lacked enough handheld two-way radios, the kind sold for twenty dollars at any electronics store. Motorola had stock available. The deal collapsed because Motorola’s accounting systems could not produce manufacturing-cost data in the format the Federal Acquisition Regulation required. The most powerful military in history could not legally buy commodity hardware off the shelf in wartime.

This anecdote is doing real argumentative work. It establishes that the authors’ quarrel is not between tech and the state but between two configurations of state-tech intimacy: the post-Reagan procurement bureaucracy on one side, and an idealised mid-century fusion (the Manhattan Project, ARPA, the early Stanford Research Institute) on the other. The book is, in this register, a critique of administrative ossification masquerading as a critique of pacifism.

The Eck Swarm and the foxes

The third argument is the book’s most distinctive and is, predictably, the part the X thread excises most thoroughly. Karp and Zamiska reach for two unlikely sources to articulate what an unalienated engineering culture might look like. The first is the Eck Swarm: Martin Lindauer’s 1951 observation, in a Munich park, of honeybees collectively deliberating among eight potential nesting sites through decentralised dance. The second is Keith Johnstone’s improvisational theatre, in which the cardinal rule is that one must say yes to what is offered before complicating it. Behind both stands Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between the hedgehog who knows one big thing and the fox who knows many. Silicon Valley, the authors insist, is the consummate fox, and the fox should not pretend to be a hedgehog.

This is the most theoretically generative passage in the book. It articulates a vision of organisational form (flat, decentralised, anti-authoritarian, governed by emergent consensus rather than hierarchy) that is in pointed tension with the manifesto’s own demand for unified national purpose. Whether the authors register this contradiction is unclear. They proceed as though the swarm and the state could be married without incident.

It is at this point, between the bee and the bomb, that the book begins to fall apart.

II. The thread as a different object

The twenty-two-point summary that Palantir’s corporate account published is not a précis. It is a different object than the book it claims to compress. To read the two side by side is to watch a contemplative diagnosis transmuted into something closer to a recruitment poster, and the transmutation is itself the symptom worth examining.

Consider what survives the compression and what does not. What survives: the demand for hard power, the call for AI weapons, the mockery of pacifism, the assertion that some cultures are “middling, regressive, harmful,” the insistence that Silicon Valley owes a moral debt, the call to reconsider the all-volunteer force. What does not survive: the entire psychological architecture (Asch’s conformity experiments, Milgram’s obedience studies) that Karp and Zamiska use precisely to warn against the formation of monolithic ideology. What does not survive: the Eck Swarm, the improvisational startup, the fox. What does not survive: the critique of bureaucratic ossification, which constitutes nearly a third of the book.

The compression is not random. It systematically excises every passage that complicates the manifesto’s call to arms. A book that argues for decentralised, anti-authoritarian engineering culture becomes, on the timeline, an argument for unified national militarisation. A book that warns against the psychological pressure to conform becomes a warning that one must conform to the new programme. The thread is not a summary of the book; it is the book purged of its self-doubt.

This is not a complaint about reading comprehension. It is a structural feature of the medium. The thread cannot accommodate the book’s contradictions because contradictions do not propagate on platforms optimised for affective uptake. What propagates is the assertion stripped of its qualification. And so the thread does what the book refuses to do: it speaks with one voice, in declarative cadence, with the rhetorical posture of a state department that has been disintermediated.

There is something instructive in the observation that the very platform Palantir’s authors disparage as a symptom of civilisational decay is the one chosen to propagate the cure. The contradiction is not lost on the company; it is the operating logic. The thread is performative rather than constative. It does not describe a politics; it enacts one. And what it enacts is the spectacle of seriousness: the aestheticisation of strategic resolve, packaged for an audience of investors, recruits, and rival capitals.

The interesting feature of the Palantir thread is not its content but its publication. Other frontier-AI firms hold positions on military and surveillance applications that range from active participation to formal restriction; none has felt the need to publish a twenty-two-point credo. The manifesto-form is itself the symptom. It appears where capital needs to coordinate not just labour and contracts but also the legitimacy of what it is about to do, and where the appeal to internal corporate policy or quiet contractual practice is judged insufficient to that task. To publish a manifesto is to confess that something must now be said aloud.

III. The materialist undertow

Read at this register, the book and the thread cease to look like text and apparatus and begin to look like one continuous gesture. The gesture is the ideological work of a particular faction of capital, addressing a particular constituency, in a particular conjuncture. The interesting question is not whether the authors are sincere (they almost certainly are) but what their sincerity is for.

Factional warfare in the bourgeoisie

The book’s indictment of consumer technology is not, as it presents itself, a critique of capitalism. It is a quarrel within capital. Defence and surveillance capital, long the junior partner of the consumer-internet behemoths, is making a bid to redirect engineering labour, valuation multiples, and political attention toward its own balance sheet. The “moral debt” owed by Silicon Valley turns out, on inspection, to be denominated in contracts. The authors are not asking the technological class to renounce capital. They are asking it to pick a different patron.

This factional reading also explains the otherwise curious structure of the book’s anger. Why is Karp angrier with Google’s engineers than with, say, the offshoring of fabrication to Taiwan, or the financialisation of the engineering profession itself? Because the former is a competitor for talent and capital; the latter are not. The polemic does not, of course, reduce without remainder to the cash flows; the authors’ civilisational alarm is real, and the reduction would itself be too clean. But the polemic tracks the cash flows closely enough that a reader watching only the money would predict its grammar correctly.

The imperial monopoly on violence

The call for a “new Manhattan Project” is best read not as historical analogy but as a demand for state-guaranteed demand. The Manhattan Project worked, from the perspective of the firms that participated, because it offered cost-plus contracts, regulatory cover, and indefinite procurement horizons. What Karp and Zamiska are advocating is the reconstitution of those conditions for the AI sector. The “West” in this account is the imperial core, and the dispensation it requires is one in which the volatile dynamics of consumer markets are replaced by the predictable rhythms of military Keynesianism.

The book’s description of German and Japanese pacifism as an “overcorrection,” a phrase that landed with notable force in European policy circles, should be read in this light. The genuine geopolitical anxiety it taps into is not manufactured; the elite panic is real, and rearmament debates were already advancing in Berlin and Tokyo without Palantir’s prompting. But real panic and market opportunity coexist without difficulty. A rearmed Europe and a remilitarised Japan are, for a defence-software firm, addressable markets that have been politically off-limits for seventy years. The polemic against pacifism does not invent the anxiety it mobilises; it monetises it.

The fantasy of the missing centre

Where the materialist reading needs to be supplemented is in accounting for the manifesto’s persistent gesture toward a missing object: the “shared culture,” the “national purpose,” the “civic rituals” the authors mourn. This is the moment at which a Lacanian register becomes useful. The thread does not, strictly speaking, propose a politics. It proposes a fantasy that organises desire around a void. The repeated insistence that the West must rediscover what it has lost performs the constitutive function: the loss is not contingent but structural, and the manifesto’s political utility lies precisely in its refusal to specify what would count as recovery.

Žižek’s observation that ideology is most effective when it cynically acknowledges its own ideological character applies here with unusual exactness. Karp and Zamiska know the West they invoke is a constructed fiction. They say so. The point is not to mistake the fiction for reality but to use the fiction as a coordinating mechanism for capital and labour that would otherwise have no shared horizon. The thread is, in this sense, a quilting point: a master signifier that retroactively organises the field of meaning so that drone swarms, cultural cohesion, and procurement reform appear to belong to the same project.

Synthesis: the manifesto as commodity-form

The deepest contradiction in The Technological Republic is the one its authors cannot resolve and the thread cannot afford to expose. The book’s most original passages (the Eck Swarm, the improvisational startup, the warning against Aschian conformity) describe an organisational form that is constitutively incompatible with the project the same authors propose. One cannot have a flat, decentralised, dissent-tolerant engineering culture and a unified national defence apparatus animated by shared cultural purpose. These are not complementary visions. They are antagonists. The book’s rhetorical sleight of hand is to present them as continuous, and the thread’s function is to ensure no one notices the seam.

This is what makes the manifesto useful as a diagnostic instrument, even (perhaps especially) for those who reject its conclusions. It exposes, with unusual clarity, the structure of the present conjuncture: a fraction of the technological bourgeoisie attempting to reconstitute the conditions of mid-century state-capital fusion under the sign of a manufactured cultural emergency, while propagating the appeal through the very platforms whose hollowness it diagnoses. The diagnosis is not wrong about the hollowness. It is wrong, or perhaps strategically silent, about who emptied the room.

To diagnose the manifesto’s fantasy is not to stand outside it. The materialist reading shares the longing for a coordinating frame; what it refuses is the form Karp and Zamiska propose. The refusal is not yet an alternative, and to pretend otherwise would be its own ideological move. The conjuncture’s difficulty is precisely that the absence of a frame is intolerable and that no available frame is innocent.

Karp and Zamiska identify a real symptom: the alienation of the technologist, the sclerosis of the procurement state, the disappearance of any frame larger than the next quarterly earnings call. They are correct that something will rush in to fill the void; they are wrong to imagine that what they are offering is recovery rather than capture. What they describe as a return to civic purpose is, in operational terms, the subsumption of the engineering class under the disciplinary regime of military capital; a regime which, like all such regimes, will require its dissenters and its swarms and its foxes to fall in line. The hedgehog wins in the end.

There is a kind of time that does not move forward. It settles. It accumulates in thin, almost invisible layers, like dust on a surface no one disturbs. It measures nothing, leads nowhere, promises nothing. It simply remains, as though the present were a ground that yields to touch but not to passage.

Within that time, there are gestures that do not act upon the world but accompany it. Minimal gestures, repeated until intention drains away, like the slow movement of a tide that never quite becomes a wave. A hand opens a glove compartment. The air has not yet decided it is morning. There is an instant of suspension — an interval in which nothing is chosen and yet everything is already settled. Then the tape clicks into place, brief, dry, sufficient to set the day in motion.

It is in that interval that Hirayama appears: the public toilet cleaner at the quiet centre of Perfect Days. He does not stream; he does not scroll. He inserts the cassette — Lou Reed, Van Morrison, Patti Smith — and drives into the blue Tokyo dawn as though the act of choosing analogue over digital were itself a form of prayer spoken under the breath, before language. Wim Wenders knows exactly what he is doing. The cassette is not nostalgia. It is a theory of time coiled back upon itself, a current that exists only because it cannot return.

Perfect Days (2023) has been received, in certain quarters, as a gentle film — contemplative, Buddhist-adjacent, a corrective to the velocity of contemporary life. This reading is not wrong, but it is insufficient. Wenders is not offering an escape from modernity. He opens it the way one opens a mechanism, exposing the gears while they are still warm. Hirayama’s meticulous daily routine — the futon folded with the precision of someone closing a page, the small trees watered as though each leaf were a living clock, the vending machine coffee consumed in the particular stillness of early morning — is not a retreat but an argument cast in the form of habit. The argument is this: that presence is not a psychological disposition but a technical problem, and that solving it requires the construction of a life as deliberately as one cuts a sentence down until it breathes.

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The film’s central visual motif is komorebi, the Japanese concept of light filtered through leaves. Hirayama photographs it obsessively, on film, with an analogue camera, gathering these fragments of light the way one cups water in one’s hands knowing it will inevitably run through. He develops rolls he stores in a cardboard box without, apparently, ever revisiting them — as though the archive were merely the residue of a gesture already spent. The photographs are not for memory. They are proof that the present touched the skin of the world. There is here a decisive inversion of the logic of the contemporary archive. In the digital economy, one accumulates in order to review, display, circulate; the archive is potential, a promise of future use. In Hirayama, the archive is dead. Images are stored and abandoned, like sediments of attention that have already served their purpose. They do not constitute a reserve of the past but the by-product of having been there. Each exposure is an unrepeatable event — the light at that angle, through those particular leaves, on that specific morning, will never recur in that configuration.

This is the move that separates Perfect Days from its more sentimentalised peers in the genre of cinematic slowness. The film does not argue that small things are secretly large, that the mundane contains multitudes, that beauty hides in the overlooked corners of the everyday like a forgotten coin. That argument, comfortable and finally consoling, leaves the machinery of modern life intact. Wenders proposes something harder: that the capacity to perceive komorebi at all — to see it, register its unrepeatable quality, and let it pass without trying to fix or monetise or optimise it — requires the patient dismantling of the conditions modernity offers as defaults. Hirayama has no smartphone. He reads physical books. He eats alone, at the same counter, ordering the same meal — as though refusing to multiply choices were a way of protecting the clarity of the gaze. His life is not simple; it is refined, like an instrument tuned until only the necessary sound remains. There is also a difference of texture here. The digital is smooth, continuous, frictionless; it responds immediately, offers no resistance, demands no waiting. The analogue, by contrast, imposes friction: the tape can jam, the roll of film runs out, the page resists the turn. That friction is not defect but condition. It enforces patience, introduces interval, restores weight to the gesture. It is precisely in that minimal resistance that the technical conditions making presence improbable can begin to be dismantled. Presence does not emerge in spite of friction. It emerges because of it.

—

The cassette and komorebi are the film’s twin poles, and between them the argument runs taut. Komorebi is vertical — light descending through the canopy, the natural world’s own indifference to human time, a rain without water that draws time in the air. The cassette is horizontal — music recorded at a specific moment, by specific people, on an afternoon that has dissolved, advancing like a line that cannot fold back upon itself. Hirayama lives in the interval between the two: the falling light and the rolling tape, neither of which he controls, both of which pass through him as wind passes through an open house.

This is what Wenders means by the “perfect day” of the title, and it is a significantly stranger concept than it first appears. The perfect day is not pleasurable in any straightforward sense. It is not peak experience. It is not the day when things go well, when the world cooperates, when desire is satisfied. It is the day when Hirayama is fully synchronised with what is actually happening — when the gap between the life being lived and the self observing that life closes, not through transcendence, but through sustained attention. The film’s long final shot — Kōji Yakusho’s face moving through something that is simultaneously grief and recognition and a form of almost unbearable aliveness — is not a conclusion. It is a surface where time stops running and begins to boil. This is what it looks like when a person is actually present in their own life.

—

The film’s sharpest edge is also its quietest. Midway through, Hirayama encounters a dying man — the ex-husband of a woman who runs a local bar — and they play shadow tag in the darkness, two silhouettes merging on the pavement like ink spreading. It is the film’s most explicit acknowledgement of death, staged without ceremony, as though mortality were simply one more condition of the afternoon, as banal as the light shifting angle. What the scene reveals is that Hirayama’s construction of presence is not a form of denial. He is not protecting himself from impermanence by filling his days with ritual. The ritual is the minimal architecture that prevents collapse — the means by which he remains open to impermanence without being destroyed by it, like a window that lets the wind in without yielding to the storm. He has built, out of repetition and restraint and the deliberate refusal of accumulation, a self that can hold a dying man’s hand without needing the moment to become something other than what it is.

This is the film’s central political claim, though it arrives without slogans. Late capitalism maintains a very specific relationship with time: it mortgages the present against a future that perpetually recedes, like a horizon that shifts with the very act of pursuing it. Work now so you can live later. Accumulate now so you can spend later. Optimise now so you can be free eventually. The deferral is the system’s deepest mechanism — not merely economic but ontological, a structural inability to inhabit the present tense without immediately converting it into an instrument for something else, as though each instant were merely raw material for another instant that never arrives. What is productivity if not the organised destruction of the moment? What is the career, the personal brand, the portfolio, if not the transformation of lived time into a ledger in which every second is debited and credited until it loses texture?

Hirayama has refused that ledger. This is not a lifestyle choice. It is a negation that cuts at the root.

He cleans public toilets — which is to say he performs labour that is invisible, essential, and almost entirely without social prestige, labour the system classifies as valueless precisely because it produces no surplus and accumulates no cultural capital. He does it with extraordinary care, like someone restoring a surface invisible to the common gaze. The care is the scandal. In the moral economy of late capitalism, care without ambition is at best eccentricity, at worst failure — the inability to leverage effort into ascent.

But there is something more precise here. In a world organised by the attention economy — where the gaze is continuously captured, fragmented, and converted into value — Hirayama performs the inverse movement. He does not compete for attention, nor does he accumulate it. He deposits it on surfaces the system classifies as invisible, and it is precisely there that the subversion resides. Attention directed at what asks for nothing is the only attention that escapes the logic of capture. Where the digital constructs devices to retain the gaze and extract value from passing time, he chooses what cannot be monetised for the simple reason that it offers no spectacle. The clean toilet bowl, the watered leaf, the grain of dust lifted and set down: surfaces without return. This is what makes his practice of attention radically exterior to the system — not because he ignores it, but because he offers it exactly what it does not know how to process.

Wenders understands that showing a man clean a toilet with the focused attention of an artist is not humanising the service worker; it is shifting the axis of value, the way one tilts a set of scales and reveals their hidden weight. The prestige hierarchy that places the toilet cleaner below the entrepreneur is not descriptive. It is normative. It is a verdict on what kind of time is worth living. Perfect Days contests the verdict. Hirayama photographs the light. He drives home. He reads until he sleeps. The loop closes and opens again like a quiet tide. There is no arc, no project, no destination. There is only the specific quality of Tuesday, and then Wednesday, each one unrepeatable, each one — if attended to with sufficient rigour — sufficient, the way a glass of water is sufficient after a long day.

—

That Wenders made this film in Japan, with a Japanese cast, shooting the extraordinary Tadao Andō-designed public toilets of the Tokyo Toilet Project, is not incidental. Japan has its own cultural vocabulary for what Hirayama embodies — mono no aware, the pathos of things; wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection and impermanence — and Wenders borrows from that vocabulary without condescension. But he does not make a film about Japanese culture. He makes a film about the human problem of being alive in a time that is structurally hostile to presence, and he uses Tokyo precisely because Tokyo — vertical, accelerated, hyper-mediated — makes Hirayama’s practice of attention visible against a background that makes such attention almost impossible, like a flame that only becomes visible when the wind threatens to extinguish it.

The cassette plays. The light comes through the leaves. Neither can be rewound, neither can be held. Hirayama watches. This, Wenders suggests, is enough — not as consolation, but as diagnosis. The question the film leaves hanging, after Yakusho’s face fades from the screen, is whether we are capable of it: not the life Hirayama has built, which requires conditions most of us will not inhabit, but the quality of attention that can make any life something other than mere duration.

A interseccionalidade tornou-se hegemónica no discurso progressista europeu. Mas nesta viagem desde as suas origens nos movimentos negros norte-americanos até às instituições académicas e políticas europeias, algo fundamental se perdeu: a sua dimensão anticapitalista.

A DESPOLITIZAÇÃO DE UM CONCEITO RADICAL

Quando Kimberlé Crenshaw cunhou o termo “interseccionalidade” em 1989, não estava apenas a propor uma forma de “somar” identidades. Estava a denunciar como o sistema jurídico e económico produzia ativamente a invisibilidade das mulheres negras trabalhadoras. O caso que analisou - mulheres negras excluídas de processos de discriminação por não se enquadrarem nem na categoria “mulher” (lida como branca) nem na categoria “negro” (lida como masculina) - revelava algo crucial: as próprias categorias identitárias são produtos de relações materiais de poder.

Como alertou Sirma Bilge, ao ser institucionalizada na Europa, a interseccionalidade sofreu um processo de “branqueamento” (whitening) e despolitização. Foi reduzida a:

• Um exercício de “soma de opressões” (mulher + negra + pobre = mais oprimida)

• Uma ferramenta de gestão da diversidade nas instituições

• Uma competição por reconhecimento simbólico sem transformação estrutural

MATERIALISMO HISTÓRICO E INTERSECCIONALIDADE: UMA SÍNTESE NECESSÁRIA

Uma interpretação marxista da interseccionalidade parte de premissas diferentes:

1. As opressões não são sistemas autónomos que “se intersectam”

Raça, género, sexualidade e classe não são estruturas separadas que ocasionalmente se cruzam. São dimensões coexistentes da organização capitalista do trabalho e da reprodução social.

O capitalismo não explora uma “classe trabalhadora abstracta” - explora corpos racializados, generificados, com sexualidades e capacidades específicas. Como demonstrou Angela Davis, a escravatura não foi apenas uma questão “racial” sobreposta ao capitalismo: foi constitutiva da acumulação primitiva que tornou possível o capitalismo industrial.

2. O capital usa as divisões identitárias como tecnologia de dominação

A segmentação do mercado de trabalho por raça e género não é um “resíduo” pré-capitalista. É uma estratégia ativa de maximização da extração de mais-valia:

• Mulheres racializadas concentradas em trabalho de cuidados precarizado e invisibilizado

• Trabalhadores migrantes sem papéis forçados à super-exploração

• Pessoas LGBTQI+ empurradas para a economia informal

• Pessoas com deficiência excluídas do mercado de trabalho formal

Esta segmentação fragmenta a classe trabalhadora, dificultando a organização coletiva e permitindo a depreciação salarial generalizada.

3. A reprodução social é o elo perdido

A teoria da reprodução social, desenvolvida por feministas marxistas como Tithi Bhattacharya e Cinzia Arruzza, mostra como a opressão de género está organicamente ligada à acumulação capitalista. O trabalho de cuidados - historicamente atribuído às mulheres e não remunerado - é essencial para produzir e reproduzir a força de trabalho que o capital explora.

Quando este trabalho é mercantilizado (creches privadas, lares de idosos, trabalho doméstico pago), são desproporcionalmente mulheres racializadas e migrantes que o executam, em condições precárias. A intersecção não é acidental: é estrutural.

DA TEORIA À PRÁTICA: QUE POLÍTICA INTERSECCIONAL?

Em Portugal e na Europa, vemos hoje duas versões da interseccionalidade em disputa:

Interseccionalidade liberal/institucional:

• Representatividade em conselhos de administração

• Quotas sem redistribuição económica

• “Diversidade” como valor de mercado

• Direitos individuais sem transformação coletiva

Interseccionalidade anticapitalista:

• Organização coletiva contra múltiplas formas de exploração

• Lutas concretas: trabalhadoras de limpeza (maioritariamente racializadas), cuidadoras, trabalhadoras do sexo

• Articulação entre greves laborais e movimentos antirracistas/feministas

• Exigências estruturais: salário mínimo digno, regularização, socialização do trabalho reprodutivo

PORTUGAL COMO LABORATÓRIO

O caso português é revelador. Enquanto o discurso interseccional prolifera nas universidades e ONGs, as trabalhadoras de limpeza nos hospitais - maioritariamente mulheres negras e brasileiras - lutam por contratos dignos contra a subcontratação. Quando fizeram greve, enfrentaram não apenas os patrões mas a indiferença de muitos “interseccionais institucionais”.

A verdadeira interseccionalidade materialista estaria ao lado destas trabalhadoras, compreendendo que a sua luta não é “apenas laboral” nem “apenas racial” nem “apenas de género” - é contra um sistema que racializa, generifica e precariza simultaneamente para maximizar lucros.

CONCLUSÃO: INTERSECCIONALIDADE COMO PRÁXIS REVOLUCIONÁRIA

Recuperar a radicalidade da interseccionalidade significa:

Centrar a análise materialista: Como as opressões servem a acumulação de capital?

Priorizar as lutas dos mais explorados: Não as “vozes mais marginalizadas” em abstracto, mas as trabalhadoras em luta concreta

Articular diferentes frentes: Sindicalismo, antirracismo, feminismo, LGBTQI+, anticapacitismo - não como “aliados” mas como dimensões de uma luta comum

Exigir transformação estrutural: Não inclusão no capitalismo, mas abolição das relações sociais que produzem raça, género e classe como hierarquias

A questão não é identidade versus classe. É compreender que não existe classe sem raça e género, que o capitalismo é sempre racializado e patriarcal, e que qualquer luta verdadeiramente emancipatória deve atacar simultaneamente todas as dimensões da exploração e opressão.