“Many are starting to ask themselves, ‘What will it take for the people in power to wake up?’ But let’s be clear: They are already awake. They know exactly what they are doing. … The leaders are not doing nothing. They are actively creating loopholes and shaping frameworks to benefit themselves and to continue profiting from this destructive system.” — Greta Thunberg speaking outside the COP26 conference in Glasgow in 2021
The global climate movement is at a turning point. So is the movement against police murders and the prison-industrial complex, so also is the movement for clean water for all, so is the movement for public education, and so is the movement for a public healthcare system. They’re all at the same turning point.
After years of intensive action and sacrifice – holding government and corporations accountable, massive demonstrations, strikes, civil disobedience, and information campaigns to educate or awaken legislators and CEOs – it’s now clear that those, by themselves, are no longer having the needed effect.
The climate movement, along with every movement, is confronting the reality that the politicians, CEOs, and organizations touted as leaders, are not just going too slowly; they are consciously moving in the opposite direction – acting against all of the needs of people and planet. Like Michael Jackson moonwalking, they offer the appearance of moving forward while going backward.
Activists are becoming aware that the fight to save ourselves is not a debate, but a struggle for the power to enact what is needed.
It is now upon society to organize to dispossess the corporations, make their assets public, and declare private ownership of natural and social resources illegal. It’s time to discuss how to end the global corporate-market-commodity economy, and create one based on the true value of things and processes – for people and planet.
There is no other way. The abolition movement against slavery is instructive for us today; slavery was ended, not by convincing slaveholders of the error of their ways, but by a new government that dispossessed slaveowners and declared ownership of human beings illegal.
That government began as a movement.
Every crisis – from police killings to toxic water, to growing homelessness and displacement, to climate catastrophe – is driven and funded by corporate power and market imperatives. Every attempt to solve these dire problems is blocked by corporate power – either directly, or more often by the government and state acting on behalf of corporations.
They are not only disregarding people. The leaders of both parties are actively turning America into a corporate dictatorship, suppressing not only voting and protest, but democratically elected institutions, as local governments are coerced by higher officials to do the bidding of giant investment groups. Fascism is not only an ideology of hatred, it is also a business deal: an aggressive campaign to put every aspect of life under corporate control, executed by a government seamlessly joined to business.
In addition to the powerful street heat and electoral campaigns already in motion, in addition to the valiant fighters working within the Democratic Party to hold it accountable to the people, it is essential for movements to begin discussing how they will unite and organize to become a new kind of government. None of the movements can succeed separate from the others.
A movement prepares itself to govern by stating its goals as a platform. It organizes on that platform to use the electoral system, combined with street heat, door-to-door community listening and organizing, and community councils to achieve political power. That is to say, it forms a political party whose goals and strategy are its platform.
To make this possible, it must first enter the stream of conversation among serious people. A process this complex, against an intransigent opponent, requires strategic consideration and study.
Taking over the property of a class and declaring it to be neither private, nor property, is the process of political revolution.
To many, this is simply impossible or at least far in the future. It will be argued that the project is utopian, that there is no workable alternative to capitalism, that such a project is too huge, that human nature makes it impossible.
None of these is true. If we believe them to be true, it’s because billions of dollars and centuries of psychological warfare have been expended to make sure we believe there’s no way out. Both capitalism and private property had beginnings, both have an end. The all-encompassing nature of today’s crisis shows we are at that end. Capitalism is violent. Deprivation is violence. We need change.
Many youths express deep despair, but revolution is neither impossible nor optional, nor is it far in the future.
On what basis do we say we are in a revolution?
Revolution is far more than the act of taking political power. A revolutionary process begins when the technology for producing the necessaries of life changes so much that it conflicts with the social structure of distributing those necessaries and it destroys the social fabric.
That is precisely what we are experiencing today. The introduction of the microchip into industry in the early 1970s began a technological revolution that undercut the foundations not only of capitalism, but of private property itself.
Capitalism’s structural foundation lies in buying human labor power as a commodity, paying workers enough to purchase at least some of the goods they make and come back to work to generate more profit for the company.
A level of technology that can replace humans throughout the production cycle renders such an economy obsolete, and constantly drives down real wages (i.e., the value and price of labor). This is why we have people with full-time jobs who are homeless in the midst of empty housing.
We are in a revolutionary process. Stages of that process – technological, economic, and the social destruction and people’s response to it, which together make up social revolution – are what we have been experiencing since the mid-1970s. Political revolution – the rise of new forces and parties, the struggle for power to achieve new aims – is at our door.
None of our struggles have been wasted. Every step has clarified our tasks and what we face. Every step brings us closer to the ultimate battle to end private property and proceed with our climate tasks cooperatively, creating a society that is fundamentally inclusive of all species.
The Republican Party of Abolition gained power in six years from their founding in 1854, and they only had the telegraph. Today, we have astounding communications technology. With a climate catastrophe deadline only eight years away, we are on a short, and therefore accelerated schedule.
May/June 2022. vol.32. Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction
