The Legal System Will Not Save the Planet

The Legal System Will Not Save the Planet

by | Nov 1, 2019 | Colonialism & Conquest

By Max Wilbert

As the world moves further into a state of climate crisis, it’s imperative that we study and critique the strategies being proposed to address greenhouse gas emissions, and develop our own strategies based on rigorous assessment of their effectiveness.

Many of the strategies currently being pursued by the mainstream environmental movement hinge on courts and on legislative change.  This article will examine one these strategies—the “climate trust” lawsuits brought by the group Our Children’s Trust—in some detail. First, however, we must review a basic framework of how the court system, and more fundamentally, the legal system in general, serves ruling class interests within capitalism.

From early English laws like the Statutes of Merton and Westminster that authorized enclosure of the commons, to the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera” in 1493 which authorized the Doctrine of Discovery and the conquest and colonization of non-Christian lands west of the Azores, law within capitalism has always been an exercise in justifying systematic theft.

These ancient foundations continue to underlie law. For example, in the United States the Johnson v. M’Intosh Supreme Court case of 1823 is regarded as the foundation of modern property law and studied by nearly every law student. In the unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that “the whole theory of their titles to lands in America, rests upon the hypothesis, that the Indians had no right of soil as sovereign, independent states. Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and this overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives.”[i]

What is the Purpose of Law within Capitalism?

French Liberal School economist and laissez faire advocate Frederic Bastiat provided one of the most concise definitions of law within capitalism. “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” he wrote in 1850, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”[ii]

With this statement, Bastiat was attempting to critique socialism and collectivist tendencies. Marx, a contemporary of Bastiat, called him “The shallowest and therefore the most successful representative of the apologists of vulgar economics.” But Bastiat has inadvertently provided a functional description of law within capitalism.

In a similar manner, the free-market advocate, New York Times columnist, and Iraq War crusader Thomas Friedman inadvertently described the link between imperialist warfare and free-market capitalism perfectly when he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1999 that “[t]he hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for silicon valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US army, air force, navy, and Marine Corps.”[iii]

Friedman’s piece argued for “sustainable globalization” which “cannot be maintained without the active [military] involvement of the United States,” and explicitly argued for increased cooperation between U.S. corporations and military.

The Institutionalization of Organized Theft

Critics of globalized capitalism agree with Friedman’s linkage of corporate power and military hegemony, but to borrow Bastiat’s term, see these entities as facilitating the plunder that defines modern capitalism, not ushering in Friedman’s neoliberal fantasy. Military aggression and economic colonization were the foundation of imperial power in Bastiat’s time, just as they are today.  Today’s capitalist societies have evolved their methods. Instead of legalized chattel slavery,[iv] the United States now has a slave-like prison system and the global economy is fully dependent on systematic labor exploitation. Some of the most lasting impacts of globalization include the outsourcing of jobs to poor nations with artificially deflated labor costs, the outsourcing of pollution to what Lawrence Summers called “underpolluted” nations, and the explosion of international trade. All of this is facilitated by the IMF and World Bank, which leverage development loans to systematically privatize the wealth and dismantle social and environmental regulations within poor nations. Altogether, this organized theft leads to an average wealth transfer of roughly $2 trillion per year from poor countries to rich countries, not counting externalities.[v]

The accelerating extraction of wealth from the poor has been matched by similar growth in destructive theft from the planet. Extraction of primary resources—timber, foodstuffs, ore, fossil fuels, water, etc.—has tripled over the past 40 years to more than 70 billion tonnes annually.[vi] Greenhouse gas emissions have doubled since 1980, and more than 1 million species are threatened with extinction, threatening to unravel the ecological basis of life on this planet.[vii] Human disconnection from the natural world is at an all-time high as business privatizes even our most intimate private lives with pornography, dating apps, and ubiquitous data gathering.

By realistic economic measures, the owners of society are wealthier than ever and inequality is reaching record levels.[viii] And as Bastiat described, this arrangement of power is undergirded by a legal structure that authorizes and glorifies this exploitation.

The United States—still the epicenter of imperial power, despite a steady decline in influence since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001—provides illustrative examples. The extraction of profits from workers and the land is the bedrock principle of American law. The idea that workers should be in control of their own communities and benefit from the work they and their neighbors do is not even a topic of discussion in courtrooms and legislative halls. Nature is owned and managed as property. The idea that nature should be respected as the source of all human goods and life is, at best, commodified into the ideology of “natural capitalism”, while true deep ecology ideals—that nature exists and has value for it’s own sake, on it’s own terms—remain fringe positions.

The Legal System as an Arena of Political Change

Movements for justice have always used the legal system and the courts as arenas of political struggle. The Civil Rights movement, the Feminist movement, the Labor movement, and the Environmental movement have all won significant victories in courtrooms. The feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, who is credited with the legal recognition of sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, wrote in collaboration with Andrea Dworkin that “law organizes power.”[ix]

Given the current supremacy of the capitalist state, the courts are an important arena of political struggle. To concede this legal battleground to reactionaries could be suicidal. But to rely only on legal methods is also a flawed strategy. Legal reform has never proved able to do more than slow the progression of capital’s death march.

The Voting Rights Act has now been dismantled, reversing a key gain of the Civil Rights Movement.[x] Roe v. Wade, which established Federal legality of abortion, has been under incessant attack for decades. Countless state laws have closed abortion clinics, limited funding, and attacked the principle of female bodily autonomy via more than 400 laws in the last 9 years alone.[xi] With the new Supreme Court, it’s likely Roe will be completely overturned. The Clean Water Act is currently being gutted.[xii] Union membership is at an all-time low as “right-to-work” laws proliferate, undermining the effectiveness of even bourgeois workplace organizing efforts.[xiii] This reflects global efforts to undermine minimum wages and other basic labor protections.[xiv]

Recently, environmentalists in the United States and elsewhere are testing a set of innovative legal strategies. These include the group “Our Children’s Trust,” which is filing lawsuits against the federal government for failing to uphold the “public trust doctrine,” a legal principle that the government is responsible for managing public resources for the benefit of the public.  Our Children’s Trust is attempting to expand the purview of the trust doctrine to include the climate, and thus potentially force the U.S. government to fight climate change.

But the flaw in this plan is  obvious right away: the U.S. government, like all capitalist states, has never existed to wisely steward public resources, but rather to facilitate their exploitation for private gain. In truth, even most socialist states have fallen victim to industrial arms races with capitalist societies or to an industrial productivism that values development of industry as the highest good, and have thus fallen well short of this ideal.

Rights of Nature, the Trust Doctrine, and The Necessity Defense

The trust doctrine approach is just one of the innovative legal strategies being pursued by the environmental movement today. Two others are the Rights of Nature movement, and the push for the “climate necessity defense.” The rights of nature movement seeks to expand basic rights, such as personhood, to non-human ecosystems. The necessity defense is the legal principle that it is sometimes legal to break the law in order to prevent a greater harm; the classic example is breaking a window to save a child from a home that is on fire. It has been used to defend protestors in a few high-profile cases of civil disobedience.[xv]

These legal strategies aim to advance ecological struggles by providing protections for ecosystems, by forcing changes in U.S. and international law to curtail global warming, and by protecting political dissidents.

Can they succeed? And what would success look like?

I argue that these efforts, while laudable, will not lead to significant change because of structural barriers. For example, let’s imagine that the “Our Children’s Trust” lawsuit was successful, and U.S. courts recognized the obligation of the federal government to safeguard climate stability, and ordered emissions reductions of, for example, 80 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. And let’s suppose they choose to implement the methods proposed by Our Children’s Trust.

Our Children’s Trust proposes a three-pronged strategy for halting global warming.[xvi] First, they call for 100 gigatons of carbon sequestration via reforestation, perennial agriculture, and soil conservation. Second, they call for reducing emissions by “designing our cities for walking and biking, investing in mass transit, constructing high-performance energy efficient buildings, transitioning to 100% clean energy, shifting to green manufacturing and durable products, and adopting restorative forestry and farming practices.” Finally, they propose fees on carbon pollution and ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

Their first category of solutions is admirable, as long as “reforestation” is not twisted to mean expanding the monocrop plantations of industrial forestry. But as I exhaustively detail in my forthcoming book Bright Green Lies, their second category, technological solutions, is woefully insufficient for addressing global climate destabilization.

The Failure of Green Technology

According to the work of sociologist Richard York, renewable energy today rarely actually displaces fossil fuels. Instead, predictably, these energy sources are typically added on top of existing sources, helping to grow the capitalist economy. York writes that “Non-hydro renewable [energy] sources have a positive coefficient, indicating the opposite of displacement, but this coefficient is not significantly different from 0, indicating that renewables tend to simply be added to the energy mix without displacing fossil fuels.”[xvii] Another study in China had similar results, finding that “Non-hydro alternative energy did not show statistically significant displacement effect in any of the six regional grids.”[xviii]At a global level (which is ultimately the only significant scope for global warming), the burning of coal, oil, and gas has grown significantly even as wind and solar have boomed.[xix]

After five years of research, one climate solutions lab found that even “a wholesale adoption of renewable energy… would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions” and concluded that “Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work.”[xx]

Socialists have long argued that centralized planning and the lack of a growth imperative would allow non-capitalist societies to adopt new technologies cautiously and rationally. This remains a largely untested hypothesis in our era of global ecological crisis, but regardless, this is not what Our Children’s Trust is promoting. Instead, they chose to promote unproven and extremely expensive carbon capture technology (as one recent headline reads, “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered”[xxi]), electric cars, and energy efficiency which hasn’t made a dent in growth in consumption. In truth, efficiency within capitalism is almost certain to lead to Jevon’s Paradox: more profit, more investment, and more growth in resource use.[xxii]

“Green Cities” and Market Failures

Even dense, walkable cities—a favorite of “green growth” and de-growth advocates alike probably represent an illusory solution. As urban planning professor Michael Neuman succinctly explains, “Since 1960, while human population has doubled [and the majority of the world’s population has moved to cities], the global economy has quadrupled, and resource consumption quintupled,” he says. “Thus, we are getting less efficient and less sustainable as we move to cities, not more, contrary to popular belief and professional dogma.”[xxiii] Study after study from locations as widely spaced as Iran, Taiwan, and the Netherlands have shown little or no reduction in energy consumption resulting from increased urban density.

As with other market-based measures for environmental protection, carbon tax schemes have been almost completely ineffective in lowering emissions. For example, the European market is flooded with allowances, and has at best reduced emissions by 2 or 3 percent across the continent.[xxiv] At worst, it has simply incentivized pollution outsourcing and “carbon laundering” as seen most prominently in the Volkswagen emissions case.

Given these realities, even a positive ruling in the Our Children’s Trust case wouldn’t significantly slow or stop global climate destabilization. Direct approaches, like stopping fossil fuel extraction, are not discussed in their strategy, and there is no critique of capitalism apparent either.

Some proponents argue that major policy proposals like The Green New Deal or lawsuits like the Our Children’s Trust cases represent organizing focal points which expand the scope of acceptable debate.[xxv] This is certainly true. But while false solutions to the problems of capitalism are always acceptable to ruling class, they will never solve the problems they purport to address. It is past time to build explicitly anti-capitalist organizations to address the ecological crisis, and to arm them with effective (read: revolutionary) methods.

The Necessity of Dismantling Industrial Capitalism

The reason Our Children’s Trust isn’t tackling this issue is likely the same reason The Green New Deal didn’t include a proposal to shut down the fossil fuel industry. As Brad Hornick writes in Resilience, “[Stopping anthropogenic climate disruption] implies a radical retrenchment or collapse of the dominant industries and infrastructure based upon fossil fuel production, including automobiles, aircraft, shipping, petrochemical, synthetic fabrics, construction, agribusiness, industrial agriculture, packaging, plastic production (disposables economy), and the war industries.”

In other words, stopping climate chaos requires an end to capitalism, to much of the global economy, and to U.S. hegemony. This is not popular in society, nor is it politically acceptable—even thinkable—in courtrooms. The U.S. court system will never order the dismantling of the global economy and of U.S. empire. In the 19th century, Mikhail Bakunin wrote that “The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost.” This remains true today.

Legally speaking, judges can rule anything they want, as long as they can justify it using legal precedent. But there are also specific legal and doctrinal barriers that confine all judges who sincerely believe in the structure of American law. Namely, as mentioned earlier, the notion that nature is property, that property can be rightfully destroyed or consumed by its owner, and the principles of corporate rights all stand in the way in the significant legal change. Further, even favorable court rulings would depend on the Executive and Legislative branches of the U.S. government, as well as on police, military, and other Federal employees, to enforce such a legal shift.

To rely on the law alone is to concede to a never-ending tug of war—an endless battle which the ruling class wages using billions in lobbying dollars. But institutions are not monolithic. Ideological power struggles within them can change the material conditions for resistance taking place within the broader culture. And there is some promise in all of these legal strategies. For example, the Rights of Nature approach has the possibility to instill a new, fundamental respect for the integrity of the natural world throughout certain populations. The climate necessity defense approach has promise for protecting activists who engage in non-violent direct action (which we should note has been thus far entirely ineffective in stopping the murder of the planet). Therefore, the promise these new legal approaches represent is primarily cultural. In military terminology, these are shaping actions, not decisive ones.[xxvi]

Reform Will Not Halt The Crisis

These legal strategies may change the framing conditions and lead to reform. But as the last 50 years can attest, reforms will not be enough to halt the ecological crisis. At worst, ill-fated movements can divert valuable resources and energy into dead-end efforts. Left historians do not look kindly on Nelson Mandela’s pro-capitalist turn late in life, but he articulated an important consideration when he justified his decision to create the Unkhonte We Sizwe, an armed underground insurgency, writing that “There is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”[xxvii]

Modern movements would do well to consider this.

David Brower, the founder of Earth Island Institute and Friends of the Earth, and former director of the Sierra Club once said, “All I have done in my career is to slow the rate at which things get worse.” In this historical moment, we don’t have time to merely slow the destruction. We need to rapidly halt it and to reverse it. This means choosing effective methods, and at a minimum, dismantling capitalism.

The struggle to halt the ecological crisis will not be primarily fought in courtrooms, legislated by policymakers, sold by corporations, or decided by foundation-funded NGOs. It will be fought by people’s movements and by revolutionaries who are willing to fight for the survival of the human species and the global community of biotic life. That’s something that the courts will never do.

Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He been involved in campaigns against sexual violence, destruction of the planet, and racism for 18 years.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Featured image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

References

[i] Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S.  543 (1823)

[ii] Frederick Bastiat. The Law. 1850.

[iii] Thomas L. Friedman. “A Manifesto for the Fast World.” New York Times Magazine (March 28, 1999).

[iv] Although it should be noted there are an estimated 40 million literal slaves in the world today, mostly in forced manual labor, service industries, and sexual slavery.

[v] Intan Suwandi, R. Jamil Jonna, and John Bellamy Foster. “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism.” Monthly Review 70, no. 10 (March 2019): 1-24.

[vi] “Worldwide Extraction of Materials Triples in Four Decades, Intensifying Climate Change and Air Pollution.” International Resource Panel, U.N. Environmental Programme (20 July 2016).

[vii] “Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating.’” Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (May 6, 2019).

[viii] Jason Hickel. “Global inequality may be much worse than we think.” The Guardian (April 8, 2016).

[ix] Andrea Dworkin and Catherine A. MacKinnon. Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988).

[x] “Voting Rights Act Dismantled by Supreme Court.” Democracy Chronicles (June 25, 2013)..

[xi] “Roe v. Wade: The Constitutional Right to Access Safe, Legal Abortion.” Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

[xii] Michelle Chen. “Trump Moves to Gut the Clean Water Act.” The Nation (December 13, 2018).

[xiii] Gordon Lafer. “The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012.” Economic Policy Institute (October 31, 2013).

[xiv] Subodh Varma. “World Bank: abolish minimum wage, other labour laws.” Monthly Review Online (April 24, 2018).

[xv] Andrew Buncombe. “Anti-pipeline campaigners found not guilty by judge because ‘protest against climate change crisis’ was legal ‘necessity.’” The Independent (March 27, 2018).

[xvi] “Pathway to Climate Recovery.” Our Children’s Trust.

[xvii] Richard York. “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 441-443.

[xviii] Yuanan Hu and Hefa Cheng. “Displacement efficiency of alternative energy and trans-provincial imported electricity in China.” Nature Communications 8 (2017): 14590.

[xix] Barry Saxifrage. “Fossil fuel expansion crushes renewables.” National Observer (September 20, 2017).

[xx] Ross Koningstein and David Fork. “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change.” IEEE Spectrum (November 18, 2014).

[xxi] Michael Barnard. “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered.” CleanTechnica (June 12, 2019).

[xxii] John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York. “Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency.” Monthly Review 62, no. 6 (November 1, 2010).

[xxiii] Alan Oakes. “Revisiting Neuman’s ‘Compact City Fallacy.’” Green Building and Design Magazine (2013).

[xxiv] “The EU Emissions Trading System.” European Commission Climate Action (July 22, 2016).

[xxv] Carol Dansereau, John Foran, Ted Franklin, Brad Hornick, Sandra Lindberg, Jennifer Scarlott. “One, Two, … Many Green New Deals: An Ecosocialist Roundtable.” Resilience (February 26, 2019).

[xxvi] “ADP 3-0. Unified Land Operations.” Department of the Army (2011).

[xxvii] Nelson Mandela. Long Walk to Freedom (Little Brown & Co., 1994).

Love Letter to a Fierce Revolutionary Community

by | Oct 23, 2019 | Culture of Resistance

By Max Wilbert

For the past 9 years, I have been part of a revolutionary social and ecological organization. In that time, I have made some of my best friends in the world. I have met some of the most incredible people I can imagine: true-hearted warriors with courage, conviction, and character.

These comrades are doing incredible work, around the world, every day. They are fighting coal mines and oil pipelines. They are sponsoring refugees and campaigning for women’s rights. They are advocating for revolutionary environmentalism. They are restoring land and fighting “development,” better known as destruction of the land. They are collaborating and allying with indigenous nations in decolonization and resistance.

They are also doing the everyday work of human beings. They are raising intelligent, articulate, capable children.  They are rewriting the rules of equal relationships. They are being good friends. They are creating local, sustainable food systems. They are building community over shared meals and shared ideals, then working to make their ideals a reality.

It has become a tradition in this community for us to support members and close allies who are going through difficult times. We send them notes of support, packages of food, herbal medicines, art. We care for one another.

It is not easy to be a revolutionary. Some of us have lost our jobs for our political views. Others have faced physical violence, ostracization, blacklisting. Taunts, jeers, death and rape threats: these are a regular occurrence for many of us. Many of us live under authoritarian governments and police states of one degree or another. Disappearance, trumped-up jail time, and solitary confinement in maximum-security is a constant threat.

Radical communities can be volatile. Personalities clash, ideals are tested, and the oppression of the dominant culture is never fully stamped out. As we grapple with the biggest problems ever faced by our species—mass extinction, global warming, toxification, militarism, patriarchy, racism—we struggle to form solidarity with each other.

We have had our share of problems. We make mistakes. We hurt each other. We make poor decisions. We have much to learn.

But we are serious, and we are committed. We know ecological revolution is perhaps the only remaining path to a livable future. We are facing the end of life on the planet; any risks are small in comparison to that nightmare. As we struggle externally, against the dominant culture, against the machine, we struggle internally as well. To be better people. To live up to our ideals. To be relentless in our love, our passion, our commitment. To personify the spirit of the revolution.

In this world in crisis, we know where we stand. We stand together, united, in defense of the living planet, and in defense of justice.

—

Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement, and works with Deep Green Resistance. He is the author of two books.

Resistance Profile: Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)

Resistance Profile: Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)

by | Oct 11, 2019 | The Solution: Resistance

Editors note: this material is excerpted from a Deep Green Resistance  database called “Resistance Profiles,” which explores various movements, their strategies and tactics, and their effectiveness. We encourage you to study all social movements to learn from their successes and failures.

Goal

To protect indigenous autonomy, their connection with their hereditary land, and combat forces of globalization. In addition, they are working to build participatory models of government, following indigenous traditions as well as uniting anti-capitalist forces behind “Zapatismo”.

Strategy

They initially used an armed uprising with a heavy military focus to win some autonomous space. They now work mostly aboveground to create institutions parallel to and in replacement of the Mexican government. They network with other indigenous groups to support autonomy, while interacting as little as possible with the “bad government.”

Tactics:

Their tactics have evolved in the last decades. The EZLN began with a full scale attack on key cities in Chiapas, Mexico, resulting in a war with the government. The war ended with a cease-fire after 12 days, leading to a 1996 peace accord with the government meant to protect indigenous autonomy. Though not actively fighting, they still maintain a formalized underground army with bases of support. The army states that it will not attack nor defend lands with weapons, but is training. If lands are taken by government, the people relocate.

The Mexican government failed to uphold the 1996 treaty, but the Zapatistas have used this period to act as if the treaty is valid, building health, educational, and governmental alternatives to those offered by the Mexican state.

They actively build an international presence to gather donations and support, and also tour Mexico and host large indigenous conferences in the hopes of supporting other indigenous groups in their mission for autonomy. They refuse offers of “aid” and other subsidies from the Mexican government.

Organization:

The territory is split into 6 “caracoles”, autonomous governments that fall under a larger Zapatista banner, with local community members continuously rotating through positions of power. The “civilian” arm of the group is technically in charge of the “Zapatistas” with the EZLN (the actual army) taking a step back, but there is some debate over how much influence the EZLN commands in reality.

Above/Underground:

Both. The Zapatistas are run by the aboveground arm, with the EZLN in control of the underground army.

Security:

Lots of secrecy around army whereabouts and activities; participants are not openly armed. Everyone wears signature “pasamontana” mask. Borders to territories are protected by unarmed guards and visitors need permission to enter.

Recruitment:

Mainly from populations of peasant farmers and indigenous communities. They are struggling to keep recruits because of economic disruption and decreasing crop yields likely resulting from climate change. In addition, the government has engaged in a long paramilitary war with US complicity, using the “drug war” as a ploy to militarize the south of Mexico and undermine autonomy.

Effectiveness:

Very effective. They have been able to protect lands for the last 20 years. Overall, there has been a resurgence in indigenous movements in Mexico and Central America, largely related to the continuing presence of the Zapatistas.

Further learning

Featured image by seven resist, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

To Save the World

To Save the World

by | Oct 7, 2019 | Agriculture

Editor’s note: people with various diets are involved in Deep Green Resistance. Critical analysis of agriculture is central to our understanding.

By Lierre Keith

Start with a sixteen-year-old girl. She has a conscience, a brain, and two eyes. Her planet is being drawn and quartered, species by species. She knows it even while the adults around her play shell games with carbon trade schemes and ethanol. She’s also found information that leaves her sickened in her soul, the torment of animals that merges sadism with economic rationality to become the US food supply. Their suffering is both detailed and institution- ally distant, and both of those descriptors hold their own horrors.
A friend of mine talks about “the thing that breaks and is never repaired.” Anyone who has faced the truth about willful or socially- sanctioned cruelty knows that experience: in slavery, historic and con- temporary; in the endless sexual sadism of rape, battering, pornography; in the Holocaust and other genocides. You’re never the same after some knowledge gets through with you. But our sixteen-year-old has courage and commitment, and now she wants to do what’s right.

The vegetarians have a complete plan for her. It’s simple. You can create justice for animals, for impoverished humans, and for the earth if you eat grains and beans. That simplicity is part of its appeal, partly because humans have a tendency to like easy rules. But it also speaks to our desire for beauty, that with one act so much that’s wrong can be set right: our health, our compassion, our planet.

The problem is they’re wrong, not in their attempts to save the world, but in their solution. The moral valuing of justice over power, care over cruelty and biophilia over anthropocentrism is a shift in values that must occur if we are to save this planet. I didn’t call this book The Vegetarian Lie. I called it The Vegetarian Myth for a reason. It’s not a lie that animals are sentient beings currently being tortured for our food. It’s not a lie that the rich nations are siphoning off the life of the planet for literally oceans full of endless, empty plastic junk. It’s not a lie that most people refuse to face the systems of domination— their brute scale—that are destroying us and the earth.

But the vegetarians’ solution is a myth based on ignorance, an ignorance as encompassing as any of those dominating systems. Civilization, the life of cities, has broken our identification with the living land and broken the land itself. “The plow is the … the world’s most feared wrecking ball,” writes Steven Stoll. For ten thousand years, the six centers of civilization have waged war against our only home, waged it mostly with axes and plows. Those are weapons, not tools. Never mind reparations or repair: no peace is possible until we lay them down.

Those six centers were each driven by a tight cohort of creatures, at the center of which stand an annual plant or two. And humans have been so useful to corn and rice and potatoes, clever enough to conquer perennial polycultures as vast as forests, as tough as prairies, but not smart enough to see we’ve been destroying the world. The cohort has often included infectious diseases, diseases like smallpox and measles that jumped the species barrier from domesticated animals to humans. Humans who stood in the way of civilization’s hunger have been eradicated by the millions through civilization’s microbes, the first clear-cut preparing the way for the plow.

This is the ignorance where the vegetarian myth dead ends. Life must kill and we are all made possible by the dead body of another. It’s not killing that’s domination: it’s agriculture. The foods the vegetarians say will save us are the foods that destroy the world. The vegetarian attempt to remove humans from a paradigmatical pinnacle is commendable. And it’s crucial. We will never take our true place, one sibling amongst millions, sharing a common journey from carbon to consciousness, sacred and hungry, then back to carbon, without firmly and forever rejecting human dominion.

But in order to save the world we must know it, and the veg- etarians don’t, not any more than the rest of the civilized, especially the industrially so. Hens driven insane in battery cages are visible to vegetarians; both morally and politically that insistent sight is needed. What are invisible are all the other animals that agriculture has driven extinct. Entire continents have been skinned alive, yet that act goes unnoticed to vegetarians, despite the scale. How do they not see it? The answer is they don’t know to look for it. We are all so used to a devastated landscape, covered in asphalt and the same small handful of suburban plants, a biotic coup of its own. The whole east coast should be one slow sigh of wetland, interspersed with marsh meadows and old growth forest. It’s all gone, replaced by a McMonocrop of houses, shackles of asphalt, the brutal weight of cities.

Where the water goes shy, the trees should thin to savanna and prairie, although even there the wetlands should cradle the rivers. But there’s nothing left. The deltas and swamps, bison and black terns, have been turned into soy and wheat and corn. The capitalists say we should turn those into animal units; the vegetarians say we should dump them near the starving; I say we should stop growing them and let the world come back to life. Then we can take our place again, that place that the vegetarians claim to want, our place as participants.

We can dominate or we can participate but there is no way out. That’s what no one is telling that sixteen-year-old. The earth is liter- ally dying for wetlands and forests, rivers and prairies. And if humans would simply step aside, the world would do the work of repairing itself. But that repair involves death. It means letting the beavers eat the trees, letting the wolves eat the beavers, letting the soil eat us all. It means taking down every last dam and letting the salmon come home to lay their eggs and be eaten, and in the eating become the forest. This is the world as it should be, resiliently nourishing itself, the gift both given and received. No one is going to tell that sixteen- year-old girl the truth, because there’s no one left in her world who knows it.

Letting the beavers come back will mean that wetlands may well cover one-third of the land in places. Those wetlands can’t coexist with our roads and suburbs and agriculture. So where does your loyalty lie? Ask yourself that question as if you really mean it. Those wetlands would also feed us forever. To bring the wolves back would require a similar and massive contracture of human activity: they need land, wild land, sturdy with functioning forests and grasslands, not broken by cars, gouged into subdivisions, and coerced into mono- crops. You can’t have it both ways, vegetarians. If you want to save this world, including its animals, you can’t keep destroying it. And your food destroys it.

If you want rules about what to eat, I can give you some principles. They’re slightly more complicated than “Meat Is Murder,” but then the living world is complex, and beholding it should leave us all aching with awe. So start with topsoil, the beginning place. Remember, one million creatures per tablespoon. It’s alive, and it will protect itself if we stop assaulting it. It protects itself with perennial poly- cultures, with lots and lots of plants intertwining their roots, adding carbonaceous leaves, and working together with mycelium, bacteria, protozoa, making a new organism between them, the mycorrhiza that talks and nourishes and directs.

Defend the soil with your life, reader: there is no other organism that can touch the intelligence of what goes on beneath your feet.

So here are the questions you should ask, a new form of grace to say over your food. Does this food build or destroy topsoil? Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers? Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?

Everything falls into place with those three questions. Those annual monocrops lose on all three counts, unless you live in Nebraska, where it “only” fails the first two. Animal rights philosopher Peter Singer argues that you should only eat animal products if you can see their origin with your own eyes. While I agree with the impulse—to end the denial and ignorance that protect factory farming—this demand has to be much bigger: you should know where every bite of your food comes from. We need to end the denial and ignorance that protect agriculture. The worldview that gives any and all plant foods an automatic pass is profoundly blind to how those very foods devour living communities. Go look at Nebraska, where the native prairie is 98 percent gone. Even if you’ve never seen an Audubon bighorn or a swift fox, you must surely miss them.

We’ve all built this living world of gift and need, birth and return. To repair this planet, we must take our sustenance as part of those relationships instead of destroying them. We can pull the forest down or we can eat the deer that live there. We can rip up the grass or we can eat the bison that should stretch across the plains. We can dam the rivers or we can eat the fish that could feed us forever. We can turn biologic processes into commodities until the soil is salt and dust, or we can take our place as another hungering member of an ancient tribe, the tribe of carbon. All flesh is grass, wrote someone named Isaiah in a book I don’t usually quote. In Hebrew, the word translated as “flesh” is basar, meaning meat, something one eats. Isaiah understood what is no longer physically visible to us, living at the end of the world: we are all a part of one another, made from grass, become meat.

“But food requires destruction,” a vegan argued with me, in an e-mail exchange that went exactly nowhere. That is the final myth you must face, vegetarians. Because the food I am proposing, the food of our ancestors, whose paleolithic hearts and souls we still inhabit, does not require destruction. At this moment it would in fact require repair and restitution: the forests and grasslands mended, conquered territory ceded back to the earth for her wetlands. Steven Stoll sums up agriculture: “Humans became parasites of the soil.” It’s your food that has brought us to the end of the world.

My food builds topsoil. I’ve watched it happen. The mixture of grasses and trees, cousins in their own right, provides for the animals, who in their turn maintain and nourish by their simple biological functions of eating and excreting. On Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm— the mecca of sustainable food production—organic matter has increased from 1.5 percent in 1961 to 8 percent today. The average right now in the US is 2-3 percent. In case you don’t understand, let me explain. A 6.5 percent increase in organic matter isn’t a fact for ink and paper: it’s a song for the angels to sing. Remember that pine forest that built one-sixteenth of an inch of soil in fifty years? Cue those angels again: Salatin’s rotating mixture of animals on pasture is building one inch of soil annually.

Peter Bane did some calculations. He estimates that there are a hundred million agricultural acres in the US similar enough to the Salatins’ to count: “about 2/3 of the area east of the Dakotas, roughly from Omaha and Topeka east to the Atlantic and south to the Gulf of Mexico.” Right now, that land is mostly planted to corn and soy. But returned to permanent cover, it would sequester 2.2 billion tons of carbon every year. Bane writes:

That’s equal to present gross US atmospheric releases, not counting the net reduction from the carbon sinks of existing forests and soils … Without expanding farm acreage or removing any existing forests, and even before undertaking changes in consumer lifestyle, reduction in traffic, and increases in industrial and transport fuel efficiencies, which are absolutely imperative, the US could become a net carbon sink by changing cultivating practices and marketing on a million farms. In fact, we could create 5 million new jobs in farming if the land were used as efficiently as the Salatins use theirs.

Understand: agriculture was the beginning of global warming. Ten thousand years of destroying the carbon sinks of perennial polycultures has added almost as much carbon to the atmosphere as industrialization (see Figure 5, opposite), an indictment that you, vegetarians, need to answer. No one has told you this before, but that is what your food—those oh so eco-peaceful grains and beans—has done. Remember the ghost acres and the ghost slaves? What you’re eating in those grains and beans is ghost meat, down to the bare bones of whole species. There is no reconciling civilization and its foods with the needs of our living planet.

To save the world, we must first stop destroying it. Cast your eyes down when you pray, not in fear of some god above, but in recognition: our only hope is in the soil, and in the trees, grasses, and wetlands that are its children and its protectors both.

“And why are we not doing this now?” is the clarion call Bane ends with. For a lot of reasons, most of them having to do with power. But a new populism could spring from this need, a serious political movement combining environmentalists, farm activists, animal rights groups, feminists, indigenous people, anti-globalization and relocalization efforts—all of us who are desperate for a new, and living, world.

That’s the real reason I’ve written this book. The earth, our only home, needs that movement, and she needs it now. The only just economy is a local economy; the only sustainable economy is a local economy. Come at it from whichever angle matches your passion, the answers nest around the same central theme: humans have to draw their sustenance from where they live, without destroying that place.

That means that first we must know that place. I can’t give you a list of what to eat because I don’t know what can live where you do. I can only give you the principles I’ve already laid out. Then you’ll have to ask questions. How much rain falls where you are? What’s the terrain, the temperature, the soil? Dairy cattle, for instance, do great things where I live in cold, wet New England. I wouldn’t suggest them in dry New Mexico.

Understand my point. Farming—the growing of annual mono- crops—will never be sustainable. Our only chance is a judicious and humble human participation in perennial polycultures. We can do that poorly, as demonstrated in the overgrazing due to population pressures that is currently turning grasslands to desert the world over. Or we can do it well, like the Fulani of Africa, with a largely unbroken line reaching back to a pre-human time four million years ago.

How much can we change the landscape before participation becomes destruction? Especially when our impact may not be visible for a thousand years? Should we, for instance, use fire? Fire will drive out some species, both plant and animal, and encourage others. Where I live, sugar maples are iconic. Yet five hundred years ago, they wouldn’t have been here, or not many of them. The burning practices of Native Americans kept the forest here shifted toward fire-resistant and mast-bearing trees. That information was a shock
to my system: don’t mess with my maple trees. But Brian Donahue makes the point that as long as there has been a forest in New Eng- land, there have been humans living in it. We belong here, too, if we would just behave like it. The pristine forest free of human influence has never existed here, so is it the ideal we should be aiming for?

If so, that ideal must presuppose a devastated landscape some- where else and an interstate highway system to transport the foods produced out of it. None of this can last: not the devastation, the fossil fuel, the distance. We need to eat where we live and our food must be part of the repair of our home.

Let’s look at an example. Do dairy cows belong in New Eng- land? In the here and now, as I make my personal and political decisions about breakfast, are cows on the side of good or do they need to be hauled up Mount Doom?

Dairy cattle were brought over from Europe four hundred years ago. Does that rule them out automatically? But if you dig deeper into the past, there were once thirty-three more genera of large mammals on this continent, relatives of horses, cows, elephants, giraffes— and not that long ago, a mere 12,000 years. Their absence has left evolutionary widows, trees like honey locust and osage orange that are in decline because they need large herbivores to help them.9 In that sense, horses and cows were perhaps reintroduced with the spread of Europeans. So dig deeper still. Are these new animals similar enough to the ones that are gone, or do their divergences make them destructive assailants on the land base? There were, for instance, once equids here, but they had cloven hooves and no upper teeth. The result of the solid hooves and incisors is “ecological havoc.”10 The feral horses from Europe destroy desert seeps and springs, smother spawning gravel with silt, and strip grasslands to bare dirt. The most in-depth analysis of nineteen study sites found severe damage to “soils, rodents, reptiles, ants, and plants.” That damage puts species from desert tortoises to the endangered Lahontan cutthroats at risk.

There are clearly brittle landscapes too fragile for cows—especially for dairy cows—as well. Most of the west is more suited to the animals that were already there—buffalo, pronghorns, elk—and that’s what the people there should be eating. So that’s a directive: restore the prairie, long grass and short, and the drylands, and return their animal cohorts. Then think long and hard about other megafauna and their place on this continent. Do the grasslands and savannas want them back, or their relatives that still survive? What about the honey locust and osage orange, who need their large seeds to be di- gested and carried by large herbivores? Is their dying simply evolution at work? If we humans reintroduce some creature that might fulfill that function and restore the range of those trees, is that also evolu- tion? Or is that interference?

And I still need to decide about breakfast.

Cattle on pasture in my climate can easily be sustainable. Joel Salatin is certainly proving that. The model is sound and the climate and rainfall are suitable. But pasture isn’t the natural landscape of New England. Forests, wetlands, and marsh meadows are. The Europeans’ cows first grazed in those meadows and forests. As the beaver were eradicated, the wetlands and marsh meadows disappeared. Meanwhile, in Europe, experimentation with plant admixtures improved the sustainability of pastures dramatically. How does turning some forest land into pasture compare with the habitat shift of burning? Both of these are activities that, done well, will build topsoil and provide for human sustenance essentially forever. So how much impact are we allowed to have? The entire rainforest is a human project. Small patches are burned by the indigenous like the Lacandon Mayan, and then planted in a secession of eighty different crops, including the vines, shrubs, and trees that will take over when the plot has been abandoned—though “abandoned” is not really an accurate description, as the plot will be revisited in a twenty-year rotation, and will meanwhile produce food, fiber, and building materials, as well as a home for the wild animals that serve as protein.

Which brings me to my point. It wasn’t pasture that brought down the northeast forest. It was coal. As long as the human economy was based on wood in this cold climate, people more or less took care of the forest, because they needed it. Coal was what reduced the forest to simply one more commodity, and the land that forests grew on was more profitably used for wool breeds of sheep. What will happen as the price of oil first climbs past what the average household can pay, then past the effort worth retrieving it from the ground? Will New England be cleared from the Atlantic Ocean to the Housatonic River as people freeze to death? Or will the rural areas and private woodlot owners be able to hang onto their parts of this young forest, knowing that without it they, too, will soon freeze? Will we be facing a war not over Middle Eastern oilfields, but over trees in the Berkshires?

And I still need to decide about breakfast.

I can raise these issues, but maybe I can’t answer the questions.
I know that whatever we’re eating has to build soil, and if it doesn’t, it has to be struck forever from the human menu. It has to be part of a self-replicating community, where life and death are inseparable in the process of nourishment. Everyone has to give back, through the labor of their life functions, and then through the nutrients stored in their bodies. Our food can’t be based on fossil fuel, for nitrogen or energy. Nor can it use fossil water, or indeed any water that empties a river.

Dairy cows, where I live, meet those criteria and more. But is the change in species composition wrought by human-set fire on the acceptable side of the line while the change required for pasture placed in the unacceptable column? Then what we will eat instead will be deer and moose. Both of those, along with bison, migrated here from Eurasia not too long ago, maybe 12,000 years. They filled in niches left empty by the megafaunal extinctions. They’re Eurasian trans- plants, too. Do you see how complicated this gets?

And I still need my breakfast.

In the end, I do have my own answers to offer, of course, but they involve a bit more than drinking soy milk. Agriculture has to stop. It’s been a ten thousand year disaster, as life on earth will tell us if we listen. Writes William Catton:

The breakthrough we called industrialization was fundamentally unlike earlier ones. It did not just take over for human use another portion of the web that had previously supported other forms of life. Instead, it went underground to extract carrying capacity supplements from a finite and depletable fund …

As discussed earlier, I think the beginning of the fossil fuel age does mark a new level of human destructiveness, but he’s wrong in his characterization of agriculture as simply taking over more ecological niches. Agriculture is extractive: soil is depletable and “peak soil” was ten thousand years ago, on the day before agriculture began. We’ve been on the down curve ever since.

So agriculture has to stop. It’s about to run out anyway—of soil, of water, of ecosystems—but it would go easier on us all if we faced that collectively, and then developed cultural constraints that would stop us from ever doing it again.

Where I live, the wetlands need to return to cover the land in a soft, slow blanket of water. They will be a home for a lush multitude of species, many of which—waterfowl, moose, fish—could feed us. The rivers need to be undammed. And the suburbs and the roads need to be abandoned. I have no great solutions for how to make that economically feasible: I sincerely doubt it’s possible. I only know it has to happen, no matter how much we resist.

This is an excerpt from “To Save the World” in the book The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. Click here to order directly from the author.

Toward the Formation of a Transnational Alliance of Working and Oppressed Peoples

Toward the Formation of a Transnational Alliance of Working and Oppressed Peoples

by | Sep 27, 2019 | Movement Building & Support

Editor’s note: We have never believed that the Deep Green Resistance strategy alone is sufficient to end empire. Our movement has one part to play in a much broader struggle. This call to action speaks to the necessity of internationalist, cross-movement solidarity between working and oppressed people. In these times, the more solidarity we can build between revolutionary and radical people’s organizations, the better. This article has been republished from Monthly Review with permission.

by Samir Amin and Firoze Manji

Shortly before his death on August 12, 2018, Samir Amin, working together with Firoze Manji, prepared a document he hoped would be widely circulated. His aim was to initiate the building of a transnational alliance that was both radical and enabled a diversity of perspectives. Amin’s friends have commenced an international conversation to that end. With the intent of furthering that nascent project, and in boundless appreciation of his invaluable contributions to Monthly Review over many decades, we present the last written words of our comrade Samir Amin.
        — Monthly Review editors

1

For the last thirty years, the world system has undergone an extreme centralization of power in all its dimensions—local and international, economic and military, social and cultural.

Some thousand giant corporations and some hundreds of financial institutions, which have formed cartels among themselves, have reduced national and globalized production systems to the status of subcontractors. In this way, the financial oligarchies appropriate a growing share of the profits from labor and from companies that have been transformed into rent producers for their own exclusive benefit.

Having domesticated the main right-wing and left-wing parties, as well as the unions and organizations of so-called civil society, these oligarchies now also exercise absolute political power. They exercise power over the media that is subordinated to them, creating the necessary disinformation to depoliticize public opinion. The oligarchies have annihilated the traditional practice of multipartyism, virtually replacing it with a one-party system controlled by capital. Representative democracy, having lost all its meaning, has also lost its legitimacy.

Late contemporary capitalism, which has become a completely closed system, matches all the criteria of totalitarianism, although care is taken not to name it as such. This totalitarianism is still soft but is always ready to resort to extreme violence as soon as the victims—the majority of workers and oppressed peoples—begin to revolt. All changes that are part of this so-called modernization must be seen in light of the foregoing analysis. Thus, we face major ecological challenges (especially climate change) that capitalism is incapable of resolving (the Paris agreement of December 2015 was only a smokescreen). We are witnessing scientific developments and technological innovations, including information technology, rigorously subjected to the requirements of the financial profit they can make for the monopolies. The glorification of competitiveness and the freedom of the market, which the subservient media present as guarantees of the freedom and efficiency of civil society, are in fact antitheses of the actual situation, which is riven by violent conflicts between fractions of the existing oligarchies and is the cause of the destructive effects of their governance.

2

Contemporary capitalism always follows the same imperialist logic of globalization that has been its characteristic since its origins (the colonization of the nineteenth century was clearly a form of globalization). Contemporary globalization does not escape this logic; it is nothing other than a new form of imperialist globalization. This term, globalization, so often used without any definition, hides an important fact: the deployment of systematic strategies developed by the historical imperialist powers (the United States, Western and Central European countries, and Japan, which we shall call the triad) that continue to pillage the resources of the global South and carry out the superexploitation of labor that is associated with delocalization and subcontracting. These powers intend to maintain their historical privilege and to prevent all other nations from extricating themselves from the status of dominated peripheries. The history of the last century was in fact a history of the revolt of the peoples of the peripheries of the world system who were engaged in either a socialist delinking from capital or in attenuated forms of national liberation. The pages of that history have, for the moment, been turned. The current process of recolonization has no legitimacy and is therefore fragile.

For this reason, the historical imperialist powers of the triad have set up a system of collective military control over the planet, directed by the United States. Membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (which is inextricably linked to the construction of Europe) and the militarization of Japan reflect the requirement of this new collective imperialism that has taken over the national imperialisms (of the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, France, and a few others) that were formerly in permanent and violent conflict.

In these circumstances, constructing a transnational alliance of workers and oppressed peoples of the entire world has to be the main objective of the struggle to counteract the spread of contemporary imperialist capitalism.

3

Confronted by this tremendous challenge, the inadequacy of the struggles being carried out by the victims of the system is all too apparent. The weaknesses of these struggles are of different kinds, which we would classify under the following headings:

  1. The extreme fragmentation of the struggles, whether at the local or world level, which are always localized and focused on a single issue (such as ecology, women’s rights, social services, or housing). Those rare single-issue campaigns conducted at the national or even international level have not had any significant success in that they have not forced any significant changes to the policies of those in power. Many of these struggles have been absorbed or incorporated by the system that fosters the illusion that it is subject to reform.
    Nevertheless, there has been an enormous acceleration in the process of generalized proletarianization. Almost all the populations in the central capitalist countries are now waged workers who sell their labor power. The industrialization of regions in the global South has created worker proletariats (large sections of which have precarious jobs and many of whom are permanently unemployed) and a salaried middle class, while the peasantry is fully integrated into the market system. The political strategies employed by the powerful have succeeded in fragmenting this gigantic proletariat into diverse fractions that are often in conflict with each other. This contradiction must be overcome.
  2. The peoples of the triad appear to have renounced international anti-imperialist solidarity, which has been replaced at best by so-called humanitarian campaigns and aid programs that are controlled by the capital of the monopolies. The European political forces that inherited left-wing traditions today support the imperialist vision of existing globalization.
  3. A new right-wing ideology has gained support among the people.

In the North, the central theme of anticapitalist class struggle has been abandoned by the left or reduced to a supposed new definition of the left wing defined by partner culture or communitarianism, separating the defense of specific rights from the general fight against capitalism.

In certain countries of the South, the tradition of struggles that associated the anti-imperialist struggle with social progress has given way to reactionary backward-looking illusions expressed by religions or pseudoethics. In other countries of the South, the successful acceleration of economic growth over the last decades feeds the illusion that it is possible to construct a developed national capitalism capable of imposing its active participation in shaping globalization.

4

The power of the oligarchies of contemporary imperialism appears to be indestructible in the countries of the triad and even at the world level (“the end of history”!). Public opinion subscribes to its disguise of market democracy, preferring it to its past adversary—socialism—which is invariably embellished with such odious sobriquets as criminal, nationalist, or totalitarian autocracies.

However, this system is not viable for many reasons:

  1. Contemporary capitalism is presented as being open to criticism and reform, as innovative and flexible. Some claim that it is possible to put an end to the abuses of uncontrolled finance capital and the permanent austerity policies that accompany it—and thus to save capitalism from itself. But such calls are in vain since present practices of capitalism serve the interests of the oligarchs of the triad—the only ones that count—as they guarantee the continual increase of wealth in spite of the economic stagnation that besets their countries and peoples.
  2. The European subsystem—the European Union—is an integral part of imperial globalization. It was conceived in a reactionary spirit that was antisocialist and proimperialist, subordinate to the military command of the United States. Within it, Germany exercises its hegemony, particularly in the framework of the eurozone and over Eastern Europe, which has been annexed just as Latin America has been annexed by the United States. As we saw in the Greek crisis, German Europe serves the nationalist interests of the German oligarchy, which are expressed with arrogance. This Europe is not viable and its implosion has already started.
  3. The stagnation of growth in the countries of the triad contrasts with the acceleration in growth of regions in the South that have been able to profit from globalization. It has been concluded too hastily that capitalism is alive and well, even if its center of gravity is moving from the old countries of the Atlantic West to the South, particularly Asia. In actual fact, the obstacles to pursuing this historical corrective movement are likely to become increasingly violent, including military aggression. The imperial powers do not intend to allow any country of the periphery—great or small—to free itself from their domination.
  4. The ecological devastation that is necessarily associated with capitalist expansion reinforces the reasons why this system is not viable.

We are now in the phase of the autumn of capitalism, without this being strengthened by the emergence of a springtime of peoples and a socialist perspective. The possibility of substantial progressive reforms of capitalism in its current stage is only an illusion. There is no alternative other than that enabled by a renewal of an international radical left, capable of carrying out—and not just imagining—socialist advances. It is necessary to end crisis-ridden capitalism rather than to try to end the crisis of capitalism.

Based on the first of the four hypotheses above, nothing decisive will affect the attachment of the peoples of the triad to their imperialist option, especially in Europe. The victims of the system will remain incapable of conceiving their way out of the path traced by the European project, one that has to be deconstructed before it can then be reconstructed with another vision. The experiences of Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and Insoumise in France, the hesitations of the German Die Linke, and others all testify to the extent and complexity of the challenge. The facile accusation of nationalism against those critical of Europe does not hold water. The European project is increasingly visible as being that of the bourgeois nationalism of Germany. There is no alternative in Europe, as elsewhere, to the setting up of national, popular, and democratic projects (not bourgeois, indeed antibourgeois) that will begin the delinking from imperialist globalization. It is necessary to deconstruct the extreme centralization of wealth and the power that is associated with the system.

According to this hypothesis, the most probable outcome will be a remake of the twentieth century: advances made exclusively in some of the peripheries of the system. But these advances will remain fragile, as have those of the past, and for the same reason—the permanent warfare waged against them by the imperialist power centers, the success of which is greatly due to their own limits and deviations. The hypothesis of a workers and peoples’ internationalism opens up ways to further evolutions that are necessary and possible.

The first of these ways is that of relying on the “decadence of civilization.” In this case, the paths forward are not to be masterminded by anyone, rather their trails must be blazed in response to the conditions imposed by the evolving situation of decay. However, in our epoch, given the power of ecological and military destruction and the disposition of the powerful to use such powers, the risk, denounced by Karl Marx in his time, is that there is a very real possibility that the fighting will destroy all the camps that oppose each other.

The second path, by contrast, will require the lucid and organized intervention of the international front of workers and all oppressed peoples.

5

Creating a new transnational alliance of workers and oppressed peoples must be the main objective for the genuine militants who are convinced of the odious nature of the world imperialist capitalist system that we have at present. It is a heavy responsibility and the task requires several years before reaping any tangible results.

As for ourselves, we put forward the following proposals:

  1. The aim should be to establish an alliance that can evolve as an organization and not just a movement. This involves moving beyond the concept of a discussion forum. It also involves analyzing the inadequacies of the notion, still prevalent, that the movements claim to be horizontal and are hostile to so-called vertical organizations on the pretext that the latter are by their very nature antidemocratic. Organization is, in fact, the result of action that by itself generates leaders. The latter can aspire to dominate, even manipulate movements. But it is also possible to avoid this danger through appropriate statutes. This should be discussed.
  2. The experience of the worker Internationals should be seriously studied, even if they belong to the past. This should be done, not in order to choose a model among them, but to invent the most suitable form for contemporary conditions.
  3. Such an invitation should be addressed to a good number of combative parties and organizations. A committee should first be set up to get the project started.
  4. This construction cannot be a remake of the Internationals of the past—the Second, the Third, or the Fourth. It has to be founded on other and new principles: an alliance of all working peoples of the world and not only those qualified as representatives of the proletariat (recognizing also that this definition is itself matter of debate), including all wage earners of the services, peasants, farmers, and the peoples oppressed by modern capitalism. The construction must also be based on the recognition and respect of diversity, whether of parties, trade unions, or other popular organizations in struggle, guaranteeing their real independence.

We shall therefore suggest organizing a meeting with a view to creating the new transnational alliance of workers and oppressed peoples. Each region should be represented by activists known and respected in their regions for their commitment to the defense of peoples’ interests, against the aggressions of capitalism, delegated if possible by their own organizations. Voices of communities in conflict with the state to which they belong, as well as communities with no state, should also be represented. Therefore, in contrast with previous Internationals, each country will be represented by several organizations, not a single one, in keeping with the respect of diversity, provided that all recognize that what unites us is more important than what divides us. Finally, the meeting should also help identify a first set of common targets for the struggles in the long run as well as for the immediate future.

Comrades, we call on your sense of historical responsibility. This meeting could help identify the conditions for achieving new revolutionary socialist advances (taking stock of the lessons of past revolutions). In the absence of such progress, the world will continue to be ruled by chaos, barbarian practices, and the destruction of the earth.

Samir Amin (1931–2018) was director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal, and the author of many books.

Firoze Manji is the founder and former editor of Pambazuka News and Pambazuka Press. He set up Daraja Press and is currently a member of its governing collective. He is Adjunct Professor of African Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.