Is the world worth saving?
“We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” - Karl Marx
“Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.” - Fredrerick Engels
As we approach the downswing of history, crises all over the world are reaching a tipping point. Chaos seems inevitable. Everything is crumbling all around us. But before we scramble around to save this world, imploding on itself, we should probably ask:
Is this world worth saving?
Glossary
Commodities
Products and services which are sold for profit.
examples: Food, clothing, tap water, electricity, etc
Profit
Any exchange where one party receives more than the other.
Capitalism
An economic system based on the production of commodities.
Labor
Expression of mental and physical capabilities that results in some form of value, usually according to its use.
examples: Growing food, child-rearing, sewing clothes, writing code, taking care of the sick, etc
What this means
Our needs, produced by our labor, are controlled by those who have, and continue, to accumulate profit. More and more parts of our lives are commodified to continue this downward spiral of accumulation.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey
The majority of our waking lives in chains. It may be in the industrialized drudgery of wage labor, or in the moment-to-moment desperation of the gig and undergound economies. Our lives aren’t ours.
It has gotten so bad that we find ourselves grinding the planet and our souls up into feedstock to fuel the sick ambitions of a few privileged assholes.
What is to be done?
When this question was asked more than a hundred years ago, the answer was the formation of a revolutionary party. The Party would lead the working class in arms against their oppressors and seize the power of the State, paving the way to a better future. But every tool shapes their wielder, and The State was no different. The major Worker’s States of the 20th Century all since fell apart and/or adopted liberal policies. They were/are demonized for many reasons, some of them due to the decades long counter-propaganda of Imperialist nations, some of them due to actual crimes against their own supposed revolutionary values.
So what do we do? The world is literally falling apart in all the ways that matter. Our biosphere is being poisoned, civil wars are sparked at the whim of oil companies and all the while a global pandemic has made clear that all this will not hold.
So what do we do?
The key to the social revolution is the self-abolition of the proletariat, which goes hand-in-hand with the abolition of value, because these are the roots or the foundations of capitalism, understood as the social dictatorship of value valorizing itself at the cost of a proletarianized humanity and of nature.
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In the case that our class doesn’t fight for the total revolution until the end, the counterrevolution will continue to reign and the capitalist or dystopian catastrophe in course (systematic economic crisis, cutting-edge technology/”artificial intelligence,” massive unemployment and poverty, devastation of nature/ecological crisis, pandemics, wars, suicides, etc.) will finally end up making us as a species extinct. Perhaps there are only a few generations left before that. And the countdown increasingly accelerates.
- The Self-Abolition of the Proletariat as the end of the Capitalist World
It’s easy. You can do it yourself. Alone or with a few trusted comrades. Complicated means are not necessary. Not even great technical knowledge.
Capital is vulnerable. All you need is to be decided.
- Alfredo Bonanno, Armed Joy
We do not need The Communist Party. We need community parties. Community defense forces. Community pantries and community libraries. We need to take back for ourselves the means to live a good life, a life worth living. We need to take back for ourselves control over the gears grinding up the planet, so we may finally dismantle the beast. Class Struggle as taking back the means to live. We have to admit to ourselves that truly looking out for ourselves is understanding how our own self-interest and wellbeing comes from the wellbeing of other living, breathing human beings. Pious atheism, merely trading “God” for “The Homeland” or “Freedom” or “The People” is just another brand of slavery.
So go ahead and build that cooperative tech, help your friends get away from the influence of megacorporations and the military-industrial complex.
Get your friends, or find like-minded people, to train up survival skills. Learn how to light a fire using sticks in wet weather. Build a shelter with junk found in the environment. Find ways to get safe drinking water from polluted sources. Trust me, y'all are gonna need all of that and more sooner than you think.
Find other groups who are doing what you’re doing, and ask how you can help each other. When you get to a certain size, learn how to make decisions by consensus.
What happens during the night at the opera, stays at the opera.