12 Revolution: Creating an Ecological Society
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced … you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.
—JAMES BALDWIN1
IN ORDER TO REPLACE CAPITALISM with an ecological society we need a revolution. Given that need, how do we get there from here? Let us summarize the main arguments made so far.
WHY WE NEED A REVOLUTION
The social-ecological crisis is upon us and is getting worse at an accelerating rate. The Trump administration introduces an entirely new dimension, potentially making social and ecological deterioration even more severe. Many people around the world continue to live deprived, precarious, and unnecessarily shortened lives with little hope for improvement. At the same time, a degraded environment threatens the lives and livelihoods of billions of people across the globe and calls into question the continuation of an interconnected human society. The equilibrium of Earth’s biogeochemical pathways is destabilizing because of the gigantic quantities of human-made chemicals that are being pumped into the atmosphere, the oceans, the soil, and the bodies and tissue of all living creatures. Changes to land use and climate are making it impossible for ecosystems to continue to function as they have; species are migrating to different ecozones; many are becoming extinct. We are tipping the Earth system into an entirely new state, one that humans have never experienced in our 200,000 years on this planet. Chaotic barbarism may well replace stable societies and some believe that our very existence as a species is threatened.
Possibilities for Reform
All progressive change in capitalist societies over the last few hundred years grew out of mass strikes and demonstrations, agitation, and other forms of direct action and civil disobedience—actions that forced legislators to acquiesce to the demands of the people. In the words of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”2
Fighting for and winning real reforms is essential, yet reforms alone cannot solve the crisis. The social-ecological crisis will not disappear if we sweep away the aggressive deregulated form of capitalism known as neoliberalism or overturn the international free-trade treaties enacted in the last three decades. Rather, it is the way capitalism operates—the way the system must operate—that makes it so destructive. Economic exploitation and inequality in the service of profit, imperial competition, racism, sexism, and warfare for geopolitical advantage and access to resources are integral parts of capitalism. Bitterly fought-for and hard-won reforms are under constant threat of being reversed and undone as the balance of social power shifts back and forth. This is being amply demonstrated in the United States by the policy proposals and actions of the new Trump administration.
The ruling class will fight constantly to roll back any environmental or social reforms that threaten capital’s profits or freedom to operate. And if they can’t reverse a reform outright, they will take the long view, chipping away at the edges: influencing governments to go soft on enforcing labor and environmental regulations; restricting funding to government agencies that are designed to enforce or implement the reforms; seeking out legal loopholes and work-arounds put in place by legislators. No social reform is ever fully accepted or deemed permanent by capital.
In the United States, the social programs of the 1930s through the 1960s—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, the rights of workers to form unions, the gains of the civil rights movements, of women, gay people, the elderly, the disabled—all can be gradually hollowed out over time or ended with a single blow. All social and ecological considerations are secondary to the imperative of capitalism: the accumulation of profits, kept secure in the hands of the ruling class. The United States ruling class took a more aggressive posture toward social reforms after the Second World War, and in the 1970s it forged an all-out attack on previous gains.3 We should expect this class war from above to continue or intensify whenever it feels conditions permit and require it.
Need for System Change
Capitalism has no off switch, no mechanism for changing its basic methods of operation. No matter how bad things get, capitalists cannot change the fundamental imperative of the system—the drive for profit. A system to replace capitalism, one based on economic and political equality and ecologically sound economies is both possible and essential.
Cooperative relations and relative equality have been the norm for most of human existence and are still the guiding values in parts of the world today. In Part Two (chapters 5, 6, and 7) we showed that there is nothing inherent in humans, in our history, or in the way ecosystems function that prevents a completely different economic and social system based on such values from being successful. And although there is no guarantee that such a new society will solve the social and ecological problems we face, it is our only hope of doing so.
We currently have the resources and technological know-how to create a society that can supply everyone with the essentials of a good life. As the Wall Street Journal reported in the spring of 2015, unintentionally underlining the contradictions that lie at the heart of capitalism: “The global economy is awash as never before in commodities like oil, cotton and iron ore, but also with capital and labor—a glut that presents several challenges as policy makers struggle to stoke demand.”4 The richest 1 percent of the world’s population has accumulated so much wealth that, in 2016, this select group of individuals controlled more than half of the world’s estimated $255 trillion in private wealth. Their wealth is equivalent to about twice the total annual world production of goods and services. If we no longer spend trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons, the military and the arms trade, and on marketing, packaging, advertising, replication of production, overproduction, and built-in waste of all kinds, that money—and huge reservoirs of human knowledge and labor power—would become available to meet the needs of society and the planet.
If the available financial and material resources and human labor are freed up and put to use to solve the social and ecological problems currently facing Earth and its inhabitants, creation of an ecological society is eminently possible. More than enough resources exist to eradicate hunger, end poverty, and build the new infrastructure—for research and development, for sanitation, water, energy, housing, education, medical care, transportation, parks, industry, and agriculture—that is needed to provide everyone with a good quality of life.
A VISION OF A NEW SOCIETY
We have outlined our ideas and views of the principles, practices, and characteristics of a society created for the purpose of establishing social equity and ecologically sound interactions between humans and the rest of the natural world. We have used the terms ecological, ecosocialist, and socialist as interchangeable descriptions of this type of society. Whatever we call it, such a society can only happen with revolutionary change, a complete rearrangement of social power, the end of capitalism and class-based society.
The word revolution is currently used by all manner of people in very different contexts. Some environmentalists and politicians talk of the need for an “energy revolution” or a “great transformation” in infrastructure, but they believe that those things can be achieved through private-public collaboration without significantly altering the prevailing power relations. It is therefore important to define what we mean by revolution, which to us means the total rearrangement of social power and its reconstitution on the basis of substantive equality. In other words, the only way to create an ecologically based society is by creating a classless society based on cooperation and the democratic decisions of the entire population. Only by overturning current social relations is it possible to create a society compatible with the well-being of the planet and its people.
Just as capitalism replaced feudalism through a series of revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, replacing a ruling class of aristocrats and their functionaries with a new ruling class of capitalists, revolutions are necessary today to replace the capitalists and their functionaries.
It’s Not Too Late
To those who say we are too late, we ask: Too late for what? To struggle for a better world means taking the world as it is and working to transform it. Although the ecological and political conditions and trends are in many respects quite desperate, we are not condemned to continue degrading the environment or our social conditions. Based on what has already happened—the release of greenhouse gases and a multitude of other pollutants into the environment—a certain amount of global warming will continue regardless of what we do, with all its negative side effects, and pollutants will contaminate the biosphere for a very long time.
However, we can stop the slide to an even more degraded Earth, poorer in species and in the health of remaining species. We can use the vast amount of available human and material resources to reorient the economy to benefit all people. An ecological society will allow us to do all the things that are currently off the table, that capitalism has repeatedly shown itself unable to achieve: providing all people with the ability to develop their full potential.
This goal can be accomplished in ways that regenerate and maintain fully functioning and healthy ecosystems by remediating the global commons, halting land- and species-degrading practices, reforesting more areas, and planting wildlife corridors and other sanctuaries that wild nature can return to.
ORGANIZING FOR CHANGE: BUILDING A MASS MOVEMENT
“An anti-capitalist political movement can start anywhere,” writes David Harvey, noted professor of anthropology and geography. “The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one moment to another in mutually reinforcing ways.”5
Even in a country like the United States where there has been relentless propaganda denying the existence of climate change, ordinary people recognize that it is happening and that human activity is the cause. According to a March 2016 Gallup poll, almost two-thirds of Americans believe that global warming, the driver of wider climate change, is underway and that it is caused by human activity. Fully 64 percent stated that they were worried either a “great deal” or a “fair amount” that global warming will affect them in their lifetimes; 41 percent said it represented a “serious threat.”6
As for the economy, the May 23, 2016, cover of Time blazed the title “Capitalism: How to Save It.” In that issue, Rana Foroohar cites a recent Harvard Institute of Politics poll that found only 42 percent of Americans aged nineteen to twenty-nine—and only a slight majority of older Americans—“supported capitalism.” As the author notes, the poll indicates not only that millennials are comfortable with the socialist label, but that there is a general dissatisfaction and discomfort with the capitalist system. The data “shows Americans have plenty of concrete reasons to question their system,” she says, highlighting the fact that workers have been getting a smaller slice of the economic pie while the median hourly wage of full-time workers, after adjusting for inflation, has increased by less than 4 percent during more than three decades.7
Abolishing an unequal and violent system, one that does not balk at destroying the resiliency and sustainability of the planet itself, will require a sustained, coordinated revolutionary mass movement: one that is centered on the power of working people to stop production when necessary, and has the vision and capacity to bring into being a new and totally different society. This movement needs to recognize that power must be taken away from the capitalist class, its assistants and hangers-on, and placed in the hands of the people. The large number of issues we must resolve are those created or made worse by capitalism; the key to solving them is solidarity. The path forward is to recognize they can’t be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion isolated from each other.
To be successful, any revolutionary upheaval will have to dwarf the mobilizations we have seen recently around the world and take place on a qualitatively different basis. It will have to be organized to reflect the principles of the future society and take control of the centers of production so as to bring capitalism to a halt. Factories, farms, businesses, entire neighborhoods, cities, larger geographical areas, and nation-states will have to come under the control of the people. Street demonstrations that are not tied to eventually achieving prolonged and generalized strike activity and to the systematic occupation and takeover of factories, businesses, farms, and schools will be insufficient for victory.
The speed with which decisions can be made today, as well as information about how successful revolutions can spread, hampers security crackdowns, and enhances the chances of solidarity revolutions. But we need to be prepared to exercise great caution and flexibility in communications because of the extent of government spying on citizens’ electronic communications, particularly in the United States and the U.K., and the ability of the security apparatus to shut down Internet and cell phone service.
Overcoming Fragmentation
A sustained revolutionary process, one that attains the social-ecological goals we have set forth, will require the majority of the population to actively participate in the process of change. The need for a majority of the population to work toward transforming into a new society in a coordinated and organized approach raises the issue of how to overcome the staggering amount of fragmentation found among activist organizations.
To fill the gap left by the decline in public delivery of much-needed services and the lack of large radical political organizations with broad agendas, single-issue non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become the main expression of the fight for social and ecological progress. Many receive some or all of their funding from businesses and foundations that can then influence a group’s message. This leads to increased conservatism in formerly more politically combative organizations.
An additional factor in the rise of NGOs was the late twentieth-century demise of highly centralized and dictatorial regimes that labeled themselves socialist. This has led many activists, particularly in the United States, to reject formal large-scale membership organizations in favor of small, single-issue-oriented groups arranged in loose ad hoc networks.
Older notions of solidarity are no longer as attractive to a new generation of worker-activists, trade unionists, and intellectuals. There has been an ideological assault on collective action, making it difficult to build an ongoing movement for broad social-ecological change based in factories, businesses, fields, and campuses.
Some actually consider the current political and organizational fragmentation to be a good thing. Even those who believe that systemic change is necessary are convinced that numerous formally splintered, “horizontal” efforts may somehow gradually coalesce into a larger, more amorphous force that will foreshadow important aspects of the new society by experimenting at the local level with direct democracy and new economic arrangements.
If we are to stand a chance of taking on the forces arrayed against us, it’s clear that we will need some kind of long-term organization, or series of connected organizations, held accountable by an informed and active membership dedicated to a democratically decided upon program. The social activist and author of This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein, recognizes some of the limitations inherent in the idea of “spontaneous coalescing” and “horizontalist organizing”:
I have, in the past, strongly defended the right of young movements to their amorphous structures—which means rejecting identifiable leadership or eschewing programmatic demands. And there is no question that old political habits and structures must be reinvented to reflect the new realities, as well as past failures. But … as many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today’s transformative movements can afford….
In practice, that means that, despite endless griping, tweeting, flashmobbing, and occupying, we collectively lack many of the tools that built and sustained transformative movements of the past.8
There is a growing recognition that fragmented and single-issue groups need to link up because all the struggles for social, economic, and environmental justice are really the same struggle, and must be united to challenge capitalism if there is to be lasting change. No amount of tinkering with the current system will be sufficient: changing the system is the only path to a humane and ecological society. As Mark Bittman explained in his New York Times food column:
I have spent a great deal of time talking about the food movement and its potential, because to truly change the food system you really have to change just about everything: good nutrition stems from access to good food; access to good food isn’t going to happen without economic justice; that isn’t going to happen without taxing the superrich; and so on. The same is true of other issues: You can’t fix climate change or the environment without stopping the unlimited exploitation of natural and human resources…. Same with social well-being. Everything affects everything.9
There are indications that many people are coming to such an understanding, that the various struggles are really all part of a single overall goal—for a humane, just, and ecologically sound future. For instance, at the People’s Climate March in New York City in September 2014, hundreds of thousands of people participated, from all sorts of groups with varying mainstream concerns. Unions, community groups, civil rights and Native American organizations, social and environmental justice groups, and many others united with a variety of environmental groups for the effort.
Similarly, the Black Lives Matter movement has involved many who previously might not have placed racial justice at the top of their agendas but who are beginning to see that, in addition to being a clear moral imperative, the fight against racism is an essential part of a more general fight against an unjust system. And Black Lives Matter, in turn, has endorsed the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions) movement against Israeli apartheid, recognizing that the United States, with its military and political support, is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”10
The 2016 Standing Rock actions against the Dakota Access pipeline mobilized support from hundreds of tribes, environmental organizations, city governments, veterans, and others around the world, eventually leading to an encampment of over 10,000 people that successfully forced the United States government to intervene and stop the pipeline. It is a living example of the words of a song written by union organizer Joe Hill over a century ago: “There is power in a band of working men, when they stand hand-in-hand.”11 (On the other hand, the decisions on the Dakota Access and the Keystone XL pipelines have been overturned in the early days of the Trump administration, providing us with another example—capitalist reforms can never be counted on to be permanent or effective. These pipelines will make it easier to exploit the especially polluting Bakken Shale oil deposits in North Dakota and the Alberta, Canada, tar sands.)
University students from various organizations have begun to realize that there is considerable strength gained by uniting their struggles. This 2015 AP news story highlights the organizing efforts of a Columbia University student who, since her freshman year, has been one of the leaders of a high-profile campus climate justice campaign:
Beyond the call for divestments, students have thrown other causes into the mix. After fighting to get Columbia University to divest from fossil fuels, a student group organized a coalition with five other campus groups that tackle issues such as racism, sexual assault and workers’ rights. Together, as the Barnard Columbia Solidarity Network, they issued merged demands to campus administrators. “I don’t think they’ve dealt with anything like this,” said Daniela Lapidous, a senior and a group member. “Only by building these coalitions will we win any of our demands.”12
An extraordinary push toward solidarity began within the January 21, 2017, massive anti-Trump Women’s March on Washington, drawing in people from, large variety of social and environmental organizations. Trump and his advisors have quickly made clear that they have a broad retrograde agenda that will potentially harm large segments of the population and the biosphere. As people realize this, and with the absurd and outrageous statements and actions pouring forth from Trump and others in the administration, a new wave of solidarity among social and environmental groups has taken hold that builds on the Women’s March. An article in the New York Times describes the response: “Call it Protest Nation: Activists across the country have been strengthening old partnerships and building new ones.”13 This is the type of a political moment in which it is quite possible to build a strong and united organization or lasting coalition dedicated to radical socioeconomic change.
An example of solidarity that comes from long ago illustrates the sentiment of an old union slogan; an injury to one is an injury to all. As attacks against the Plains Indians escalated during the construction of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the abolitionist and women’s rights campaigner Wendell Phillips wrote, “Every blow struck on those rails is heard round the globe. Haunt that road with such dangers that none will dare use it.”14
Today we need to “haunt” the oil and gas pipelines in support of native people fighting for clean land and water as well as to stand together with all oppressed groups in their struggles. From Black Lives Matter demonstrations to the Standing Rock occupation, and the many other important fights taking place around the U.S. and the world. They are all part of the same fight, for social, economic, and ecological justice.
Unification vs. Big-Tent Problems
In addition to a minimum set of agreed-upon demands, people within a unified movement need to abide by and promote new values among those involved in the struggle—solidarity, respect for all forms of difference, and sustained support for traditionally marginalized groups. The movement is advanced through changing people right now, promoting ethical behavior toward others inside and outside the movement and personally acting in ways that are socially and ecologically responsible. Vigorous but respectful debate will be required in all these areas based on an understanding that we are all committed to the same project. We need to act in solidarity with one another to the fullest extent possible, and begin to practice values we espouse for the new ecological society: reciprocity, cooperation, honesty, and solidarity.
As more immediate problems are tackled, there is always a danger of insufficient analysis and political understanding, of demands being too loosely defined, or the cause of the underlying problem not being acknowledged. That can lead to a big-tent approach, in which there are indeed lots of people involved: it may look like the movement is growing, but it then becomes a political vacuum dominated by reformists. This results in the absence of demands and actions aimed at actually changing the system. Cash-flush, media-savvy opportunists who act to channel the movement into safe conduits always ultimately fill such a vacuum. The big-tent approach typifies the activities and purpose of the Democratic Party: a vehicle of the elite that anyone can join, with politics that tend to reflect the interests of the ruling elite, which funds and controls the party.
As exciting as it was, the 2014 People’s Climate March is an example of how a big-tent approach can lead to a dead end. The organizers, mainly big green NGOs, refrained from making particular demands, claiming that doing so would be divisive. They preferred instead to focus on numbers, making it the “largest climate march in history.” Many who participated became disoriented because they were given nothing to do after the demonstration. Though the issue and the desire to do something in the months that followed didn’t go away, organizational problems led to the dissipation of the massive energy and momentum crystallized in the giant demonstration. Nevertheless, getting tens of thousands of people to come out to a march against climate change illustrates how many people want more to be done to protect our Earth and rein in fossil fuel production, as well as the willingness of many groups to come together in a common struggle. This is an extremely hopeful sign and one that could be built on.
When the Goal Is Radical Social Transformation
Rather than the more traditional and grassroots method of organizing people, most NGOs focus on a variety of top-down strategies such as legal challenges, public relations campaigns, media stunts, and funding friendly candidates for local, state, and national offices. At the same time as NGOs have risen in importance, labor unions, especially in the developed world, have become more and more top-down and undemocratic. They are organized in such a way that rank-and-file workers are effectively excluded from active participation in determining campaigns or strikes. Occasionally, supporters of NGOs and union members are asked to sign petitions, write emails or call government officials but their input is limited to a supporting role (and in the case of NGOs, constant requests for donations). Some organizations turn to demonstrations or civil disobedience to garner publicity and wider support. Occasionally, large mobilizations are organized but any demands, goals, and demonstration details are kept firmly in the hands of the large NGOs with money and resources.
An absolutely essential ingredient, what used to happen regularly in unions and other mass organizations, is missing from current efforts. This includes getting to know your constituency, finding out what is on people’s minds, and carrying out educational activities so that people fully understand the issues they are most concerned with, how they are connected to other issues, and the power relations that need to be overcome. This is sometimes called “deep organizing,” and it is what is lacking in most unions and liberal organizations that have jettisoned their radicalism to keep their donors happy or to retain a seat at the table of mainstream political discussion. Yet the history of radical activism indicates that people at the grass roots level need to be involved in setting the agenda and encouragement is needed for local leaders that organically emerge during the struggle.
Labor organizer Jane McAlevey makes clear the critical importance of this approach in her two important books about the labor movement, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) and No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Organizations working for real change need to commit to deep organizing resources, as we work to bring together fragmented organizations within a coalition or overarching organizational framework. As McAlevey explains with regard to labor unions, such an approach widens the support base:
[It] places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all…. [S]pecific injustice and outrage are the immediate motivation, but the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority, from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. Individual campaigns matter in themselves, but they are primarily a mechanism for bringing new people into the change process and keeping them involved. The organizing approach relies on mass negotiations to win, rather than the closed-door deal making typical of both advocacy and mobilizing. Ordinary people help make the power analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome. They are essential and they know it.15
Organization, Vision, and Solidarity
When large segments of the population become actively involved in struggle, they become protagonists who produce a new ethics and ideology of equality, solidarity, reciprocity, and concern for collective needs. The issue that Marx raised of “the educator [who] must himself be educated” is one that must be faced during a transition to a new society.16 Movements and parties need to be aware of the various ways in which dominant forms of social oppression and exclusion can be replicated—even within organizations committed to their eradication. Educating the educator and implementing new ethics during the struggle for change is an essential part of any struggle for a new society.
Examples of groups consciously educating members to help forge new ethics during the struggle for social change were explored in chapter 11: promoting of sharing, cooperation, and equality by the MST in Brazil and the Kurdish and Zapatista movements promoting equality for women. Another example comes from the fight against privatization of the municipal water system in Cochabamba. Oscar Olivera, former executive secretary of the Federation of Factory Workers of Cochabamba, Bolivia’s lead organizer of the water wars in Cochabamba in 2000, described the victory against water privatization and the armed forces of the state: “The people won in Cochabamba because of two things: an all-encompassing cosmo-vision based on indigenous values of reciprocity and solidarity, and organization and coordination at every level.”17 Its success resulted from the combination of a vision for a radically reordered world that went far beyond control of water and reforming current institutions, allied with a militant and democratic working-class organization.
The ruling class has many weapons at its disposal: virtually unlimited financial clout and control over the media, the education system, the state, the judiciary, the police and the armed forces. What social force exists in society powerful enough to bring the whole system to a standstill?—the mass of people. If we stop working, the machine grinds to a halt very quickly: no more mining, no more transportation, no more production of any kind without the decision of those who do the job. Only the people who do the work, organized across all sectors and borders, possess the power and the motivation to change the system.
Organizational Leadership
In any transition to a new society, and indeed any human endeavor involving many people, leaders will emerge. Even in movements described as leaderless, such as the Occupy Movement, there are people who take responsibility for certain aspects organizing, communications, and facilitating whatever legal and practical maneuvers are necessary and optimal for occupation at the various sites.
In a profoundly democratic society, there will also be people who, because of their particular skills or inclinations, will become leaders. There is nothing inherently wrong with producing leaders—people who take an issue more seriously, accept more responsibility, or have the skills necessary to be successful. But any leadership must be kept accountable to the people. In this regard, we can learn from historical examples and contemporary experiments and model our practices accordingly. This means ensuring that there is no extra pay or perks for serving as leader and that elections are democratic and transparent, with any decision instantly revocable by another vote. In addition, the practice of rotating key leadership positions in organizations whenever possible serves a number of purposes: promoting transparency in decision making, developing leadership capabilities in more people, and preventing the establishment of a permanent group with its own interests that comes to see itself as separate from the mass of people.
The contention of the right, dismissing all attempts at fundamental change, is that “all revolutions end in tyranny” because humans are corruptible and greedy by nature. In contrast, we understand that humans are capable of a wide range of behaviors, with specific configurations reinforced by the economic and social conditions and values of the society in which they live. The transformation from capitalist behaviors and ethics to those of an ecological society organized so that it is synonymous with ecosocialism will not begin with a revolution. It will be a continuous struggle, one that will require time and conscious effort to bring about, during the struggle and after a successful revolution.
FIGHTING FOR REFORMS AS PART OF THE STRUGGLE FOR SYSTEM CHANGE
In the long struggle ahead, it will be necessary to fight for immediate gains and genuine reforms that help us live better right now and at the same time build the confidence and organization that can take on the system in a revolutionary reconstitution of social power. This in no way negates what we have argued earlier: reforms by themselves do not offer a way out of the plight we’re in. Radical social and ecological organizations need to unite in order to fight together for large and small social and ecological battles that might possibly be won in the near to medium term—but they must do so certain in the knowledge that a revolution is ultimately necessary to end capitalism and transition to a cooperative, fully democratic society based on equality and ecological sustainability. Individual demands need to be made within that framework, one that pushes beyond what the system could possibly accommodate.
A revolutionary transition won’t come about without a very long period of tireless and persistent organizing and struggle. When one examines the struggle of slaves and abolitionists to end slavery in the United States, it is clear that the fight to replace the social-economic system of capitalism with one at the service of humanity and the biosphere on which it depends will necessitate an even more massive struggle. This may take decades, perhaps significantly longer.
Successful struggles for reform will alleviate, slow down, and prevent some of the ecological and social damage endemic to capitalism. They will provide possibilities for educating others to the necessity for systemic change. Victories, however small—such as winning a local strike or banning tar sand oil from a city—provide a needed lift for activists and generate enthusiasm, confidence, belief, and trust in one another, thereby nurturing stronger organization for the next fight.
Every victory, no matter how small, builds confidence and organization. Each victory needs to be considered as part of the larger struggle for change. This includes our demands and fights for full economic, social, and political equality for people of color; indigenous rights; an end to the scourge of hunger and poverty amid plenty; full and equal rights for women; the introduction of renewable energy sources and the end of fossil fuels; empowerment of workers through unionization; full equality for transgender people; more resources for public education; cancellation of student debt and the debt of developing countries; an end to discrimination against immigrants, Muslims, and refugees; more hospitals; well-paid, unionized jobs for everyone; an end to endless wars; and vastly increased taxes on the rich and corporations.
The list of necessary reforms is long and there is always the danger of activists taking up only single-issue causes or getting caught up in striving to win limited reforms, believing that they can solve our problems while retaining the basic structures and tenets of capitalism. In a prolonged struggle there is also the danger of losing faith in an alternative future altogether. Ways must be found for participants in a revolutionary struggle to find other meaning and joy aside from their participation in the fight. This will help people maintain their spirits and commitment over the long haul.
REPRESSION AND RESISTANCE
Ruling elites across the world have used neoliberal ideology to argue against any alternative to the capitalist system and its rationing of goods through markets. This includes an ongoing effort to cut social services. In 2009, David Harvey described the level of repression that is arrayed against those who fight for a different world:
The last thirty years … has seen the emergence of systems of governance that seem immune to legitimacy problems and unconcerned even with the creation of consent. The mix of authoritarianism, monetary corruption of representative democracy, surveillance, policing and militarization (particularly through the war on terror), media control and spin suggests a world in which the control of discontent through disinformation, fragmentations of oppositions, and the shaping of oppositional cultures through the promotion of NGOs tends to prevail with plenty of coercive force to back it up if necessary.18
When an effort to change some aspect of the system is deemed a threat, the armed power of the state, and its control of the law and criminal justice systems have been used time and again to crush groups that threaten the existing order. Sometimes the groups are fighting for truly revolutionary change, but sometimes they are just trying to improve their immediate situation within the system. Movement groups of all types in the United States and elsewhere—socialist and communist parties, anarchists, civil rights groups, Native Americans, striking workers, women, immigrants, environmental activists—have been relentlessly targeted and attacked by the government or their surrogates. This can take many forms: infiltration by agents provocateurs, disinformation campaigns, laws enacted against a group’s existence or activities, physical disruption of peaceful demonstrations, frivolous but costly legal cases, arrests to slow momentum and consume scarce resources, and targeted assassinations of leaders.
The great fear of authorities everywhere is that, as social movements grow and people expand their political horizons and begin to generalize from their situation, reform may spill over into revolution. In a rerun of the nefarious activities of the FBI and CIA during the civil rights and Vietnam War era, activists are increasingly likely to be targeted by law enforcement agencies and labeled as “domestic terrorists.” Whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden are vilified and, whenever the opportunity presents itself, imprisoned.
Even relatively minor challenges to the power of the ruling class, such as the Occupy Movement, are met with a robust, uncompromising, and coordinated reaction from the ruling elite, all the way up to the White House. There is a very low threshold of tolerance for active signs of discontent that in part comes from the volatility and instability of twenty-first-century capitalism.
We can therefore anticipate that to replace the entire social-economic system of capitalism—with its financially and politically powerful corporations and institutions and its monopoly on the use of force—a truly gigantic movement will be required, one that mobilizes all sectors of society, such as what we saw briefly during the Arab Spring. James Baldwin’s observation quoted at the start of the chapter is applicable: if even reforms within the system, such as civil rights legislation, will be fought with the utmost tenacity and brutality, the reaction of the ruling class to attempts to overturn the entire system will be ferocious. Even after a future decisive election victory by those seeking to create a new society out of capitalism by using democratic means, the elite will use every economic, political, and military lever they have to oppose any such change
Ultimately, we need to create a movement large and formidable enough to challenge the entire power structure of capitalism, one that is capable of winning the army and large portions of the population that up to that point had been passive, ambivalent, or even antagonistic.
THE NEED FOR INTERNATIONALISM
As the still volatile situation in North Africa demonstrates, to succeed even for a short period of time against the forces interested in maintaining the status quo, strong domestic revolutionary political organization must expand internationally to achieve genuine revolutionary change. If a country, or even a whole region, remains isolated and under attack internally and externally by the forces of capitalism and imperialism, it cannot hold out for long. This is especially true when revolutions break out, as they have tended to do, in less developed countries with fewer resources to sustain an independent ongoing struggle and subject to greater pressures from outside.
Thinking and acting internationally, instead of focusing entirely on events within a single country, can be seen in the struggles and political outlook of some indigenous communities. Networks such as the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), founded in 1993 by the recently assassinated environmental leader, Berta Cáceres, and the International Indian Treaty Council, consisting of groups from North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific are the inheritors of a long tradition of pan-continental and international organizing for justice. Internationalism has long been the principal foundation of indigenous and socialist organizing and is even more critical today. When manufacturers constantly threaten to relocate businesses to other countries or bring in scabs from other regions to break strikes, solidarity among geographically distant workers is imperative if struggles are to be successful.
LEARNING FROM HISTORY
Political disappointment with organizations that once held the hope of millions for a better world is not hard to find. The African National Congress (ANC) was an organization of committed activists involved in a decades-long struggle for black freedom in South Africa. But since coming to power in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, the ANC—with assistance from representatives of international capital such as the IMF and the World Bank—has strayed far from its emancipatory roots and the vision of its founders, imposing what South African activists have dubbed “economic apartheid.” Many former activists who became part of the government bureaucracy have been co-opted and corrupted. Instead of transforming the country into a more egalitarian society as planned by the ANC, the government maintained the neoliberal economy of the previous apartheid regime. In the midst of the second wealthiest and most technologically advanced country in Africa, abject poverty and landlessness coexist with historic white privilege and a newly privileged and enriched black business class in an unstable, socially explosive, and contradictory combination.
Dismantling the Capitalist State
Over the last few years, very large resistance movements have arisen around the globe—in North Africa, Latin America, Europe, China, and the United States—but these movements have found it difficult to sustain themselves over the long term. In part, this is due to the failure to set up at the grass roots new, united, democratic political organizations that people trust to serve their interests. The rebirth of interest in political organization and the formation of new left-wing parties around the world should be embraced as a promising sign of things to come, and a sea change in activists’ understanding of what will be required to win back some of the social gains that have suffered retrenchment over the last forty years. However, as we have seen with recent setbacks in these countries, without democratic control from below that can hold the leadership accountable, and with the old state apparatus and economic power of the wealthy intact, things can all too easily revert to a left-tinged version of the status quo.
For a meaningful transformation to occur, the government and economy of a capitalist nation must be taken over, the power to make decisions and act must be transferred to the people en masse, and people must be willing and able to experiment with the practices, processes, and procedures commensurate with healing the social-ecological crisis. In addition, they will need to absorb the multifaceted and revolutionary cultural and social shifts necessary to do so.
Can the power to transform society be achieved by working through the electoral process? While the electoral process can be effective and useful, and should not be dismissed as an avenue for activism, a government cannot just be taken over through elections and used to build a new society. The current economic structures were designed to maintain the power of the capitalist elite, to permit the exploitation of people and the environment, and to facilitate the accumulation of capital. When electoral campaigns are the exclusive undertaking of a movement or party, most people function largely in a passive mode, limiting their involvement to voting for representatives of a political party that will carry out change on their behalf. If a movement that wants to change the system is only organized in a passive and limited way around an electoral campaign, it will be in a weak position to withstand a coordinated ideological, economic, and military assault by the capitalist class.
Political democracy is not the same as economic democracy, and both are essential. Samir Amin has explained this as follows:
I think that the reason for the failure of electoral democracy to produce real change is not hard to find: all hitherto existing societies have been based on a dual system of exploitation of labor (in various forms) and of concentration of the state’s powers on behalf of the ruling class. This fundamental reality results in a relative “depoliti-cization/disacculturation” [disinterest in politics and psychological removal from the dominant culture] of very large segments of society. And this result, broadly designed and implemented to fulfill the systemic function expected of it, is simultaneously the condition for reproduction of the system without changes other than those it can control and absorb—the condition of its stability.19
Problems encountered by past attempts to change capitalist societies, such as those encountered by Egyptians during the 2011 Arab Spring, point to the need for a rapid takeover of real political and economic power. Community and worker councils need to be set up to make economic and political decisions, workers and farmers need to control workplaces, and decisions must be made in conjunction with the needs of surrounding communities. Groups representing larger geographic areas can plan for the needs of regions and the entire country. There must be a rapid transition away from state-run and private capitalist control of productive and financial resources to control by workers in individual production facilities together with local, regional, and multiregional assemblies of the people. Elected representatives must receive no more pay or benefits than other workers, be subject to instant recall and have no set terms, ensuring that the needs of the people are seen as paramount and that a new government doesn’t eventually adopt different priorities.
One of the lessons from the history of attempts to replace capitalism is that the struggle will continue even after a successful revolution institutes a new society. The current system’s deep-seated ideologies and ways of thinking and behaving will remain. As Marx said, after a revolution, a new society “emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”20 Unless this issue is understood and proactively approached, old ways continue or creep into the new system, potentially overwhelming it and leading to the reintroduction of some form of class rule. A long transition is to be expected—even after the power to make decisions is in the hands of the people—to reach a fully developed society based on social equity and ecological principles.
TOWARD A REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATION
It is the job of everyone who wishes to see a better world, one that we have demonstrated is eminently possible, to take up the fight. How that looks will be different in every city, region, and country. But the common thread will be the objective of building the strength of our movement, thereby weakening their capitalist system. Whenever people move into individual struggles, we must be with them and seek to expand, deepen, and connect their separate struggles into one unified fight against capitalism. Whether the issue is police brutality, the building of new oil or gas pipelines, the erosion of voting rights or workers’ rights, the vilification of Muslims or immigrants, sexism in the workplace or elsewhere, or some other battle for social and economic justice and a healthy environment, we must take it on.
The struggle is really about the need to change the balance of forces, to educate others and ourselves about what is needed and what is possible. The ultimate goal is to replace the system of capital with an economic-political-social system designed for the purpose of enabling all people to reach their full human potential in ways that respect and preserve a healthy stable biosphere. And from there, people will need to discuss, decide, and plan how best to create or implement the necessary changes. Revolution is a continuous process. It doesn’t end with triumph in an individual country, or even in all countries, but continues for generations, even after people are born who have no direct knowledge of a social system based on class inequality, racism, sexism, war, competition, and greed.
That is the vision of a world worth fighting for. It gives meaning to one’s life.
¡La lucha sigue!—¡Hasta la victoria siempre!
The struggle continues!—Ever onward to victory!