Your Plans For Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works.
All the old ideas for uprooting the status quo have failed. I point this out not to depress people, but to persuade them to stop twisting on locked doorknobs. The old ideas don't work, so we need new ones.
The political process has failed. Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. Libertarianism has failed. Marx has failed. Populism has failed. Anarchism has failed. I say this not because of any glaring flaws in any of those ideas (in theory any of them could potentially work in an alternate universe), but because we are hurtling towards extinction in the fairly near future, and none of them have saved us.
"But Caitlin!" you may object. "My particular favorite ideology would have saved us long ago if only everyone had gotten on board with it!"
Okay. But they didn't. And now we're on the brink of armageddon. That means it has failed. It doesn't work.
We are well on our way to extinction via climate collapse or nuclear holocaust, and even if we miss those by some miracle we are headed toward an artificial intelligence-led tech dystopia in which our consciousness is permanently enslaved by a propaganda network that is far too advanced for there to be any hope of escaping into truth.
We are witnessing a mass extinction the likes of which we haven't seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth's food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops.
Our ecosystem is very fragile and rapidly fading, and the difference between the ability to survive without it and our current scientific capability is the difference between flying and jumping. Which won't matter if one of the many small, unpredictable moving parts in the steadily escalating new cold war with Russia results in a nuclear weapon being deployed as a result of misunderstanding or miscommunication and sparking off the annihilation of every organism on earth, as nearly happened during the last cold war on more than one occasion.
This is where the status quo has gotten us. All attempts to overthrow it have failed. The time is up, and the results are in.
The political process doesn't work.
I say this not because the political process can't work, due to some technical failure in the way it has been applied. I say this because it doesn't work, as evidenced by the fact that we're on the cusp of the apocalypse with no signs of steering clear of it. Attempts to uproot the status quo via political engagement and voting does not work.
"But Caitlin!" you may object. "The only reason the political process doesn't work is because it has been hijacked by corrupt powers with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo! If we can extract those corrupt powers, we can make the political process work!"
Okay. But you didn't. You were unable to extract the corrupt powers, and now we're on the brink of extinction. Your strategy has failed.
Capitalism doesn't work.
I say this not because capitalism can't work in theory, I say this because it doesn't work in practice. How do I know it doesn't work in practice? Because the planet is dying and we've all got doomsday weapons pointing at our heads that may go off at any moment. The results are in. Capitalism doesn't work.
"But Caitlin!" you may object. "What we've tried hasn't been real capitalism! The free market hasn't been given a chance to solve all our problems, because of the artificial interference and regulations of Big Government. If we can get rid of Big Government, we can solve all our problems!"
Okay. But that never happened. And now here we are at the end of the world, watching our planet ripped to shreds by status quo power structures. Capitalism failed. It doesn't work.
Socialism doesn't work.
I say this not because socialism can't work in theory, I say it because it doesn't work in real life, as evidenced by the fact that our world is on fire, our time is up, and we are all about to die. Socialism failed to save us. It doesn't work.
"But Caitlin!" you may object. "Socialism hasn't worked because it's never had a chance to work! If the capitalist imperialists would just stop sabotaging socialist experiments, it would thrive and replace the status quo! We'd all be saved!"
Okay. But we're not. The worldwide populace has not answered the call of socialism in sufficient numbers to overthrow the interests which oppose it, and now we're at the end of days. The plan was to unite the working class against the elite oppressors around the world and implement socialism, and it failed. It is a strategy which does not work.
Libertarianism doesn't work.
We could do this all day, with any number of ideologies. Perhaps libertarianism could work under the right circumstances, but attempts to rally the public around it have utterly failed, and now we're staring down the barrel of extinction. You can object and make excuses, or you can acknowledge that the strategies for implementing your preferred status quo-challenging ideology don't work, and find new ones.
It's easy to isolate yourself within a particular ideological echo chamber and create the illusion for yourself that your pet ideology is making progress. Oh look, Russiagate was disproven. Oh look, Jeremy Corbyn did well in those last elections. Oh look, the Democratic Socialists of America gained a few thousand members. But if you step out of that echo chamber and look at the big picture, you see a futile tug-of-war between feuding ideologies with no gains made anywhere near the scale that would be necessary to avert the massive threats on our horizon.
My point here is that we may have found an ideological standpoint that really resonates with us, and that ideology itself may be intrinsically worthy and vastly superior to the status quo. But the strategies for implementing that strategy have failed spectacularly. If you can't implement your strategy, you're just diddling cutesy ideas while the world burns. It's just a nice identity for you to hold onto and make your feely bits feel nice.
"I'm a Marxist!"
"I'm an anarchist!"
No you're not. You're an ideological LARPer dressing up in an identity and pretending to change the world, while the world itself tumbles into the abyss.
Again, I say this not to create a sense of hopelessness, but to get people to stop wasting time and energy pushing on locked doors. Stop trying strategies that people have been trying for decades with essentially zero ground gained, and try something else instead. Stop hanging out in your little echo chambers and thinking that anything's changing just because you are surrounded by people who agree with you. Sure, hold onto your beliefs about what kind of system would most benefit the world if you like, but be acutely aware that those beliefs in our current situation are completely meaningless.
The reality is that as long as powerful people control the dominant public narratives, no ground will be gained in steering our species away from the status quo trajectory that's killing us, because you won't be able to awaken mainstream consciousness to what's going on. The only thing that has any hope of prying the oligarchic hands off the steering wheel is the mainstream public seeing what they're doing and using the power of their numbers to force drastic change in a wildly different direction. If we can't make that happen, we're all just banging on locked doors while the curtain closes on humanity.
We all need to do better. I include myself in this. We need to try new things. Many, many new things. We need new ideas. What kind of new ideas? I don't know, that's why I'm telling you. I'm just one woman, and I put as many ideas out there as I can, but it's not enough. Clearly it's not enough, because here we are.
In my opinion the obvious way to open up a path for dissident ideas to replace the status quo is to kill the public trust in the stories they were told in school and continue to be told by the mass media about the kind of world and country they live in, but so far that hasn't happened. My own ideas for advancing that agenda which I've been seeding into the world have been inadequate, and so have everyone else's. So we need more new ideas. Lots and lots of new ideas.
What we've tried up until now hasn't worked, so if there's anything that might work it's going to come from a wildly unanticipated direction, from way outside the failed mental processes which have accompanied us to this point. We need to open ourselves to that kind of idea.
That's basically all I've got to offer today. A helpless but sincere plea for humanity to try something new, spat out onto the internet in the Hail Mary hope that it might plant some seeds and loosen the soil for something unprecedented to open up in human consciousness. Sometimes that's all that we can do.
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Our best weapon is high-quality education and the free flow of information for everyone.Educated,smart people can make responsible decisions,understand what's happening and why and can't be fooled by rhetorics and conspiracies.
This is a great post, because it can help folks to become averse to political debate in lieu of political action. It also reveals a bit of depth of history of how revolutions become captive to political rhetoric, and abandon political action.
Here's a new ism to consider: realism. Just the facts, and nothing but the facts. Technology is possible that physics enables, and people tinker until they develop it. We'll continue to do so because that's a human trait. Throughout history technology has always increased the power of individuals versus institutions. The more advanced technology is the greater that power differential grows, and the faster technology disperses throughout the population.
Today, across all fields, the cutting edge of all technological advance is decentralization. This is natural. Nature, decentralized, is messy, redundant, and robust. As soon as bits of it can come back following some catastrophe, they do. Soon enough verdant and fecund ecosystems overflow landscapes to their carrying capacity. Centralization, on which institutional power depends, is neat, efficient, and fragile. Catastrophe often completely eradicates the mechanisms and the beneficiaries of centralized systems. Sometimes as little as one maniacal zealot with an assassin's heart is all that's necessary to drop nations to their knees, and allows others to take their clay.
Decentralization directly decreases centralization. Centralization is tyranny, institutions imposing power on individuals, while decentralization is actual freedom, individuals creating their own power by producing their own goods, services, and wealth.
This revolution cannot be stopped. It cannot be reasoned with. It will never end until all centralized mechanisms intent on oppressing individuals for the profit of the overlords running those institutions are dead, buried, and historical footnotes. As technological advance continues at an ever accelerating pace, the propagation of decentralized means of production increases concomitantly, and the power of individuals versus institutions grows exponentially.
Do some research into what novel means of production present windows of opportunity that benefit you economically, and adopt those that make sense in your circumstances. Proselytize. Every person becoming more free by doing the same thing increases your personal freedom. Since people will differentially adopt tech, direct trade between them further increases the benefits of their personal control of the means of production, because barter isn't taxable, and does not provide rent through parasitism to overlords in control of industrial means of production.
All we need to do to become the masters of our own fate, and pass on a world more free and prosperous is to do this and avoid becoming catastrophically involved in war or other institutionally induced catastrophes that potentially could reduce our access to tech, even reduce us (those that survive) to chipping rocks and scratching in dirt for a living.
If that's all we do, we win.
Take heart, because even a cursory look online, searching reprap, or CRISPR, or aquaponics, will reveal more links to people doing this than you can follow if you live for a thousand years. When billions of us do this, government becomes incapable of projecting power - and this is important - because to do so they need boots on the ground, thugs, that can kick in doors and arrest us. They can't nuke our cities, drone us en masse, or poison our wells, because we are the source of the rent they depend on for their power. They need to convince us to render them service, and have done this by controlling the means of production with walled gardens of centralized wealth.
When we control the means of production, nobody will serve them, and they can't make us do it.
Firearms are literally a thousand year old technology, and incomprehensibly obsolete in modern times for people that own their own means of manufacturing mechanisms that prevent thugs from projecting force on them. I won't go into detail, but little thought is necessary to grasp how better tech exists to secure people from firearms than firearms can prevent them from effecting.
You can speed things up, or you can just wait for others to do it. The more you personally undertake this process, the more secure and prosperous you will be, but you can do you, and the rest of us will do what we do, and eventually, we'll all win.
Peace!
Every thought is limited, so every change coming from an idea/thought is limited and will only bring more conflict. The only revolution who works, is the revolution of the mind. Now this being said, it just shows us how much we are effd in today's state of mind!
"An idea who's time has come can not be stopped by any army or any government".
Agreed, still it will create conflict... I'm looking for the change without conflict. That would be real peace.
Yeah, well, Scientism doesn't exactly work either, so maybe lay off the global warming schtick. Things are urgent enough without an additional layer of artificial panic.
The only ideology I'd say we should all push the narrative towards is statelessness. Not because I believe it will all work out, but because individual sovereignty & respect for each person provides perspective. I feel it's the only way to a healthier future.
Politics only exists because the State does. This coercive force providing stress on society.
Freedom is beautiful and when it's in practice somewhere we all need to boost the signal to help drown out the sickness which is authoritarianism. Not by any government, but authoritative tendencies within our fellow humans.
Appreciation of liberty is a learned trait in my humble opinion.
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Without the state, we are left defenseless against the ruling class, with their central banks and monopolies. I mean the state works for them now...but...for a few decades the state protected We The People from the rulers.
How do you have a "Central bank" if no one is forced to use it? How would the ruling class be the ruling class without the State? Even when America was founded, who do you think wrote and created the government? How is a monopoly able to hold its monopoly without the State creating barriers to entry for their competition?
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It is time to realize that we cannot wait for the right time, right circumstance, right form of organizing.
We must all act now.
And - let's stop bombing the fuck out of the planet.
We're fucked enough...why make it go faster? Especially since the US Military is the #1 polluter on earth: we would have a win/win: less blood of children splattered all over the earth...and a few more years til extinction.
Dear Caitlin Johnstone:
Thank you for all of your efforts. They have NOT been in vain. Please do not let your ego (which we all have) tell you not to give yourself as much as before to what seems like an unresponsive world. It isn't easy to see, considering how much the media squelches news of the changing attitudes of people and the effects that has already been having, the movement towards stopping what has been going on for centuries. This is the time to continue your very valuable work unabated and not get discouraged.
I posted the following comment on Truthdig that acknowledges how bad and good things have become.
"All the problems Republicans and establishment Democrats have created are dwarfed by their incredibly blind opposition to ameliorating (its too late to stop) climate change and their craven efforts to blame Russia for everything bringing us closer to a nuclear holocaust. Their craven fear of losing their privileged positions and wealth has brought all of us closer to extinction. The media have been the main force in making come about by their long time massive efforts to squelch environmental and antiwar concerns, including by making it seem like that there is no great change in how people feel about these issues.
Yet quietly there is a rising tide of opposition even among the 1% to the course being taken by that mad dog in the White House and his accomplices in Congress and the Supreme Court. Even the greed damaged minds of the 1% have become aware that you cannot hoard huge amounts of money and other forms of power to feel you own and run the world when that world, through their efforts, is becoming inhospitable to our species continuing. Their growing awareness has come through the work of journals such as Truthdig, Consortium News, et al and the work of courageous journalists such Caitlin Johnstone and others. I hope they continue their work unabated and give enough weight to what they have accomplished and not let their egos (which we all have ) encourage them to feel it all comes to nothing. It doesn't. e.g. the children of the world are beginning to object to having no future, and this can only increase.
Thirty years ago there were no AOCs or Omars in Congress, no Tulsi Gabbards or Bernie Sanders running for President (you have to go back to FDR to find such), no rising might in China and Russia opposing US imperialism, no favoring of Socialism over Capitalism in the younger generation, no talk of the greed of the 1%, no such widespread distrust of the mainstream media!, no widespread domestic fear of our government, no increasing inability of all but the biggest corporations to make real profit (i.e. without manipulating the financials), no non-union resistance to corporate power (though guided by unions), no great anger among the vast majority of Americans on how they are treated economically (albeit some of it disastrously misdirected), and so many more other types of resistance to "business as usual" that is going on which the media tries to make into nothing. And all this is happening despite all the years of a massive onslaught of mainstream propaganda trying to fool the American people, and many other people overseas, into believing what is evil is good, and what is good is either evil, weak or a fraud!