Radical criticism of the given, even in advance of having blueprints for an alternative, can be a material force, because it can seize the mind of the masses of people. There is no greater responsibility for intellectuals.
—JOEL KOVEL
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.
—MARIO SAVIO
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
If we, as a human species, are to overcome the existential threats to our collective future, nation-states controlled by the people will have to be a central part of this necessary struggle. In this book we have discussed the ways that the CFR, an agent of the capitalist class, controls the U.S. state in an undemocratic fashion, implementing policies in the interest of the capitalist class, not the people at large. The Council consists of a combination of the wealthiest of the old and new plutocratic families and their corporations, families, and the private organizations that have no formal, legal, or political power per se. They need the state to wield coercive and management power in their interest, the interest of the possessing class. Management of the system involves using the strength of the state to create profit opportunities and provide legitimacy, including the illusion of democracy. Police, the army, and prisons provide protection against the inevitable discontent of the dispossessed and exploited classes. In addition, leading elements of the capitalist class in general, and the financial sector in particular, depend on explicit and implicit government guarantees against market losses in a supposedly “free market” system. Taxpayer bailouts of “too big to fail” companies are frequent occurrences in recent history—witness the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath—illustrating the power of the capitalist class in getting the government to do its bidding, and use public resources to assure its own private profit. All too often the economic risks of the private enterprise system are socialized, and the gains privatized, resulting in the destruction of the public interest and general welfare.
Seeing the state as an organ of class rule, intertwined with the CFR and the capitalist class, allows us to see the reality of the term “ruling class,” a class for itself that forms its own economy, society, and politics that is part of the whole but above it, ruling over it, even to the extent of sometimes standing above the law. The CFR is at the center of this ruling class, as well as being a critical transmission belt between the capitalist class, its professional-class helpers, and a colonized state, using multiple means to assure that the state serves, first and foremost, the needs of monopoly finance capitalism, and not the needs of the people and the planet. This is how the class struggle from above, the ongoing class war of the 1 percent against the working-class majority, is waged. The essentials of the status quo are preserved through force as well as through ideological hegemony and a constant process of co-optation of many of the better-educated and active elements of the working and professional classes.
This book’s focus on the CFR helps expose the phoniness of American “democracy,” a corrupt system in which the needs and avarice of the capitalist class are dominant, a desire to accumulate more and more wealth in all of its forms. Behind this avarice is a passion for power over others, an unquenchable thirst for conquest, to rule over more and more human beings in order to exploit their labor power, to keep them imprisoned in an immoral slave-like division of labor, often including low wages, poor conditions, and work insecurity. This division of labor puts the capitalist at the top, making decisions about the lives of the workers, as well as plundering the surplus value/profits and, as folk wisdom puts it, “laughing all the way to the bank.” This focus on the Council and its activities also provides important advance knowledge about developing trends in ruling-class thinking, intelligence that can be useful to working people as they confront the capitalists in their daily and longer-term struggles.
At the more individual level, the “in-and-outers” (part of the revolving door between private institutions and the government), very often CFR members who almost always remain members while serving in government, academic life, or in the private sector business world, are a kind of double agent, serving the interests of the capitalist class and its corporations while in “public service,” then leaving, often to reap the benefits of their decisions after returning to top corporate or other lucrative positions. Their membership in the Council informs all who want to see that such an individual is “reliable,” someone who will make decisions in conformity with the needs and interests of the capitalist class and neoliberal geopolitics.
These facts and analyses have a crucial bearing on the often mentioned, but mistaken, “relative autonomy of the state” theory of state power and governmental decision making.781 This theory and its proponents assert that the state bureaucracy in the United States is normally relatively independent of a ruling capitalist class and has the autonomy to make decisions that are in the interest of the system as a whole. The advocates of this view have failed to consider that market and private trade associations are not the only important social relationships among the top capitalists and their relationships to government. The capitalist class also has the deep state—made up of the CFR and related organizations especially—to formulate and coordinate their overall strategic interests and insert them into the government. The Council and its larger network of interlocked institutions plays a central role in training and selecting the capitalist-class and professional-class leaders who occupy the highest levels of state power.
Leo Panitch and Sam Ginden argue that it cannot be said that the state is “captured” by Wall Street because the Treasury and the Fed are concerned with strengthening their own management and regulatory capacities. An example they give to prove their “relative autonomy” theory is Secretary of the Treasury Timothy F. Geithner’s statement on the need for regulation of Wall Street, which supposedly offers “a remarkably clear example of the relative autonomy of the state.” Geithner addressed the issue at a June 2011 meeting of bankers, saying: “The success of the Dodd-Frank Act will depend on a sustained effort to improve the level of expertise in the regulators charged with oversight and to ensure there are enough ‘cops on the street.’ ”782 As we have seen throughout this book, the regulatory “cops on the street” are in fact usually closely connected to the CFR and capitalist class and make decisions based on their direct understanding of the needs of big capital. As we have seen in Geithner’s case, his entire career has been as a leader and agent of the capitalist class and the Council: as a member and employee of the CFR, as a staff member at Kissinger Associates, as an adviser to the chair of the Council, as a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, as New York Fed bank president, and as president of Warburg Pincus. As treasury secretary, his highest number of phone calls were to top CFR leaders and capitalists like director Lawrence D. Fink and chair Robert E. Rubin. Finally, he is quoted in the Council’s 2014 Annual Report as saying, when he was treasury secretary: “You don’t go to speak to the Council; you go to get advice.”783 To argue that Geithner’s actions represent a “remarkably clear example” of the relative autonomy of the state is clearly mistaken, as is this overall theory in the U.S. case.
When in-and-outers like Geithner make policy they consider first and foremost the needs of their own class of wealthy owners and their corporations, and consult with the leaders of this class to get advice about how to handle key issues. The task of these key players and the CFR itself is to generalize the overall longer-term systemic strategic interests of the capitalist class and make decisions based upon the resulting consensus. The potential and actual power of government is too strong for the capitalist class not to want to heavily influence or control its decisions. The CFR and its network also develop the new policy initiatives needed for the state to be able to cope with and stay ahead of changing world and national circumstances. It is the Council and the class it represents, not the state, that is the organization with relative autonomy from the great majority of people and that small part of the capitalist class not well represented in its ranks.
The above analysis refers, of course, to the United States during what could be called normal times and conditions. During such periods the U.S. federal government, together with the in-and-outers from the CFR, amount to nothing less than the managing committee of the capitalist ruling class. Abnormal times, rare situations of societal stress, are different. Situations of actual or threatened civil war, depression, and intense class struggle, rapid change and crisis, make it more difficult for the dominant sector of the capitalist class to influence the conflicts and struggles that arise. It is during such abnormal times that the state can become more autonomous from the capitalist ruling class and can more independently embody the preservation instincts of the overall system, and make and execute decisions needed based on the historical situation.784 To recount two concrete examples from U.S. history, during both the Civil War of 1861–65 and the Great Depression of 1933–39, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt respectively assumed unusual powers in order to save the overall system. These two exceptional situations represented the relative autonomy of the state from the ruling capitalist class. But even in these unusual circumstances the interests of the propertied plutocracy were, in large measure, preserved. For example, during the threatening environment of the Civil War and its aftermath, the rebel landowners of the former slave-owning South were generally allowed to keep their property after losing the war. They were also allowed to, in effect, re-enslave most of their powerless former slaves as a sharecropping agricultural labor force. During the Great Depression, workers’ struggles threatened the system and this led to Roosevelt and the state granting some labor and other rights in the form of the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, and other laws over the opposition of one sector of the capitalist class. But the overall property rights of the capitalists were fully upheld, even during this intense crisis.
The Council and allied organizations are not, however, the only avenue used by the capitalist class to influence the U.S. state. As documented by many critical thinkers, another is a corrupted political process, a “Dollarocracy” that regularly elects the candidates who have the most money to spend on their campaigns for office, with the decisive amounts coming from the capitalist plutocracy, a number of them members of the CFR.785 The Council and allied organizations also supply numerous expert advisers to their favored politicans, and the CFR-connected major media give friendly attention to these plutocratic-connected candidates. 786
The facade of democracy, and the false consciousness associated with this ruse, is thus another part of the overall picture. Electing representatives who are increasingly selected and fully funded by the capitalists only disguises the reality of a system run by and for the dictatorship of big capital. These two routes together allow the capitalist class, especially the financial sector, to control the U.S. state and influence it to do its bidding, with increasingly dire results for both the rank and file and the ecologies that all life on earth depend upon. In the relatively few cases in which the U.S. capitalist class fails to succeed in their policy aims, it was usually due to direct class struggle from below, and resulting adjustments made by the capitalist class, not to any supposed “relative autonomy of the state” from the capitalist ruling class and its own special interests.
The United States and other nation-states will only become autonomous from the power of the capitalist class through the direct action and electoral action—where electoral systems are truly democratic—of the mass of the people. The section at the end of this chapter provides suggestions on how to build this necessary majoritarian movement, focusing on the looming ecological crisis.
As we saw in chapter 8, the CFR has primarily focused its studies only on climate change, when the ecological crisis is actually much broader, extending to the entire human-environment interaction. As Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster pointed out in March 2010:
One of the latest, most important, developments in ecological science is the concept of “planetary boundaries,” in which nine critical boundaries/thresholds of the earth system have been designated in relation to: (1) climate change; (2) ocean acidification; (3) stratospheric ozone depletion; (4) the biogeochemical flow boundary (the nitrogen cycle and the phosphorus cycles); (5) global freshwater use; (6) change in land use; (7) biodiversity loss; (8) atmospheric aerosol loading; and (9) chemical pollution. Each of these is considered essential to maintaining the relatively benign climate and environmental conditions that have existed during the last twelve thousand years (the Holocene epoch). The sustainable boundaries in three of these systems—climate change, biodiversity, and human interference with the nitrogen cycle—may have already been crossed.787
When one stops to ask why these planetary boundaries are being crossed, one must fully understand the nature of the predatory economic system of neoliberal financial monopoly capitalism that currently dominates the globe. Such an understanding exposes the CFR’s entire enterprise as a kind of pathology and a form of higher immorality, lacking any real social or moral bearing. The Council and other organs of the global capitalist ruling class qualify as massive failures when it comes to tackling the real problems of our age; they are dinosaurs pulling us all into the gyre of destruction, racing toward extinction. Their overriding interest is in the expansion of neoliberal geopolitics, always wanting to expand, speed up, and deepen the capitalist accumulation machine, continuing to prosper in darkening times, never considering the obvious trajectory of history. Capitalism in its neoliberal geopolitical variant operates like a religious compulsion, but is now a doomsday machine, characterized by reckless excess, unable to consider the precautionary principle and the long term. They fail to recognize that it is impossible to have an ever-growing economy on a finite planet, with a finite amount of pure air, water, rich soil, forests, and other natural resources. Left to its own logic, capitalism will undercut and destroy the foundations for its own existence; in short, ecological sustainability is incompatible with neoliberal geopolitical capitalism as promoted by the CFR. The system of neoliberal, geopolitical capitalism has brought on a global ecological crisis whose magnitude is so vast that it dwarfs any problem that past humanity has ever had to deal with. That catastrophic consequences are in the offing should now be beyond debate. The capitalist system threatens the entire web of life by gradually but inexorably destroying a stable biosphere, climate system, and our oceans.
In reality, this descent into climate hell has already begun; witness the increasing extreme weather events: record storms killing thousands, the advance of deserts, both heat and cold waves, massive fires, drought, floods, melting ice, and rising oceans. A 2014 study by Rutgers University and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists concluded that these unusual weather events, including extreme cold in some places due to the “polar vortex” shifting south, are due to an increasingly erratic jet stream, caused in turn by global warming. One year will see an unusually warm winter, another year an unusually cold winter, one year a record number of tornadoes, another year a record lack of tornadoes; one place will have record flooding and another will suffer an epic drought.788
The global ecological crisis is deeply rooted in the logic of capitalist profit and accumulation. Capitalism promotes the processes, relationships, and outcomes that are the opposite of what is needed for an ecologically and biologically sound, just, and harmonious society. Capitalism’s main driving force is the imperative of production and exchange for profit. “Expand or die” are the watchwords of this anti-ecological system. Forests and entire ecosystems are commodified and demolished, the oceans, waterways, and nature generally treated as a sewer for the disposal of capitalist industrial waste. The very biochemical processes of the entire planet are altered. Capitalism is therefore a cancerous system, an angel of death, a death for all prepared by the fragmentation and destruction of ecosystems through alienation from nature. This alienation begins with the separation from the worker of the means of production, including land, which also separates the worker from the means of life. The objects produced by labor are taken over by the capitalist and become alien to and independent of the producers. The worker is then forced down to the level of a mere commodity, separated from his or her own natural life force. The resulting alienated labor is fundamental to capitalism, acting as it does on the principles of exploitation of human labor, conversion of nature into commodities, and exchanging those commodities into capitalist value. Capitalism pushes on in an endless pursuit of more and more production, profit, and accumulation on a larger and larger scale, domestically and worldwide. Yet human and other life species live on a finite planet, which by definition ultimately has limited resources. Once limits to growth are reached, capitalism begins to flounder, creating crisis.
Economic limits must now be set within natural ones, resources must be conserved and shared, pollution must be cleaned up, and adequate health care dispensed. Democratic planning and state power, not the market, are necessary to enforce limits on fossil fuel mining and burning, restrictions that—because the use of fossil fuel is so ubiquitous—will end the rule of capital. Here we even find at least one current member of the Council advocating this type of radical measure to try to solve the looming threat to humanity and other life-forms. James K. Galbraith is an economist and a professor at the University of Texas. He became a CFR member in 2007.789 His father, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was also a CFR member. In 2008 James K. wrote in his book The Predator State that the threat of global warming was so serious that
the problem of technological planning and disaster management will soon become the central security issue facing every part of the planet. And it will become so in a way that must necessarily remove a central element of economic life—control over the sources and uses of energy—from the purview of private corporations and place it under public administration. Indefinitely. That is the reality of climate change if we are going to manage climate change and not simply succumb to it.790
Needless to say, Galbraith’s view is not popular within the CFR and the larger capitalist class, yet it represents the truth. Capitalism is a system characterized by commodities in motion, most of them moved, directly or indirectly, by fossil fuels (gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, oil, electricity). Therefore what needs to be faced is that the needed large-scale abandonment of fossil fuels, “leaving the coal in the hold, the oil in the soil and the gas under the grass,” would end capitalism as we know it, and this is why climate denialism is still being promoted on a large scale, along with a “head in the sand” market-based approach on the part of the CFR, allied organizations, and a large part of the U.S. political economic and media establishment. This ruling class insists on assuming that capitalism can go on forever, therefore posing all discussions of the ecological crisis within a framework of how to preserve capitalism. To break with this order, and win a future for humanity and other life-forms, this refusal must be coupled with an affirmation, an outline of an alternative future. What is necessary is the revolutionary transcending of this system and substituting a completely democratic—in both economic and political aspects of life—humane, rational, and scientific ecosocialist system that promotes solidarity between humans and harmony with the earth’s ecologies. Such a future can only be the democratic work of millions of people, and it is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. Here we can only suggest starting points for the needed ongoing great debate for our collective future.
The neoliberal geopolitical system of capital faces what John Bellamy Foster calls an epochal crisis, “the convergence of economic and ecological contradictions in such a way that the material conditions of society as a whole are undermined, posing the question of a historical transition to a new mode of production.”791 Although we are at a critical moment in human history, fast approaching the reality of ecological collapse, we are also on the verge of a global mass democratic awakening and uprising. The system of neoliberal geopolitics, run by unelected, non-democratic forces, can only be changed by massive rebellion and direct struggle aimed at putting full democracy, human development, and ecological restoration at the center of political and economic life, not profit and accumulation.
Only mass social movements worldwide can now save the people and the planet. We know for certain where—if left unchecked—the current system is headed, what road it is on. If we stay on that road a dystopia awaits, so we must block the road and create a new pathway for humanity. People need to begin by arming themselves with education and then unify, organize, and act on that education. The path to survival requires us to act now in time to avert catastrophe. Such essential changes on a crash basis, similar to a war emergency, only more serious, have never been attempted before in human history, and will be fiercely resisted by the powers that be both within and outside the CFR circle. We need education, science, engineering, but most of all resistance to the existing neoliberal geopolitical system, which has to be completely overthrown and transcended as a mode of production. In its place we need a society characterized by full, participatory democracy, localism instead of globalism, freely associated labor by the producers, a cooperative economy, long-term planning, a much larger and more powerful public sector, and peaceful resolution of conflicts instead of capitalist-class tyranny and war.
No full blueprint is possible for a society of an ecological commons, such as is being described here, together with freely associated labor; the actions of the workers/producers themselves must create such a fundamental transformation from below or it will not be brought into existence. Society-wide and global solutions to the capitalist-created ecological crisis would have to be discussed and decided democratically on a massive scale; there is and can be no master plan. But intellectuals who consider themselves of, by, and for the working class have a responsibility to offer preliminary proposals, a brief catalogue of ideas and possibilities that might be helpful to encourage thought, debate, and material action by the rank and file. Below, suggestions at three different levels will be offered: characteristics of the movements we want; suggestions for a transitional program; and the nature of the longer-term goal of a constantly advancing and improving ecosocialist civilization.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead once said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”792 Our genius as human beings is that we can dream and envision a world that has never existed. We have to overcome illusions and capitalist brainwashing to dedicate ourselves to a long-term, difficult yet beautiful journey, a struggle for a humane, sane, holistic world of ecological balance, one that will save the planet and all of its life-forms. We must create inclusive spaces where broad sectors of the people, especially youth, can cooperatively come together as part of that effort. Interculturality and the recognition of humanity’s oneness must be central, welcoming all cultures, races and ethnicities, forms of knowledge, philosophies, and religions to participate democratically in making real and concrete the slogan “Another world is possible.” Our movements must be like a loving family working together in solidarity: altruistic and generous; moral and spiritual; radically collective and egalitarian, based on mutual aid, creativity, community, and grassroots democracy. We need to feel bonded together as part of one struggle for a higher form of being and society—in resistance to capitalist ecocide, with a social justice ethic—offering a responsible, life-serving alternative to the current self-destructive course toward predictable planetary catastrophe that humanity is currently on.
In our involvement in real-world struggle, revolutionaries must maintain a difficult and contradictory balance. We need to join struggles for ecological reforms and yet not slide into suggesting that capitalism with these reforms could create a just society and avoid ecological catastrophe.
Although this is a complex question that can only be worked out through experience, a revolutionary transitional ecosocialist program—a set of political positions put forth in order to present our vision of a better world and to push forward and unite the various political struggles—will help us maintain this balance by linking immediate demands to a revolutionary democratic vision.
The basic elements in an ecosocialist transitional program aim to end neoliberal alienation, empowering the working class in the service of sustainable, ecologically based human development with an emphasis on the local, the collective, the community, and including more free time for people for its own sake.
Transitional demands like these have to be part of an explicitly class-conscious revolutionary program, one that envisions a society that overcomes capitalist class rule, exploitation, the oppression of women, people of color, and other groups, creating full equality and taking rapid strides to reestablish a balanced metabolism between society and nature.
The elements of a transitional program such as those listed below could be paid for by ending geopolitical-linked military spending, corporate bailouts, and corporate welfare, and increased progressive taxes on the wealthy, all carried out by an active, ecologically oriented and fully democratic state:
•Ecosystems—nature valued for its own sake as the ultimate source of all life; an end to destruction of habitats; a massive effort to restore and re-create damaged ecosystems, including tree planting on a gigantic scale.
•Food and Agriculture—a crash program to wipe out hunger and malnutrition worldwide, ending the tragic daily massacre of tens of thousands of people by starvation in the predatory capitalist neoliberal geopolitical world; promoting self-sufficient diversified organic local food production and distribution (gardens in the cities); actively supporting farmers to convert to decentralized ecological agriculture; banning GMOs as harmful to humans and other living things; and transitioning to a communal system of user rights and responsibilities instead of land ownership in giant parcels.
•Jobs—an end to exploitation and private capital accumulation worldwide through collective ownership of the main means of production and a rapid transition to control by the associated workers as subjects working for themselves, leading to a full-employment economy based on sound ecological principles.
•Transportation—creating large-scale, free, and efficient public transportation networks.
•Technology—use of computers, the Internet, and other instruments to have a global movement of working people establishing a harmonious, self-governing, post-capitalist world through information, connection, and organization.
•Politics—decentralized organization, direct democracy from below is the goal, inclusive and transparent.
•Housing—rehabilitate existing housing, including solar upgrades and weatherproofing, build new housing through the creation of a public entity, training workers to build and maintain houses.
•Health Care—a human right and public good, not a commodity to make profit on; therefore universal health care must be guaranteed by the state in a single-payer, “medicare for all” or similar free and all-inclusive socialized system with preventative care an important component. The pharmaceutical industry should be a public sector service industry, not for private profit, so that vaccines can be developed for all of the neglected diseases of poverty like Ebola.
•Culture—a shift to more free time and less consumerism means an increase in the level of cultural development by and for the people, with more music, dance, and the arts.
•Education—a public school system dedicated to the creative, all-round development of every student and free to all from preschool to graduate school.
•Peace—end geopolitical rivalries, develop a peaceful, cooperative foreign policy instead of imperialist wars and interventions based on the needs of the capitalist system; national defense based on a mobilized population, closing foreign bases, converting the armed forces to a defensive force also trained in ecological restoration practices.
•Advertising—substitute a simple listing of services and products for the massive and wasteful (now about $450 billion annually worldwide) current advertising/propaganda system, since ads are simply a means for capitalists to colonize and dominate our minds in service to more and more consumption.
•Retirement—improve the current Social Security system by making it more generous.
•Community—foster strong local communities through stressing cooperation, use value, and barter on the local level, not exchange value and long-distance trade.
•Fossil Fuels—rapid phasing out of these fuels in favor of clean energy sources through large investments in solar, wind, and geothermal; making ownership and control of all fossil fuel sources a public utility controlled by the people.
Limiting the use of the world’s proven fossil fuel reserves would likely result in many trillions of dollars of investment losses, however, subtracting massive amounts from what are now counted as the private capitalist assets of corporations, governments, families, and individuals. Speaking of coal alone, as mentioned above, one estimate puts the value of U.S. coal reserves—about a third under U.S. government ownership, the remainder private/corporate—at $30 trillion, the most valuable supply of any nation on earth. U.S. natural gas reserves’ estimated worth is $3.1 trillion. Other nations would have to be involved in any attempt to save our planet and humanity by limiting the burning of fossil fuels, and here the values are also large. Just to cite a few examples: Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves are estimated to be worth $31.5 trillion; Canada’s oil reserves at $21 trillion; Russia’s natural gas reserves at $19 trillion; Iran’s oil reserves at $16.1 trillion; Iraq’s oil reserves at $13.9 trillion; and Venezuela’s oil reserves at $11.7 trillion.793 Putting fossil fuels under public ownership and control would obviously seriously impact capitalist interests and would be strenuously resisted by the corporations and leading plutocratic families that benefit from the existing system.
In an ecosocialist civilization, living beings would come together in the matrix of nature to form interdependent webs of life: ecosystems. Such a society would be characterized by the logic of life: full human development, completely outside the imperatives of commodification, profit, and capital accumulation. Production for use (use value) instead of for sale (exchange value) would be central, together with an emphasis on nature valued for itself, part of a commons benefiting all.
Ownership and ecologically sustainable production would be social, organized by the workers for maximum public benefit and the satisfaction of community needs. Such a civilization would focus on full development of the potential of every human being but stop growing when basic needs are met. For example, technological advances in production would be used to shorten work hours rather than to produce more, leading to more free time for truly fulfilling activities, and allow greater variety in how we spend our lives. Organizing cooperatives would be central to implementation.
A sustainable and just society would also eliminate the distinction between productive and reproductive labor by socializing domestic labor (such as childcare, cooking, and laundry) and organizing cooperatives. This would be a more efficient way to fulfill people’s needs and would further women’s liberation, combating the gendered division of labor in society. In a democratically planned and ecologically rational society, many of the lifestyle changes that individualist environmentalism points to as necessary would occur, but as part of a social process of liberation, not as a forced sacrifice or imposed by moralistic principles.
Such an economy would be characterized by freely associated labor of the cooperating workers/producers, organized in councils. It would neither need nor allow advertising to entice people to consume more and more. It would restore and protect ecologies—natural life-support systems—and respect the limits of natural resources, taking into account the needs of future generations. It would make decisions on long-term societal requirements, fostering a culture of cooperation, sharing, love, hope, compassion, reciprocity, and responsibility to community. It would run as much as possible on current energy (solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass) instead of fossil fuels. It would promote fully democratic mass-participatory political and economic decision making for local, regional, and multiregional coordination bodies, aiming at common prosperity for all, not excessive wealth for the few.794
Such a civilization of collective control of the means of production and democratic planning of production and exchange can only be brought into being by an ecosocialist revolution.
John Bellamy Foster summed up the goal of such a revolution as follows:
What is clear is that the long-term strategy for ecological revolution throughout the globe involves the building of a society of substantive equality, i.e., the struggle for socialism. Not only are the two inseparable, but they also provide essential content for each other. There can be no true ecological revolution that is not socialist; no true socialist revolution that is not ecological.795
Foster points out that the forces to create such a new system of social justice and ecological sanity are now coming together, offering a way out of what is an epochal crisis:
The objective conditions are . . . emerging that are creating the potential for a larger material alliance against the system. This will likely take the form of a co-revolutionary struggle, in the sense suggested by David Harvey, embodying an alliance of gender, race, class, indigenous and environmental movements.
All of this depends of course on the rise to prominence of an environmental working class (and ecological peasantry) capable of initiating a broad, counter-hegemonic struggle for the fulfillment of human needs in line with the fundamental biogeochemical processes of the planet—a world of substantive equality and ecological sustainability. There is no doubt that this is an objective necessity and . . . will increasingly become a subjective one as well. Yet, there is no certainty as to the future of humanity. The very continuation of the human species along with most . . . other “higher” forms of life is now in doubt. The future and even survival of humanity thus rests as never before on the revolutionary struggle of humanity itself. 796
Ecosocialist thinkers worldwide have developed three manifestos—starting points for discussion, mobilization, and action—furthering this revolutionary struggle. They obviously do not exhaust the possibilities, but all are international in scope and represent the best beginnings for the discussion at this point in time.797
There are signs that opposition to capitalism is beginning to go mainstream. A battle of worldviews is under way as we reinvent the commons, a system by and for everyone. More and more, former politically neutral scientists are recognizing the need for resistance as an existential necessity, since the ecological crisis represents a threat to our species’ existence. Radical de-growth strategies, especially in the wealthy nations of the triad, are no longer optional, and calls for revolutionary change are spreading.798
The Council on Foreign Relations represents the theoretical expression, the personification, of a form of social organization that cannot plan for the long term, or in any way change the eco-destructiveness of its system—capitalism—that always bring forth behaviors in its own corrupt and ethically bankrupt image.
We need a moral, political, and economic antidote to the hegemony of an irresponsible capitalist class led by the CFR. This alternative is expressed through valuing nature and humanity, and their undeniable interconnectedness. A stress on the intrinsic value of nature differentiates ecosocialism from the other socialisms of the past. Ecosocialism challenges the fatal compromises that prior socialisms made with industrialism, resulting in impacts to nature and peoples, especially indigenous peoples.
The new road for humanity must also have the overarching goal of all-sided development for every member of the human family everywhere in the world, rather than the obscene commitment to unlimited wealth and unlimited power of the few over the many. Equality, scientific rationality, common prosperity, collective ownership, ecological values and practice, equitable distribution of income and wealth, and full participatory direct democracy, as well as humanity as protagonists and subjects of our collective destiny through organizations of freely associated labor are the interests of the vast majority—the working class. These interests must be asserted in revolutionary ways for humanity to survive. Ecosocialism represents these emancipatory objectives of a fundamentally different social order; we must strive for it by building the unified, combative international mass movements and organizations of, by, and for the working class. To the CFR and others steeped in the status quo, this will sound too radical, just as the U.S. abolitionists fighting slavery during the mid-nineteenth century were seen as strange people who were willing to violate the laws of “property” and upend the economy of Southern plantations and the cotton trade. But we must recognize the emergency we are in and that the current status quo in regard to fossil fuel use is a death sentence for our children and grandchildren because our house, our elegant planet, is slowly burning down. The real danger we face is underreaction, not overreaction. The capitalists investing in and promoting fossil fuel use and seeing geopolitical advantage in more production must be bluntly asked: How will your stocks do as the ocean dies? when massive crop failures and heat waves kill millions of people? when monster storms and rising seas wipe out coastal areas? when planetary climate chaos makes billions of people desperate? Taking care of our planet before it spirals into chaos makes good sense for everyone.
The fragile fabric of planetary life will not be able to take many more years of the kind of wanton destruction of nature it has suffered at the hands of the CFR-inspired capitalist empire. If we as a species stay on our current path, relatively soon a time will come when the effects will be so severe that we will lose the ability to creatively plan for and implement our own future. We will have only severely degraded ecosystems remaining when planetary forces we cannot control are being unleashed. The slide into an unknown but surely unpleasant fate for ourselves, our children, and grandchildren will then become inevitable. But the promise of humanity resides within itself, and this trend does not have to become our destiny.
We must recognize that we have nothing to lose by revolting and engaging in direct action except the dismal spectacle of observing a dying planet, constantly made uglier by continuing injustice and ecocide. We have a world to gain, the chance to save our beautiful earth and its many life-forms, including humanity itself. Humanity can have a future if we take that future into our own hands by asserting the people’s inherent right to alter our current destructive and undemocratic system, which is contrary to the needs and welfare of all.