How to Save the World

Photo by Fabian Jones on Unsplash

There should be no doubt that capitalism is to blame for the rapidly escalating cataclysm we now find ourselves in.

Rampant extraction and production on a planet with finite resources is leading to a series of interlinked crises, of which climate change is the most serious. It seems that those driving forward this insane agenda have no intention of stopping. At the same time, the system is maintained because enough citizens in the developed world are either benefiting from the current system or are sufficiently apathetic and in thrall to consumerism to go along for the ride.

Those who truly hold power over society have likely factored in and accepted the costs of what they’re doing. They are now building fortified homes, re-purposing underground bunkers, buying tracts of land in New Zealand; in effect they’re pulling up the drawbridges and gambling that their wealth and power will insulate them from the worst effects of what’s to come.

It won’t.

Yet appeals to self-interest will not work with a class of people who already have all their interests catered to. It should also be perfectly obvious by now that scientific, moral, even economic reasoning, will not suffice to alter our current dystopian trajectory.

What’s to be done then? I obviously haven’t a clue really but my opinion is that capitalism as a system cannot be abruptly overthrown, certainly not in the time-frame needed to fully avert the disaster that awaits, and arguably not without producing even more widespread economic misery. Capitalism has on its side the full force of the state, with its militarized police, well-equipped armies and its corporate linked networks of propaganda and surveillance, all of which would be deployed ruthlessly to counter any movements that came even remotely close to instituting widespread systemic change. The world’s most powerful governments today are in no way analogous to the decrepit, disorganized Tsarist government of 1917 Russia. Realistically speaking, revolution in the near-term is a fantasy.

On the other hand, passively waiting for the next election to come (only for the familiar array of corporate forces to subvert it) is not a tenable strategy. What’s needed is a mass movement that can force capitalism to shed as many as possible of its ecologically…