A Call to Unite for Revolutionary Change
This is the final part of a six-part series in response to the lies propagandized by our capitalist society. Part one, The Capitalist Lie — Welcome to the Slaughterhouse; part two, Shop ’til You Drop — the Unsustainability of Capitalism; part three, The Myth of the Meritocracy and the Palace of Thieves; and part four, Endgame Competition — Heads We Win, Tails You Lose have been followed by part five, The Tyranny of Capital and the Gilded Cage that can be found here https://medium.com/coping-with-capitalism/the-tyranny-of-capital-and-the-gilded-cage-b231a8a4b76e
Reviewing the Terrain
Capitalism’s relationship with climate change is contained in the primary contradiction of this crisis. Growth equates to death.
This is a system deeply dependent on dependency. This feature befouls our entire consumer culture called modernity. We become addicts. Sick and depressed and unable to act or even care when matters become most urgent.
Yet, it is death that we face. The Mass Extinction and the end of our kind….
Is it any wonder?
Basing the entire globe’s economy on consumption while enabling power to tighten its grip — keeping us at one another’s throats.
Could this have worked out any worse? …For humanity, or for the other species?
Our destruction has become monumental. Our folly may well be fatal.
If there is to be any hope, then we must act and change soon.
Know thyself, Know thy Enemy
An inclusive movement to transform must invite our leaders to join us but must also insist they no longer lead. By coming to our agora — which should welcome all without prejudice — they become part of the collective.
In this common space, their power is given back to the people. This is necessary as they have failed us. Certainly, we all must accept our responsibility for these crises, but our leaders must also accept their responsibility and be held to account.
Reform has been without any meaningful effect.
Meanwhile, we have little time remaining.
Things must change. Yet, we still find these same leaders in charge. They ask us to continue to have faith in them.
Like many of us, our leaders are in denial. Denial takes many forms — from the denialists who are quickly becoming pariahs to the lukewarm denial afforded those who keep their heads in the sand. There is also the insidious form of cold denial — that it is too late to do anything to stop disaster or even that we can somehow save modernity and capitalism along with it.
This is the form of denial being promoted by our leaders. This is denying that capitalism, and much of modernity’s construct, must be abandoned to save humanity.
Modeling the Iraqi War, this is what Naomi Klein called the Security Age with its world of red zones and small enclaves of green zone. This is power doing what power does. This is computational and technological power, surveillance, coercive-psyopic violence, and brute force. Power will advance the claims of scarcity to justify hording, profit gouging, and to aggressively protect what is “rightly theirs”.
This is capitalism’s final act.
Our objective must be to flip this power pyramid so that capitalism is stopped for good, and our modern experiment geared down to something we can manage and deal with.
The Fish in the Sea
It is easy to be in denial. We are moderns. We have been seduced by consumerism, materialism and the comforts of our technology. The temptations are all around us. We believe we must keep this world in place so that our desires can be fulfilled, and our fears abated.
We become willing victims.
Growth and development have been the expansionist modern human capitalist mantra. As we’ve already seen, economic disparities restrict access to education and healthcare. This leads directly to explosive population growth.
Demographics are symptomatic of capitalism and not significant causes of climate change activity. Capitalist growth incentivizes not only higher populations, but the development of the populous poor nations. This brings with it both affluence and industrialization and creates better consumers for global goods. It also increases pollution and waste.
Capitalism is most exploitative and profitable with a plethora of consumers.
Unfortunately, it is far too easy to lay the blame on a planet unfit to support this many humans. Even as our leaders promise to make a better capitalist world, we continue to consume planet Earth as if she provides us unlimited resources.
Results speak volumes. Failure stares us straight in the face.
We must shut down the runaway consumption by first shutting down capitalism. This must be done protecting billions of people relying on industrialized food production. Industrialization has created surplus. Hunger has always been a byproduct of economics, not of our capacity to produce and distribute food. As we become more efficient, the effects of industrial agriculture will diminish. As long as we take significant strides to reduce birth rates around the globe, humans should be able to dramatically reduce energy demands and its effects on our habitat.
Along with those unwilling to act, authoritarians will be among our most significant threats. As consumers, we have been objectified and as workers we are exploited. We are to be the pawns in this game. We are expendable. Walled-off leaders become authoritarians acting without impunity through genocide, mass murder, black ops, and their death cults.
A vast amount of power is in a very few hands. This places all of humanity in peril.
Unification
To Educate — Coming together relies on getting the truth to as much as possible. As we educate, we unite. While we have many challenges, we are also afforded significant advantages. We can exploit modernity even as we struggle with it.
To Organize — As a non-hierarchical, revolutionary movement, we should utilize a cellular organizational structure where individual cells work somewhat independently to create tactical goals and agendas and manage these efforts. Each cell would work within the greater network of other cells sharing, correcting and advancing the strategic vision and goals.
This movement must be fluid and adaptable. As a people-led movement, our operations should involve a variety of organizations and movements within the larger network all working towards this common goal to overturn hegemonic leaders and their capitalist eco-culture.
Tactical goals (often strategically identified by specific organizations working at the cellular level) can become shared amongst other cells and even become part of the greater strategy.
A critical component is inclusiveness. The revolutionary network should not narrow its vision or goals to exclude viable members within this movement. This can even include sympathetic politicians. Yet, we must never forget the moral imperative that can not be abridged.
All are welcome, but our goals are paramount.
So, a movement of resistance can evolve through numerical strength into a revolutionary struggle.
To Unite — Education, organizing and uniting are continuous processes. This would be a global worker-consumer revolutionary movement. One might contemplate the work of many similar organizations through recent and more distant history — labor movements, civil rights struggles, anti-colonial revolutions, BLM-Occupy radical continuities, Mondragon, etc.
Although we are labeled as “workers” and “consumers” and may, as individuals, wish to shed these restrictive and derogatory labels, as revolutionaries we should embrace them. For these are the roles we have been assigned within the capitalist structure.
Understanding capitalism and how it functions, one must eventually conclude that the system is dependent on dependency, and this is the system’s ultimate Achilles heel.
As workers, we impact production, but labor has been commodified through globalization and technological advancements. Disrupting production will continue to have its place in a worker-consumer revolutionary movement, but capitalism doesn’t simply depend on production.
Capitalism depends on the market.
This is the ace we reveal from our consumer sleeves — we don’t simply control the market, we are the market.
We have the power, but without each other we have little ability to express this power and change reality.
Command, Sovereignty and Moral Authority
To Assemble — One effective strategy is to utilize People Assemblies to focus on solving problems. We will find that pushing authority down to the local/cellular level will make for better decisions, particularly as it affects their orbits. Similar assemblies can take place on various scales throughout the network.
While precious revolutionary experience must be embraced, a critical component should be centering the voice of the unheard. While it is imperative to refrain from silencing any voices, our movement must respond to the exploitation of our most vulnerable members. We must place women at the center of these conversations. Any who are oppressed, LGBTQ+, young people, black and brown, the poor, working people, and those who have been traditionally left out or left behind by mainstream capitalist society must be central in our discourse. Our mandate makes us stewards of Mother Earth and all her children.
When we center the voice of the unheard, we should remain attentive, respectful and leave plenty of space for the unheard to occupy. This is what an inclusive revolutionary movement must demand of each of us.
The moral imperative to save humanity and as much biodiversity as possible gives this movement its most important weapon of all — Moral Authority. This absolute authority must be nurtured and cherished at every step as it builds momentum.
This revolution must be non-violent and peaceful. This provides the best gateway to the future. Uniting people behind the revolution is critical as our power is only realized through cohesion and numbers. We must grow or die.
The opposition wields political power and physical might. We have little of either.
We are fighting for justice. This is a people’s collective striving to bring peace and security to our communities. A beast of many heads can’t be defeated through force but can be starved. Our strengths must be Moral Authority and Unity.
The opposition will reveal themselves to be devoid of morality. While we wish to save humanity and the other creatures of our Earth, the opposition is likely to devolve into cruelty and ignorance.
The people must lead a movement under the sovereignty of Planet Earth empowered with the Moral Authority that is our righteous cause.
Our Revolution
The Tactical — Tactical use of methodology can be global, regional or local. Local tactics can drive cell strategies but should also advance the greater worldwide strategic objectives.
Individual local cells may have specific causes they are looking to advance that might even conflict with other cells elsewhere, but all cells must share the global objectives of the greater network for planetary liberation.
The Arsenal — The weapons we are armed with all have tactical and strategic applications. These are Boycott, Demonstration and Strike.
As we’ve discussed, our impact on the market is more substantive than how we can disrupt production.
Boycott is a form of passive resistance. One must not act to be active. Tactically, this can be used to help shape oppositional behavior. Companies, specific products or entire industries could be targeted by tactical boycott.
The market has the ability, when unified, to bring a single company to its knees. This is accomplished simply by not buying from the targeted company until it acquiesces.
Demonstration would likely be centered on non-violent civil disobedience. Demonstrators would have to be skilled and trained and be willing and able to disrupt the capitalist structure. Numbers would be less important in these sorts of demonstrations, while skilled and trained non-violent participants would be essential.
Demonstration can be used to disrupt production, supply chains or other infrastructures. As with all these methods, demonstrations would be tactically incorporated mainly while building towards a disruptive revolutionary populace that can alter the trajectory of society.
Using Strikes to disrupt producers and their allies would likely be a last resort both tactically and strategically.
The Cooperative — Without Mutual Aid, none of this is possible. After all, we must walk the walk and create a cooperative conservation-driven underground economy. It is this subversive, parallel economy that makes the whole revolution possible and gives the movement true purpose.
Only through this anti-capitalism can we grow this revolution and its alternative economics. As we become strategic, it is this economy that must become dominate to capitalism and leverage it into non-existence.
This is the cashless free-exchange market non-economy.
This is people helping people and our fellow species and Mother Earth.
For us to consume our own goods, we must eventually produce our own goods. Importantly, these are a humble set of necessary goods and services — nutritious food, clean water, healthy air, shelter and eventually healthcare, childcare and education. Our purpose is non-negotiable and serves our lives as we serve one another.
Life centers around an informal local community that is networked to the greater collective.
Once this new economy has matured, we can move towards a strategic boycott of the entire capitalist market.
Demonstrations will strategically dovetail into a complete paralysis of the political authorities and their authoritarian proxies along with all their capitalist institutions.
Once we strategically strike, the day will be won. We will no longer be making or buying their products while we completely shut down the death machine they call modern capitalism.
They are neither innovators nor unpredictable. They favor violence, subterfuge, lies, divide and conquer and, like wolves, will go for the weakest members of our herd.
Our response must be as one. We must rush to defend our fellows no matter how they are demonized by the bigoted hate-mongers. There can be no exception to this. We should be all for one and one for all or we lose Moral Authority and will lose this war.
Divide and conquer must be a thing of the past.
Their soldiers have mastered violence. Never be so foolhardy as to take this beast on from its heads. Yes, we are like fleas.
As they bring the violence to bear, we must rush to stand together. Our opposition must be as one, but our responses three-fold.
While they are united only in a common individual pursuit of self-interest, we have one interest. This can only be gained through peace and relies on love, cohesion and numbers, not physical might.
They rely on competition and have given this to us for suckling. We remain their patsies when we play by their rules.
We must care for our children and teach them to think for themselves. Then they will teach us true knowledge.
Once we walk on the battlefield, much of our plans will be tossed aside. We must be flexible, adaptable and cover as many aspects as we can, but the integrity of our singular cause must never be brought into question — we are here to save our biological family.
“Austerity” will be the Newspeak term for bringing capital to bear upon these red zones. Our expectations must be humbled as we come to one another’s aid and comfort.
Whether from our efforts or its own, this serpent will eat itself in the end. There will be an inflationary collapse and all of society may well go with it. Better to be prepared than otherwise.
The Right Time
That’s right. That time is now.
We must begin to unite under this cause. Our revolution must begin as a movement.
This is a call for each of us and the institutions devoted to protect us in our various identities to come together.
We must never forget that there may be any of a number of supposed justifications for a hierarchical global economic structure, but the true and most sacrosanct rationale is this very fact — that it is hierarchical and ensures that entrenched power remains that way.
We must also recognize and exploit our efficiencies. Even as capitalism depends on inefficiency, we must be thrifty and efficient. Ours is the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.
In closing, consider…. Revolution is the only sane recourse for anyone wishing to end this mass murder suicide madness.
Better ideas, contributions, corrections, critiques, and ways to advance this agenda are all desirable.
Take the first steps by commenting on this article.
This is Coping with Capitalism.
