Being new to our group, I wanted to express some of my revolutionary sentiments and solicit feedback and critique from ACM members. I am grateful for each one of you. You each have my love freely given.
Purpose
Our complex modern world is coming to an end. Modernity is in what is being called “overshoot”. A key structure of this world is our global economics that is propelled by consumption and dependent on exploitative dependency. Competition and hierarchical structures are most obviously important means of control for Power, so we are left paralyzed and unable to act particularly as we understand the need to confront Power.
All of this is the “civilizing” force of dominance and subjection that has driven human activity for thousands of years. Power manifesting itself.
For those who could see this coming, there should be no need for explanation. Reform as much as one can manage – that avenue will be covered - but check any hope for a timely reprieve much less one of those magic bullets.
Meanwhile, it is full steam ahead. That’s what we pay people to do.
So…this is where we have been led. Our leaders wish to continue showing us the way forward. Yet, as we look down into this abyss, and, yes, that is Death staring you in the eyes…, one must ask if they are actually telling us to take that last little step….
Capitalism has handed us its great contradiction. Now, standing on the precipice, humankind has the opportunity to clearly see this contradiction for what it is.
Growth Equals Death.
The Modern problem is a predicament without solutions. Our mission is to soft-land the beast of modernity to preserve life: humanity, every living creature and Mother Earth. Our mission is not to save modernity or its global economic system, but to preserve each individual life as someone precious and sanctified.
What of Power?
A good friend of mine once pointed out there were only something like 21 Nazis that really mattered. If you were #22 and it was expeditious, well, then you might find yourself in some dark alley with a bullet in the back of your skull.
This is the rich man wrapping his arms around his stash and pulling it towards himself. This is property threatened with poverty. This is what Naomi Klein termed the Security Age that manifests its own versions of the Iraqi War’s enclave “green zones” and “red zones” and, now… coming to America (it’s the New World Order so also coming to an industrialized nation near you) the formation of the Security State.
This is the Rights of Property over the Rights of Life: your self, every living creature and the Earthly home we all must share.
Is this drug of dominance more powerful than the love of life? Mother Earth lays before them on the butcher’s block. Power doesn’t simply want to own her, but to dominate and control it all. Are we to see Power repeat the performances of the school-shooter? Mass murder followed by suicide?
Power is 21 Nazis. It starts with exclusion. We are the, something around, 8.2 billion others. Those excluded. The ones not wired up on this drug of dominance that is.
Unite to Resist
To achieve this purpose, we must unite.
To unite, we must perpetually unite.
We must perpetually educate. The growth of the economy, the growth of our planet’s population, the rise in industrialization and its destructive befoulment, all are accelerating in a distinctive exponential curve - colloquially the hockey stick. This trajectory demands action. That is, unless we want to be the hockey puck.
Humanity must alter course, and alter course dramatically, or this ship will wreck as certainly as the sun appearing on the horizon tomorrow. We can either beach it or ride it over the falls together. The choice is ours and it really is within our power.
We must resist.
We must rush to defend the weakest of our members.
Who are we? Never forget this and keep reminding yourselves who we are.
We are 8.2 billion people minus roughly 21. We invite all others. Hell, we invite the 21 too. Come to the place of the unwashed! There is nothing for us to fear save total annihilation and untold suffering.
We are the morality of inclusion. Inclusion is morality. Yes, workers unite!
This must be our mantra – a harm to the least of us is a harm to every one of us.
People Power
As there is no solution to the modern predicament, there is no conventional political solutions that can effectively preserve life. Only revolutionary politics can help us now.
Meanwhile, we must build a movement with what little time remains…
Look. The movement has already made itself manifest. We simply must climb onboard.
Our power is only in numbers. To survive, we must constantly build.
We have been given the great key that can open the door that leads to victory, but this key must be treasured. It must be nurtured and made precious by each and all of us. Then, when it is time, this door will open as if by magic.
What is this key?
The key to victory is Moral Authority.
This movement is a continuity from the WTO protests, from the Occupy movement to BLM. This is a leaderless movement, that, if anything, has sprung from the hearts of humankind personified in the spirit of intersectional black women. This learns from the freedom fighters of our past. Those most exploited and oppressed. The Black Radical Tradition. The former slaves and their descendants in America – the ones defending liberty and truth in this country. Chicano Liberation, Gay Liberation, Eco-Liberation, People Liberation. The piece-meal labor movement even in its American Dreaming iteration. Anti-warriors. Lovers. Anarchists. Rogues and martyrs. We are all.
This is a movement that centers the voices of the unheard. We are all. We must make space for these voices. We must listen and hear very deeply. For old white men like myself, this means speaking for those without invitations, without voices, without any power.
A primary weapon of Power is to divide and rule. When we judge one another, when we compete with one another, when we exploit one another, when we take power from one another, we are doing Power’s work for them.
We are Black People. We are LGBTQ+ People. We are Brown and Latinx People. We are the Disadvantaged People. We are Indigenous People.
We are all Palestinians and we are all Jews.
We are you, and you, and you, and you…
We are every living creature. Learn your lessons and keep learning. Grow bigger.
Where does our power go? Only to the people. We must serve one another.
If this movement moves to serve any other power than this collective, we are sealing our fate. We will be serving Power and only Power.
There is no hierarchy here. There must not be. Our movement is to flip the pyramid and that means putting people in charge. The bottom is placed on top, not any party, organization, individual or nation.
Leaderless is a movement built by people with purpose who cherish Moral Authority.
By putting people in charge, you place those in charge who will relish the opportunity to defend and nurture life and not break it.
Decisions made close to home, closer to the grounds from which they spring and upon which we stand, are better decisions. We are building a movement of leaders without leadership. The forces in opposition to this are great and project what it is we are setting against. Power.
We will each buy into the people’s true revolution and forge a new path. It is what is Moral. It is what serves life.
Apocalypse Time
Here is Robin D.G. Kelley discussing Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism and “blues time” beginning with Robinson’s 2012 reflections on how only Black radicalism wrapped in Black Christianity brought certainty with it - a certainly, except for this promise of liberation, lacking in the rest of the Black Radical Tradition:
‘Only the promise of liberation’ captures the essence of Black revolt and introduces a completely different temporality: blues time. Blues time eschews any reassurance that the path to liberation is preordained. Blues time is flexible and improvisatory; it is simultaneously in the moment, the past, the future, and the timeless space of the imagination. As the geographer Clyde Woods taught us, the blues is not a lament but a clear-eyed way of knowing and revealing the world that recognizes the tragedy and humor in everyday life, as well as the capacity of people to survive, think, and resist in the face of adversity. Blues time resembles what the anarchist theorist Uri Gordon calls a “generative temporality,” a temporality that treats the future itself as indeterminate and full of contingencies. In thinking of the Black radical tradition as generative rather than prefigurative, not only is the future uncertain, but the road is constantly changing, along with new social relations that require new visions and expose new contradictions and challenges.note
Apocalypse Time removes any promise at all. It states humankind may end on planet Earth. Humans have removed themselves and finally defiled Mother Earth to the point of complete and purposeless interference.
Like our times, time itself is exponentially gaining speed. Our technological times are speeding us toward doom. We must face this. We must serve one another to soften the blow to every individual of us.
With this acceleration, everything becomes better defined. Shadows are darker and light is pronounced. Meaning and purpose emerge from the mist of a world we have hobbled together.
Mirroring Mother Nature herself, we will see greater amplitude and greater frequency in events – disaster, complete dissonance and big weird things, extremes in human behavior and, of course fear. Death, genocide, domination and oppression is the opposing force.
We are life.
Only in service to one another do we give reverence for life – humanity, every living creature and Mother Earth – and not to modernity, wealth and Power.
Apocalypse Time makes no promises or guarantees. We must each of us lend a shoulder to soft land life as we move to sharing and caring instead of consuming and competing. Our sacrifices are to one another and all life. We must refuse Power its shekels dribbled into the palms of treachery.
Apocalypse Time tells us that we should know what to do, but we can’t always know what to expect.
In these times we do share a common fate. We must be cognizant of this from the start. We either change the world or this world will change us – that is, make us all dead.
One is unable to sugar coat this or get around it, but must fully face this truth.
Revolution
People, particularly those who have been oppressed, know what to do. Revolution is a self-conscious existence.
Make no mistake. This is the one. It is none other. That is why we must be all in with all of us in.
You want to be an asshole, you can be an asshole, but remember I’m my sister/brother’s keeper. I’m a person of peace and wish all of us were people of peace. I believe in communal living, order without coercion of any kind, and creating communities filled with love, compassion and the joy that one can only receive in communion with Mother Earth and in fellowship with every living creature.
Our revolution must respect Mother Earth. Our revolution must include every one of us. All are welcome. If you show up with blood on your hands, someone may inquire about their brother/sister believing that they are their keeper. Otherwise, we are a leaderless movement without heads of any kind.
We face a many headed thing, but it has only one intestine.
Revolution will come. It is the one. It must keep its Moral Authority and be non-violent. Comrades, without Moral Authority we will be lost.
Moral Authority is our main recruiting tool. Moral Authority gives us blessings from above and in every shop and home and place of gathering. We are the fish in the sea carrying our loaves to share with one another and make for plenty. We must receive our authority from above and this is our mission – to save life on planet Earth.
When we get our authority from above, something very magical/mystical happens. It makes things work and work really well. The strategic significance of this can not be overstated. People own this revolution at that point.
This is the time, but we must be fully prepared to support over 8 billion people by shutting down the capitalist system without shutting off penicillin, large scale fossil fuel farming, hospitals, schools, birth control, and a lot more things I can’t even think of – start working on that right now if it’s in your wheelhouse.
This is a complicated world we’ve fashioned together. We must live simpler to persist. Much preserved today must go away tomorrow and yet much also remains uncertain.
Blues Time tells us freedom must come someday while Apocalypse Time tells us little if anything other than we face extinction itself. In the end, may the spirit of the blues guide us all, but our path is yet to be determined.
One Final Indulgence
Go figure, I am a bit of a Luddite and while I have a flip phone that I turn on every four or five months for a day or two, I do not possess a smart phone.
Anyway, I ran across a cat who has an open-source app to disperse power. It looks interesting. He claims it’s completely open to all and isn’t some sort of bomb. I wouldn’t know, but I believe I know enough that we can really use technology as long as it’s clean and serves our purposes: to facilitate localized shadow economies – you know, sharing and caring - and can help us communicate efficiently on any revolutionary level – tactical or strategic.
This guy claims the tech will do all our work for us. It’s math. I’m like a born post-modern, “yeah, we’ll see…” sort of person particularly with such claims…on the other end of it wouldn’t be the first time someone blew the whole paradigm with something really new like that. Hard to get a bead on someone with the web, so no help there.
Y’all know the drill, not me.
Feel free to ask or act. Here’s the Exodus 2.0 commercial.
Summary
• Mission: to preserve Life
• Approach: all inclusion
• Time: accelerating towards uncertainty
• Conclusion: Moral Authority, the rock we build on
• Action: Vet DSI Exodus 2.0 technology