Note: This is a work in progress and involves broad strokes for the sake of brevity! This is for popular consumption and was designed to be easy and quick to read, not made for academics of any sort. This was originally formulated in 2019 but has been updated as recently as April 2022.
Introduction
Capitalism, simply put, will end humanity in our lifetimes. I fundamentally believe that the only way we can successfully bring liberty and justice for humanity, and survive the coming century, is through replacing the capitalist system instead of just reforming it. Capitalism is all consuming and has masterfully transformed itself in the face of real opposition. It transformed slavery into wage slavery and the prison industrial complex. It transformed much of the revolutionary movements of the 30s and 60s into the non-profit industrial complex and the meagre labor movement—and the labor aristocracy—we have today.
Many progressives and liberals critique radical anti-capitalists as non-pragmatic, which can be true. But not understanding the dangers in allowing capitalism to continue to grow and fester while enslaving much of the planet is not pragmatic whatsoever. It is a system that is fully contrary to democracy, it is fundamentally about the private concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few. This concentration allows capitalists to perpetually reshape the political system to their benefit, while also using their command of wealth and politics to influence media and education as a means of reshaping our minds. Much like feudalism did to capitalism for quite a bit of time, capitalism is able to keep any new systems and reforms under its control.
It is quite unfortunate that the profit-driven nature of capitalism is destroying our planet on top of stealing precious hours and years of every working human on Earth. Immediate continuous profit requires short-term and mid-term self intesrested thinking, which is fully incompatible with the kind of thinking it will take to prevent further climate collapse. Climate collapse will drive more migrants to Western nations that can weather the worst of the impacts, which will likely drive further anti-immigrant sentiment among not only the ever growing far right but the many liberals who are willing to sell out immigrants in moments of crisis and appease the companies who profit from the incarceration and low wage immiseration of immigrants.
To break capitalism we must observe successful revolutions that were able to completely or nearly completely remove systems. Two of the most successful revolutions, in terms of almost completely removing the previous system, were the American Revolution and the Russian Revolution. In common, they both involved creating alternative systems and essentially began creating their own nations within the dominant empire before actually overthrowing the system. They practiced internal democracy that allowed them to develop legitimacy and steer the ship of the revolution and had wealth somewhat independent from the system they sought to overthrow.
The Americans were wealthy plantation owners and businessmen who built their Continental Congress. The Russians practiced mutual support that allowed for the existence of professional revolutionaries and developed their Soviet councils, while they raised money from supporters or through more nefarious means like robbery. They also engaged in full delegitimization of the system they fought. Once their future potential became clear, they did not ask for a nicer king or czar, they demanded a full break from the current state.
Immediate Strategy
We must strike at American capitalism’s greatest contradiction, the sheer lack of democracy in both our political and economic systems. A Pro Democracy movement that includes an anticapitalist framework could unite disparate movements and make all of our goals ever more likely, while setting the ground for new fights that can continue to target key points of undemocratic decision making, from schools to work places to city hall budgeting sessions.
We should work for things like ballot initiatives and removing money from politics, efforts that would allow us to escape the traps of two faced elected “champions” who we have to constantly pressure to ensure that they aren’t bought out by liberal and conservative funders like Maxwell Frost was in Florida.
Liberals will try to do this inevitably and will do so without critiquing capitalism, any rigorous understanding of the system would reveal the apocalyptic futility of such efforts. Such a movement would also allow us to rearrange the debate and the alliances we have, it would force liberal organizations and politicians to either follow us or reveal their desire to preserve some form of economic authoritarianism. A fight that is simply antifascist, or single issue, would either force us to play on the game board that the right is creating for us, or force us perpetually in coalitions in which we follow instead of lead. And if we follow liberals for the next few years, we will likely be led into the abyss.
A pro-democracy movement waged over the next two decades, with a correctly timed uprising, could develop the infrastructure to rival the state and serve as an alternative to it in a moment of great crisis. The next twenty years will be rife with opportunity, and this coming election and the economic crisis that will likely accompany it will be a great first opportunity to spark an uprising and absorb masses of people into a real organization. This would allow us to either completely replace the government or to be positioned to lead the crafting of a new one.
Structure
We must create an organization that can serve as a political party, a guiding hand for the rest of the country, and a democratic administrator of a nation we will build in the midst of our own. We must build revolutionary schools, book clubs, dance parties, cooperative businesses, tech companies, printing labs, and farms. We can do this by creating a new national or preferably international identity and organization that people can join and deeply feel a part of, and a broader coalition that is able to connect already existing organizations and programs and stitch them into a force that can seize power and manage a large number of resources for the sake of redistribution.
There is much to be learned from early communist and socialist parties in terms of this. The non-profit industry has chopped up leftist infrastructure into competing silos and convinced us that our work must be separate and cannot exist under one umbrella.
All of this while taking over the institutions that we can, like labor unions, credit unions, and even large Facebook groups.
I believe that we must build organizations that can control real power and believe that much of that will lie in labor, the development of new political machines—for lack of a better term—and students. Social movement organizations and community organizations seem to only be able to develop temporary power, we must concentrate that power into real organizations that are mechanically built to easily mobilize specific groups of people who already have something in common (a workplace, a fandom), command money, or control some sector of the economy, including knowledge production. In terms of labor, we must be strategically placed at critical locations, from tech to trucking and teaching, that will maximize our power and influence. Students and labor can also serve as vital funding for our movements and operate the electoral machines we seek to build.
We must also recognize that the non-profit industrial complex is our enemy, though not all non-profits or potential funders are. They exist to control and manipulate movements. This was made clear by Ford Foundation’s support of Black Lives Matter and their explicit statement that they did so to prevent violence and escalation after the murder of police officers in Dallas, as if the only issue mattered to them because of the threat to police, the protectors of capital and the system that allows the Ford Foundation to exist in the first place.
Story
We must also delegitimize the system. Even if we are to run for elections, we must do so in a way that allows people to understand that we are in opposition to the electoral system. We must cease upholding liberal and pro-capitalist candidates. The masses barely vote and don’t believe in the system, if we legitimize the system, we may become irrelevant to the masses for working with the institutions that they do not have faith in, especially as we enter an era of continual crisis. We must not repeat the mistakes of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and fall prey to being seen as part of the system in the inevitable waves of crisis. If we are to run for office, we must do so explicitly in a way that tells the public that we understand the system does not work and needs to change.
Tactics
As we create our own nation, we must also engage in protest that grows our numbers and legitimacy. We must engage in both base building and seek to spark moments of mass protest, or at least support those moments and the organic leaders that rise from it. We cannot fall into the trap of Egypt and engage in mass protest without having the institutions large and strong enough to absorb the masses of people and carry through a successful revolution.
I’m still working on the specific phases on what exactly this would look like and encourage others to contemplate where their organization and ecosystem are at to best chart a course forward.