There are already millions around the world out in the streets demanding an end to the destruction of the environment. Faced with the environmental crisis that threatens their lives, millions of farmers, in India, Mexico, East Africa, and around the world have mobilized. And tens of millions of workers have demonstrated around the world against the attacks on their lives by corporations. Our forces can be unified in the face of the crises we face.
It will be necessary to organize production around the maintenance of life, not the generation of capital. This would be very complex, organized, and planned globally and locally employing current scientific knowledge and expanding it in service of this project, experimenting and involving and engaging people internationally. Imagine liberating science from the interests of profit to develop new energy systems based on fossil-free sources, reorganizing agriculture and food distribution to control carbon emissions, redistributing work to allow more for our most urgent needs and ending for-profit production.
Of course, our response would also mean planning for the foreseeable continued crises of food production, displacement of people, and the preservation of species of all sorts. It would be our focus as we move toward the construction of socialism. The only way this can be achieved is to remove the obstacle – the global capitalist system.
Though this sounds like a tall task, and we may feel powerless, we are often in situations where we can exercise our power alongside our co-workers, neighbors, and communities. By understanding the nature of this society, a real solution becomes more apparent. Instead of placing our hopes on politicians or limiting our goals to targeting one company, we can reach out, involve others, and find every opportunity to engage everyone around us to take this on, together. Collectively, our forces can make a real difference.
This trajectory requires taking decision making out of the hands of corporate owners and politicians and putting it into all of our hands: the people doing the work to keep us alive and functioning. This process won’t be easy, but it requires each of us, prioritizing these goals and the actions that take us there right now. Imagine what we could do if we all prioritized defending our lives and our world in this way. We have no time to wait and a world to win.
