[This page is under construction. These ideas are currently being expanded into a book, The End of Capitalism. Please feel free to discuss these topics with me - just email me at activistalex@gmail.com]
This is a website dedicated to those who see injustice in the world and cannot ignore it, for those who know suffering and must commit themselves to pull its roots from the ground, for those who work towards a new world, every single day.
The purpose is to chronicle the collapse of the global capitalist system and US imperial project, due primarily to the Earth’s natural limits, like peak oil, and growing popular resistance around the globe. We must understand the world around us so we can shape events in pursuit of our goals of freedom, justice, sustainability, democracy and love.
Below is a short summary explaining what the “end of capitalism” means, and how we might want to respond to it. This summary is expanded in the Synopsis pages on this website, so there is a link at the end of each short section you can click to explore more about each topic. Enjoy!
Synopsis Pages:
- Is This the End of Capitalism?
- What is Capitalism?
- Why is it Collapsing?
- What Comes After Capitalism?
- Conclusion: The World We Are Building
Summary:
Shock and Awe on the New York Stock Exchange – Picture courtesy of Sad Guys on Trading Floors: http://sadguysontradingfloors.tumblr.com/
1. Is This the End of Capitalism?
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” — Kenneth Boulding, economist.
“This sucker could go down.” – George W. Bush, 9/25/08
Capitalism must grow in order to survive. It is impossible for a growth-dependent system to exist forever on a planet that is defined by very real ecological and social limits. Capitalism is therefore inherently unsustainable. At this moment we are living in the midst of a crisis which is calling into question the future of this system. This is a perfect opportunity to imagine a new way of living in the world that can meet human needs while also respecting the needs of the planet. It is time to build this new world.
The ongoing economic crisis that began in 2007 is unlike any previous crisis faced by global capitalism. In earlier downturns there remained a possibility to grow out of it by expanding production. That avenue is now closed, as it appears the limits to growth have finally been reached. Although the current recession may not go down in the history books as the final chapter of global capitalism, this crisis serves as an exclamation point announcing that the system is fundamentally broken and cannot be repaired.
This is not merely a financial crisis. As Professor Richard Wolff explains in his excellent video Capitalism Hits the Fan, this crisis did not begin in the financial markets and it won’t end there. When the media cast blame for the recession on abstractions like “toxic assets,” “collateralized debt obligations,” “credit default swaps,” or focuses discussion of the problem on the crimes and errors of individual investors and firms, they obscure the true depth of the crisis.
This is a crisis of the system itself, meaning the only solution is a total change in the structure of the economy. All efforts to reboot the current system have thus far failed. The New York Times reported in February ’09 that the US government had already committed over $12 trillion to buy up worthless debt from troubled banks. (Putting this in perspective, the entire yearly economy of the United States is about $14 trillion.) Despite these unprecedented bailouts, businesses continue to close their doors or downsize their workforces, pushing the US unemployment rate to a new high of 9.4% as of May ’09.
While the US government quickly gave out trillions of dollars to banks and corporations facing hardship, it has thus far created no new job training or unemployment programs to ease the suffering of the millions of workers losing their incomes. Nor does it appear willing to create a public health care program for the nearly 50 million Americans now without access to a doctor. Such favoritism towards banks and corporations while neglecting basic public welfare is a reflection of the sickness of a capitalist logic that values human and non-human life below the heartless demands of profit.
Capitalism depends on growth, and according to an article published in New Scientist, growth is “killing the Earth.” The article included the following graph, showing the size of the global economy (GDP) skyrocketing over the last fifty years. But this tremendous growth in economic output corresponds to an equally rapid growth in damage done to the global environment. Forest loss, fisheries exploited, ozone depletion, species extinctions, carbon dioxide emissions, and the rise of global temperatures all race towards the top of the page, suggesting that if the economy were able to escape its current downturn and continue on a path of endless growth, there soon might not be any planet left.
Capitalism is killing the planet. Click the image for more detail.
Luckily there are limits constraining the economy from further growth. These limits are both ecological and social. The ecological limits include shortages of water, topsoil, uranium, and fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal. The most important limiting factor is oil, which is necessary for fueling much of the capitalist economy, including 95% of current transportation. Global capitalism today cannot exist without oil, but the worldwide production of oil appears to be at or near its ultimate maximum, or “peak.” As demand for oil continues to grow, this supply limit will mean a shortage that cannot be negated by existing alternative fuels. Such a deepening fuel shortage drastically reduces the possibility for future growth, and threatens the survival of global capitalism.
Social limits are also a necessary part of the picture. Capitalism’s hunger for growth reached its highest level with the doctrine of corporate globalization (or neoliberalism). Corporate globalization meant allowing the free transfer of wealth across the entire planet, uniting the world in one giant market so that banks and corporations would face no boundaries to maximizing profit. Under this banner, corporate elites privatized social services like public libraries and water systems, reduced wages by moving factories to countries where populations would work for less, and dismantled laws that protect the environment. This project threatened jobs in wealthy countries like the US while also targeting poor countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia, often called the Global South.
But corporate globalization’s attack on so many people provoked a powerful response called the Global Justice Movement. Starting in the 1990s the Global Justice Movement mobilized millions of people to take action against this project by making it impossible for elites to hold meetings without facing overwhelming protest. Corporate schemes were discredited and institutions promoting them were driven from many countries that had previously embraced them. Latin America reacted especially strongly and moved in a much more progressive direction. Today, the defeat of the project of corporate globalization is most apparent in the total collapse of its flagship institution, the World Trade Organization (WTO). The result of this upsurge of powerful social movements has been declining rates of profit, once again imperiling capitalism at its most vulnerable point.
As capitalism faces the inevitability of its mortality, a new economy based on fundamentally different ecological and social relationships will emerge to replace it. Whether this new reality will be more democratic, more free, more just, and more sustainable than capitalism is not certain. The outcome will in large part be determined by what we do. If we succumb to fear over the loss of wealth or privileges, it is entirely possible that we will be led into something far worse. This path could lead to fascism – a militarization of society to keep the system running at all cost. On the other hand, if we are guided by love, it seems equally likely that we can craft a new way of life that restores balance between humanity and nature, without sacrificing our core values.
This new world will only be made if we move beyond the petty differences of the past and work together for a better future. A holistic approach to social change is needed to guide us through this effort. But first we must be willing to confront the truth of the challenges we face, and understand that the best hope for the future lies within us.
[feel free to investigate Synopsis Part 1.5. What’s Down the Rabbit Hole?]
Simply put, capitalism is the organization of society by and for money (capital). It is the dominant social, political and economic system in the world today, affecting every corner of the earth, every government, and all peoples.
Commodity Production
Capitalism treats all human and non-human life, as well as all land, energy and material, as things which can make money. Capitalists survive by selling these as commodities on the market – but to do this they must first tear the fabric of the natural and social order, a process called production.
To make a buck, continents are conquered for agriculture, forests are felled for lumber, animals are caged as livestock, workers waste their lives tethered to machines. Life becomes property, and a capitalist can make a profit if their cost of production is less than the price they sell their product for. This profit-motive forces capitalists to constantly devalue the “resources” they feed into the machine of production: whether “natural resources” (land, energy and non-human life) or “human resources” (human labor and energy).
Because production is organized by markets, wherever there is a potential for profit, there will be a ruthless competition to capitalize on it or lose the advantage to a competitor. This pressure is felt by all capitalists in the form of an ultimatum to grow or perish, which drives more and more property into fewer and fewer hands, at an accelerating rate.
Humanity is conscripted off its ancestral land and into the urban workforce, where to sustain themselves and their families workers must sell their time and energy for a wage to survive. People are then squeezed dry by the system and made to work harder and longer, but always for less as there are millions just like them willing to work for lower wages. They do not see the profits their work produces, because those profits are invested by their bosses to acquire yet more capital, and make yet more profits.
A System in Crisis
What the workers are creating is in fact a giant matrix of capital, which has as its only aim to expand into a still-larger system as quickly as possible, forcing humanity to toil longer and harder and creating greater and greater damage to the natural world.
Capitalism is in perpetual crisis. It is in a never-ending race against time because every year, every week, profits must be larger, faster and cheaper than before. This requires ever-increasing levels of consumption – if people stop buying so much, there’s suddenly nowhere safe for capital to pursue even a minimum rate of return, and the risks to investors become intolerable. Values crash, loans cease, the markets freeze, ships remain in the docks, factories halt, workers lose their jobs, and the media tries to keep a smiling face while delivering the news.
To survive, capitalism must grow. And grow, and grow, at all costs. Where does it end? The system must grow to such an extent that it quite literally exhausts the energies of humanity and the earth in the frantic scramble for profit.
The State
This cancerous system, because it is inherently destructive of humanity and the planet as a whole, must be enforced through violence. That role is filled primarily by governments (states), who seek to maintain a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. They accomplish this with such mechanisms as the military, police, and the prison system. These forces are used in the service of capitalism both by suppressing the domestic population’s natural tendencies towards freedom, as well as competing with other foreign states for dominance over resources and markets.
No government can control a populace that is united and acts for itself, so capitalism is maintained by creating divisions that cut across society based on real or imaginary differences. For example, in the U.S., racism (or white supremacy) benefits workers with light skin by giving them social privileges like higher wages, better education and housing, lower chance of arrest and imprisonment, and also more subtle advantages like thinking of themselves as “attractive” or “the norm.” This comes at the expense of people of color – so to keep these privileges whites are made to feel antagonism towards their fellow workers. Gender, heteronormativity, class, citizenship and other systems of oppression are similarly constructed to pit segments of the population against one another, and therefore the only way to achieve the freedom of all is to dismantle these oppressive forces and unite in common cause.
Imperialism
Capitalism has been the dominant social system in the world for roughly the last 500 years – spread by the European conquistadors, then crystallized in the United States following the genocide of the indigenous tribes and brutal enslavement of millions of African peoples.
Theoretically founded on the principles of freedom, justice and democracy, the US has yet to fulfill that promise – and today stands over the world like a behemoth, backed up by military might in the form of 700 US military bases on foreign soil, while the US spends more money on the military than every other nation in the world – combined. Together with cultural/language dominance, this global supremacy makes up what many have rightly called an Empire.
But though it appears strongest today and totally without competitors, this Imperial project is in fact teetering alongside the global markets, and the hope of the entire world is that its decline will be as swift and peaceful as possible.
[for more detail see Synopsis Part 2. What is Capitalism?]
As we’ve seen, capitalism survives by creating two fundamental crises: one ecological, and the other social. Therefore the forces that will bring it down are an alliance of nature and humanity, both unable and unwilling to exist merely as commodities to be profited from. The death-urge of industrial capitalist production cannot withstand the forces of life unleashed in resistance, and this is exactly what we’re seeing now.
Causes of System Breakdown:
- resource and energy limits which prevent future growth
- the rising power of global movements for social change
Let’s look at each one briefly.
Nature’s Revolt: There’s Nothing Left to Fuel the Machine
Oil is the lifeblood of capitalism; there is literally nothing on this earth that can replace it as the dominant fuel for the engine of global capitalism. It’s not just that 40% of energy comes from oil, the specific uses of oil are vital to the entire economic structure. For example, 99% of the world’s pesticides are chemically produced from oil, which means the entire industrial mode of agriculture that has taken dominance over the world’s farmland depends upon abundant cheap petroleum. In fact, including tractors, chemicals, packaging, distribution, and cooking, every single calorie of food in the United States requires at least 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to bring that food to the plate. The pharmaceutical industry, chemical, plastics, and military are equally dependent.
Most crucially, oil now powers 95% of all transportation, in the form of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. By definition the global economy depends on the rapid transport of people and resources on a planetary scale, which means burning oil and dumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, causing global warming and destabilizing the Earth’s climate. Luckily, oil is limited in supply (imagine the destruction if it weren’t), and in fact according to a growing chorus of geologists, the worldwide supply of oil is now reaching its ultimate maximum level and will soon enter decline.
The Global Oil Production Peak
The evidence shows that the global peak oil production is here today.This historic event is occurring approximately 40 years after the peak global discovery of oil, in the mid-1960s. Since that time, less and less oil has been found worldwide, while demand has skyrocketed. Data indicates that the immense run-up of prices in 2007-2008 can best be explained as a result of global oil shortage, which certainly added stress to the financial markets and likely helped trigger the current crisis.
The deepening oil shortage will affect the United States and its imperialist project in a unique way. Having risen to power on a sea of oil in the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. reached its peak oil in 1970 and now imports over 2/3 of its consumption. Still by far the largest consumer of oil, using over 25% of global supply, the country is being forced into deeper and deeper debt to pay for it. This enormous trade deficit is only counteracted by the willingness of foreign countries from whom the United States purchases most of its stuff (Saudi Arabia for its oil, China for its consumer goods), to recycle their dollars back into the US by purchasing Treasury Bonds, stocks, real estate and other dollar-denominated assets. As U.S. financial markets crumble, how long until these foreign countries decide their investments are safer elsewhere, and pull the rug out from under the Empire?
Oil is just one of the many resources which are rapidly becoming scarce – coal, natural gas, uranium, phosphorus, copper, even water cannot be used at the same enormous rate that industrial capitalism demands. Oil is exceptional in regards to how adaptive and powerful it is, but the basic fact is that the economy cannot expand indefinitely on a finite planet. It was inevitable that a system which is built on transforming plants, animals, minerals and human life into money would either A) destroy the planet or B) go bankrupt when it ran out of fuel to grow. We should be thankful for the arrival of option B on the scene, and recognize nature’s revolt as the best opportunity for humanity to liberate itself from this system and realize a sustainable future based on freedom, justice and democracy.
Indeed, although the media has tried to hide it, a global movement towards these human aims has been building and is now emerges as the second great protagonist in capitalism’s breakdown.
[more on Resource Limits]
The Hope of Humanity: Resistance of Everyday People, Everywhere
As long as injustice has existed in the world, regular people have been working to undo it. Those in power teach us the opposite – that change comes from wealthy or powerful individuals: Lincoln freed the slaves, Martin Luther King won civil rights, Barack Obama is bringing change to Washington, etc. But the truth is that ordinary people like you and me worked for decades for the abolition of slavery; it was common workers who organized unions and won the 8-hour day; millions of typical black Americans who sat in, marched, and braved police dogs to kill segregation; common citizens who committed civil disobedience to stop all construction of new nuclear power plants in the US since 1979; normal lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered folks who demanded their rights be recognized as human rights, despite ongoing heterosexist attacks.
All of these systems of oppression have been undone by regular people getting together in grassroots democratic social movements, creating new arenas for collaboration to overturn the power structure and put power directly in the hands of communities on the ground. Change comes from the bottom up – it’s always been that way. What’s new is that social movements around the world have become more connected and strengthened by each other, allowing them to take on larger adversaries. Consider the incredible success of the Global Justice Movement.
The Global Justice Movement mobilized unprecedented numbers of people from all corners of the world against capitalism
The Global Justice Movement arose in the 1990s out of outraged response to Neoliberalism – the doctrine of capitalist governments and corporations in the Global North, especially the US, to extract maximum wealth from the Global South. Also known as corporate globalization, the goal of this project was to restructure Global South economies towards exporting raw materials and cheap goods for Northern markets. The global finance institutions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank were the pioneers of neoliberalism, and attempted to force poor nations into inescapable debt so they would be forced to accept neoliberal agreements. When these nations couldn’t pay the extortionate interest rates, the neoliberal institutions would punish them by initiating Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which meant privatizing social services, removing environmental laws, and undercutting worker’s rights to organize.
The Global Justice Movement was able to defeat the neoliberal project because wherever global elites met to discuss their latest plans for trade deals or debt schemes, they were met with hundreds of thousands of protestors who knew the effect of these brutal policies. After the massive direct action that shut down the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999, the venues for global trade summits were moved to more and more isolated locations, like Cancun, Hong Kong, and Qatar. But wherever the elites went, the people followed. The unrelenting and growing protest outside bolstered the demands of poor nations meeting inside, especially for Global North nations to stop agricultural subsidies that impoverish millions of subsistence farmers in the Global South. Representatives of poor nations were able to reject any deals that would keep those subsidies in place, with the support of social movements.
This movement effectively killed the World Trade Organization. Also being shot down was the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would have expanded NAFTA to the entire Western Hemisphere and further degraded legal protections for workers and the environment. Large-scale direct actions were able to stall these kinds of trade deals at the same time that lending institutions like the IMF and World Bank were increasingly nullified by an unwavering voice of protest demanding that land and ecosystems, along with workers and indigenous communities, be prioritized above the desires of financial capital. The breakdown of the neoliberal project was a major defeat for global capitalism, displaying the inherent weakness of the system – it requires our consent in order to rule us. Once this consent is withdrawn, capitalism must either rely on the use of repressive violence, or succumb to popular demands.
[more on The Power of Social Movements. or see all of Synopsis Part 3. Why is it Collapsing?]
4. What Comes After Capitalism?
As natural resource limits and rising social movements incapacitate the once-invincible machine of global capitalism, the world of the future is not written; it will be made by the victory of one set of competing actors: either the frightened few desperate to maintain their privileges, or everyday people organizing in their communities for justice.
Possible Futures:
1) Militarized states and continued plunder
2) Sustainable communities rooted in freedom, justice, and democracy
We are living through one of the most transformative periods in history, and our actions will likely determine the outcome. Will the human spirit prevail?
Desperate Measures: Preserving the System through Violence
A frightening assault on civil liberties started shortly after September 11th with the USA PATRIOT Act, which was used by federal enforcement agencies to spy on average citizens speaking out against the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the generals invaded the oil-rich Middle East, killing thousands of civilians and torturing more from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, the National Security Agency (NSA) was spying on millions of innocent Americans’ phone calls and emails. But the government’s callous disregard for human and civil rights displayed itself most disturbingly after Hurricane Katrina. When the levees broke and drowned the city of New Orleans, the mostly African American residents who were left behind languished for over a week in filth and squalor, as humanitarian aid was refused entry by the authorities. Nevertheless, the Army, National Guard, and a squadron of Blackwater mercenaries invaded the city to defend private property and shoot black people taking necessities from abandoned stores.
Riot police like this now appear at every major protest to violently discourage dissent
There is a name for this, when governments use violence to protect resources and property at the expense of human life: fascism. Rooted in authoritarian patriarchy, the control of women’s bodies and sexuality, fascism aims for the militarization of society, and draws its strength from the fears of the privileged, especially the upper and middle classes, whites, straights, and men.
Fascism appeals to those who wish to maintain their privilege, wealth and power in times of crisis, by deflecting losses towards those who are more vulnerable. The corporate bailouts illustrate this crisis-diversion perfectly: shifting risk from wealthy investors, whose irresponsible actions caused the chaos, to the taxpayers. Meanwhile, the media are raising the specter of the “enemy” (whether it be terrorists, protesters, immigrants, pro-choice Americans, or gay couples), to divide the population and enlist the white working class into nationalistic defense of property, the military, and the border. In the United States these politics of fear build on the strength of the Christian Right, and in a time of economic and ecological chaos, the appeal and danger of apocalyptic religious fundamentalism could become fodder for fascist movement. Instead of swastikas, they will carry American flags and the Bible, but hatred will be their politics.
As the capitalist iron giant stumbles, the fearful will propose desperate solutions to keep the system running. There is no available replacement for oil, but some even more destructive fuels like tar sands, ethanol, and liquefied coal (used by the Nazis in WW2) are being substituted. These require mega-scale industrial projects, but because the fuels provide such low rates of return, there is little appeal for capital investment unless the government absorbs the risks. Such an arrangement is impossible in a strictly free-market capitalist economy but becomes eminently possible if corporate and state interests merge into an arrangement that could be called state capitalism, or fascism. Reviving the industrial Frankenstein’s monster in this way would be a disaster for the planet and humanity, but there are those who would rather cling to what was than face the future with humbleness and courage.
The good news is that this monstrous corporate resuscitation can be stopped. Fascism is NOT an inevitability, only a possibility which grows increasingly unlikely as we organize, demonstrate, and take direct action for sustainability, justice, freedom and democracy. We can do this by replacing fear with love.
[more on Fascism]
Building the New World: Grassroots Movements for Progressive Change
All around the planet as the capitalist system breaks down, millions of everyday people are refusing to pay for the failures of those in power. In the wake of the economic crisis, as governments respond by favoring wealthy elites at the expense of their own populations, people are getting together to solve problems themselves, even if it means working outside the realm of established politics.
We witnessed an inspiring example of this defiance in the workers of the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago. When their bosses suddenly announced their factory would be closing and everyone would be losing their jobs, as well as their promised severance pay, the workers didn’t back down. Instead, they took direct action, occupying their factory and promising not to leave until they were compensated for their severance pay and vacation time. Their occupation electrified the nation and received support from all walks of life, including an expression of solidarity from president-elect Obama. Most importantly, the workers won their struggle and proved that even the poor and vulnerable can stand up to corporate power if they are organized.
Republic Windows & Doors Workers Occupying their Factory (picture by Joe Iosbaker), December 2008
Everyone has a role to play in social change. Workers are organizing in their workplaces for better wages and benefits, students are organizing on campuses for more accessible and democratic education, community members are organizing in their neighborhoods to save their land, homes and communities, and women and queer- and trans-folks are organizing to reclaim their bodies and sexualities. Defeating fascism and reorganizing society around human and ecological needs will take all of us working together, each in our own way. For example, we need people willing to occupy buildings or streets, but we also need people willing to hold a banner, or organize a petition. We need people to lobby Congress, and people to meet with their neighbors. We can’t do it if we don’t have people who will be willing to go to prison, and we’re lost if we don’t have people who will send emails to their friends and family. In short, we need everyone to step up to the degree that they can, and contribute in the way they know best. This requires a holistic approach to social change.
Such a holistic strategy must have at least 3 arenas of resistance (in no particular order):
- We need people inside the system to work for reforms that dull its destructive elements and amplify the voices of those on the outside. These could be progressive politicians, lawyers, celebrities, or nonprofit workers.
- We need people working against the system by fighting to stop it from doing more damage. This includes organizers and activists like myself, striking workers, those working against sexual assault and abuse, and many others engaging in direct action.
- We need people creating alternative networks that will replace the old system. These are people planting community gardens, organizing bike co-ops, starting local businesses, or maintaining their communities in the face of cultural genocide.
Finally, a holistic strategy requires that we take leadership from those most directly affected. In other words, those on the front lines of every struggle should call the shots. When people’s homes are facing eviction, no outside group or organization should attempt to speak for them or make deals behind the scenes. The homeowners must decide. This principle applies to issues of social oppression, like racism, patriarchy, class, or heterosexism. Those in power will always try to extinguish grassroots movements by dividing people along racial, gender, class or sexuality lines. To avoid this, there must be a constant effort to squash oppressive forces within the movement, as well as in society. We must model the world we wish to see.
The answer to the question “What Can I Do?” is different for every person because everyone has something unique and important to contribute. First ask yourself, what am I good at? What do I need to learn? Who do I need to work with? Finally, what institutions am I strategically positioned to affect or subvert? Then, get your people together.
We each need to discover our own voices and power in the larger struggle to free our planet. This is a struggle we can win, as long as we believe in ourselves and trust in one another.
[more on People Power. or see all of Synopsis Part 4. What Comes After Capitalism?]
5. Conclusion: The World We Are Building
An enormous weakness in the global capitalist system has been exposed. The collapse of the financial markets is just the beginning of a massive paradigm shift that will transform the social and ecological relationships inherent to capitalism.
We are living at one of the greatest turning points in history, in which a system that has just finished colonizing the entire planet is already facing its imminent demise. Like the Babylonian, Mayan, and Roman Empires before it, now Capitalism, seemingly secure in its global triumph, is in fact crumbling before our very eyes, and nothing can reverse the deterioration. Yet there remains a stark choice facing us: will the powerful succeed in coercing us into an even ghastlier slavery, or will we free ourselves and secure a more democratic future? Never before has humanity found itself at such a profound crossroads, and never will it again.
I believe strongly that we will win the future by mass noncooperation with the forces of fear and violence. The demise of capitalism and empire is closing the curtain on corporate globalization, and people the world over are going to seize the opportunity to redefine how they want to live with each other and in connection to the Earth, on a local level. Ultimately technology, the economy, and even culture will need to be appropriate to its surroundings. What works in a bioregion like the Great Plains might be different from what works in the desert, which might be different from what works in the inner city, or what once were the suburbs. This is exactly as it should be; it is impossible to construct a uniform formula that all individuals and communities should follow. The best we can lay out are core values to guide us on the journey we are about to undertake. And if we look inside ourselves, five such core values immediately present themselves: democracy, justice, sustainability, freedom and love.
Ella Baker inspired the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the other social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s with her principle of participatory democracy: individuals and communities having control of the decisions that affect their lives. In those massive, decentralized movements this doctrine proved successful not only as the ideal end but also as the best means available to social change activists. To create a world in which workers control their workplaces, students and teachers control their education, communities control their land and resources, women control their bodies, etc., our efforts towards that goal must also function through democratic decision-making. We must make sure that our movements remain inclusive of those with differing views and backgrounds, and we must involve more and more people by keeping our messaging and tactics relevant to the average person on the street. When people see themselves in the movement because we are speaking their language, they will join us.
A sense of justice teaches us that our movements must be feminist, anti-racist, queer and trans-positive, and anti-classist. Systems of oppression which privilege one group of people over another cannot be a part of the future society we are working towards, and therefore they cannot go unchallenged as we do our work. We must be sensitive to the fact that each and every one of us has been negatively affected by patriarchy, white supremacy, class and heteronormativity in different and overlapping ways, and even though some of us may be privileged for being male and/or white, for example, it is in everyone’s interest to break these systems of oppression. A famous quote by indigenous activist Lilla Watson shines a helpful light on this subject: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Obviously we are working towards sustainability, but what does that really mean? On a planet that has been devastated by industrial capitalism, and now is in danger of mass extinction or catastrophic climate change, it is not enough that we merely switch energy sources or technologies, while maintaining an economic structure based on growth. Industrial mass production and global monoculture, no matter the system of government managing them, are antithetical to sustainability. We can save trillions of dollars and drastically reduce the threat of climate change simply by eliminating wasteful and unnecessary industrial production, for example the weapons industry. Simultaneously we can create billions of jobs by radically decentralizing agricultural production: giving the farms back to families and turning our cities into gardens. Overall, a sustainable economy requires that we drastically downscale and relocalize production, consumption and trade from the industrial to the human level, bringing the human economy back within the web of the ecosystem rather than an alien force above it.
Freedom must be the backbone of any functioning future economy. People must always maintain the right to choose the field of their own labor, and be compensated fairly. Communities should decide how best to do this, and together we can likewise decide how to manage surpluses and trade. We must meet all basic human needs, like food, clothing, housing, shelter, health care, education, as well as creative work, and the best way to do this is to allow people to provide for themselves. Left to my own devices, I can fix our solar water heater during the morning, garden during the afternoon, sew in the evening and philosophize at night, without ever becoming a construction worker, farmer, tailor, or philosopher. And I cannot imagine a more productive day. This means that labor must be as equally free as trade, negotiated at the grassroots level.
All together, democracy, justice, sustainability, and freedom are more than just slogans – put together they provide a frame for the world we want to live in. But this picture would be incomplete without filling the canvass with the mutual support and forward-looking hope that I associate with love. Not the sappy, saccharine love that we’re exposed to in Disney films, but the genuine, time-tested, and transformative love that bell hooks talks about when she writes, “Love will always move us away from domination in all its forms. Love will always challenge and change us.” We need to recover a love for humanity and a love for the planet’s creatures which is founded on mutual respect. You cannot abuse, enslave or destroy that which you respect. But this is not about self-sacrifice, we also must commit to self-love. We have grown up and lived our whole lives in a culture that glorifies the unimportant, and denigrates the meaningful. As a result we’ve lost our connection to what matters most, ourselves. We love ourselves when we feel inside our bodies: notice our surroundings, appreciate our pain and pleasure, trust our emotions. We love ourselves when we put our minds to work: turn on our “thinking caps” and study the world around us, with an eye towards understanding ourselves. Finally, we love ourselves when we practice our spiritualities: connect ourselves to the great known and unknown energies at work all around us. If we base our struggles for the future on love, we know that in the end, the world we wish to see is not just a far-off idealistic dream, it is the inevitable result of a planet restoring to balance and a people recovering what they’ve lost.
This world is just over the horizon. We can see it getting closer every day as we work towards it. We will make it there, together.
[see all of Synopsis Part 5: Conclusion - The World We Are Building]
[Your feedback on these ideas is very welcome! Please share your thoughts by commenting on the Discussion page.]
Recent Comments