Photo: iStock, author: DisobeyArt
2030. That is the year by which climate scientists have warned us that unless 50% of annual carbon emissions are erased an irreversible tipping point will be crossed. At that point, all of the mechanisms that have kept Earth’s climate balanced are at risk of becoming fundamentally destabilized. How did we get here?
The long history of private property shows that, with each crisis in the system, the tactics of the ruling class to remain in power also result in new destabilizations to both human and non-human ecologies. For the past several centuries, we have been entering an era of increasingly asymmetric impact by private property on the planet. The scientists of the ruling class have covered up the truth by calling it the Anthropocene, (the Age of Humans) portraying the ecological impact of private property as being fundamental to all of humanity. But others have devised a better term. It is the Capitalocene (the Age of Capital), the new geological age characterized by the interconnected climate, social and ecological crises indicative of private property in the age white supremacy, colonialism and industrial capitalism.
With carbon emissions currently at an all-time high, what is truly needed to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 and then by100% by 2050? With seven years left to prevent irreparable global climate meltdown, tactics toward political revolution as a strategy for ending private property need to be shared, studied and tested.
A singular crisis
This society is becoming more and more hostile to people who have less and less. The accelerating disruption of the industrial and now service economy workers by digital technology is at the core of the increasingly repressive tactics of the ruling class. The result is a class of workers permanently pushed out of a society predicated on free markets as the method of distribution – left jobless, they are left penniless and left penniless they are left without any of their basic needs met. As revolutionaries have done throughout the history of class society when the system of production contradicts the system of distribution, we fight back. But with reform no longer possible within capitalism, the ruling class’s only tool left is to scale up repression.
Potentiating this process are the “unnatural” disasters caused by a warming and destabilizing climate, and by the broader extinction process of a majority of species of life. But these aren’t two unconnected processes. To place society in philosophical terms outside of the rest of the Web of Life reproduces the violent notion of human supremacy, the worldview that brought us to the crisis in the first place. Rather, we need to think in terms of the historical continuity between human and non-human systems being both producers and products of Earth’s ecology.
The main objective of the ruling class has always been to break the unity of the working class in order to remain in a position of power to accumulate wealth. They accomplished this through an initial splintering of people and the land, both literally and conceptually. Through colonial conquest and the rise of industrial capital, systems of private property have attempted to strip Indigenous peoples the world over from their connection with the ecologies they were co-producing, stripping the land of its stewards and protectors.
Today’s climate crisis is simply a byproduct of the strategy of capitalism’s centuries-long quest for cheap nature. Cheap nature strategies are all the ways in which the ruling class has used violence against all forms of life to create systems of value that reward them and their means of production they control. Through slavery and genocide; through the exploitation of land, water and air; through colonialism and industry; through the sixth mass extinction and climate crisis we’re experiencing now, private property is fundamentally rooted in the ongoing attacks against ecological reproduction.
Fighting to win
Placed in the line of fire in this ongoing process of the corporate ruling class’s drive for cheap nature and the resulting ecological destabilization, our class is fighting these attacks. Through direct action against the means of destruction and against those who sponsor it, cross- racial/gender/generational movements are rising, reclaiming their solidarity with the rest of the Web of Life and fighting through word and deed for an end to private property.
This movement’s tactical targets, the fossil fuel executives, the paid-off politicians, the banks and insurance companies funding the extraction, are important notable and formidable. But the strategic target for the climate justice movement is the ruling class itself. Only by removing the corporate ruling class from power can the planetary crisis be transformed into a revolutionary project of ecological regeneration.
Thus, a needed reinvigoration of the movement’s strategy must be brought into its tactics. If class victory over the rulers is the intended outcome, the climate justice movement must unite with its class allies – those struggling for liberation against housing, environmental, healthcare, education injustice and more – forming a unity of ultimately billions of people fighting to replace private property with common property.
The idea of a united nature and society, both philosophically and practically, is crucial to this revolutionary struggle. As those of us with nothing to gain in this parasitic system, which is spreading the disease of fascism, white supremacy, patriarchy, queer-phobia and ecological destruction to more places than ever before, our strategy is to create a new world based on distribution according to need.
Our tactics are the ways in which we accomplish our strategy, and are based on how our enemy is maneuvering. The enemy’s strategy is to maintain private property by consolidating their power and disposing of any and all opposition to it. If they can keep us as a class fighting each other, we won’t be able to fight them. This oldest trick in the book of divide and conquer can be countered through the intentional building of networks of solidarity. The movement against Cop City and to defend the Atlanta Forest is extremely instructive in this regard.
While tech-billionaires warn of a looming takeover by artificial intelligence that could “destroy civilization,” we can see that the decades-long replacement of humans by automation and digital technology and the subsequent growth of unemployment and underemployment in other sectors, has been long under way. By2010, about 40% of the workforce was made up of contingent workers – that is, part-time, on-call or temp, gig and contract workers. In the early stages of the pandemic, involuntary part-time workers totaled 11.9 million. As shown in the 2020 Rebellions against the murder of George Floyd and many others, millions of displaced workers are not sitting idly by as their disposability in the eyes of the ruling class translates to more lynchings, cop cities, mass incarceration, forced relocation and political repression of them and their communities. The movement is uniting as the consciousness of revolutionaries is developing.
There are enough resources to meet the basic needs of all of life on Earth. That abundance can only be realized through the process of revolutionary transformation. Time is running short, yet we cannot rush. Unifying around a movement to end private property is the only thing that will truly bring the planetary crisis to an end.
Published on July 6, 2023
This article originated in Rally!
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