Thread by @syntropian

Just like the IPCC report, the Nat'l Climate Assessment makes clear statements about what the future holds for us all, backed by rigorous analysis

Without the will to act, all of that collective effort counts for nothing

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1067145303713812483

Burying this on Black Friday is apropos as fuck

Just like Bush II said back in 2001:
How do we win? Just keep shopping

Capital accumulation must continue until the final moments of crisis

at which point the global 1% will retreat to New Zealand/Mars/wherever & leave us to die

The report is here

If you've been following climate for a while there's nothing new, but the language in the report is refreshingly clear:

Climate change is here, now. It's happening. And it's only going to get worse unless we take immediate action

nca2018.globalchange.gov

What might that action look like?

Fossil fuel industry - esp. those corporations implicated in funding climate change denial - immediately nationalized. All financial assets expropriated into Transition Fund. Stop all new drilling & pipelines. Mutualize remaining infrastructure.

National transition council to roll out large-scale decarbonization projects (elec grid modernization, big nuclear/geothermal plants, etc)

Form community councils in cities & counties to democratically manage local projects. Pay out grants from Transition Fund to fund them

Corporate carbon and nonrenewable natural resource consumption taxes that ratchet higher every year, with most paid out as climate dividend to everyone equally to mitigate climate effects on individuals and the rest used to fund transition projects

National organization like Depression-era CCC to engage in megascale terrestrial ecological restoration projects: reforestation of the Atlantic and the PNW, restoration of central prairies and coastal wetlands, reintroduction of megafauna, etc

Restoration of Indigenous sovereignty over existing territories, and grants of "new" territories based on historically occupied lands. Revocation of external governmental or private land titles on Indigenous lands. Reparation payments for previously extracted nonrenewables.

Progressive personal consumption taxes (that kick in at "1%" levels of consumption). Use proceeds to fund climate dividend & transition projects. The burden of mitigating climate change should fall heaviest on those who profited the most from the system that gave rise to it.

Revocation of all agricultural subsidies to industrial monoculture agribusiness. Redirection of subsidy to small-scale farming. Formation of educational institutions to spread awareness of agroecological practices (like land-grant universities of 19th C)

Revoke all existing forms of corporate welfare. Incorporate municipal cooperative banks to provide interest-free loans to startup cooperatives, especially cooperative farms, to enable rapid emergence of cooperative sector.

Of course, the two bourgeois parties will NEVER do any of these things, because they might solve the problem - and their material interests are bound up with the system that gave rise to it.

Note that most of these ideas are TOP-DOWN in orientation - they're what we'd do if we had seized control of the government and could do what we wanted

That's not the situation we face

The government of the United States of America is actively hostile to our collective survival

Let's think about how we would replicate the effects of these policies from the grassroots:

Can't expropriate Exxon-Mobil? Push fossil fuel divestment!
No funding for local transition projects? Start a municipal assembly!
No CCC? Do guerilla gardening!
No co-op bank? Form one!

"Somebody should do something about this!"

I agree.

We should.

Have you noticed that a lot of these "grassroots" solutions look like alternative institutions and counter-institutions, the germs of an eventual dual-power formation?

Follow that thought to its logical conclusion:

If a political formation to manage the transition to an ecological and democratic post-capitalism does not exist, then it would be necessary to invent one

If the US gov't refuses to act, we must replace it with something that will

When many historical leftists wrote their theories, they were patient. They "knew" that the collapse of capitalism was a historical inevitability, as certain as the setting sun, and that the final victory of the people was only a matter of time

Our situation has changed

Yes, capitalism WILL end. But the question is whether or not its end will be simultaneous with our extinction.

Will we replace capitalism before it destroys the future of all life?

We are up against the clock in a way that revolutionaries of the past couldn't even imagine.

"Had we but world enough, and time..." we would certainly solve this - eventually.

We have to solve it in twelve years.

Twelve. Years.

Six hundred twenty-four weeks.

Four thousand three-hundred and eighty days.

That is the difference between utopia and annihilation.

"So what do I do?"

Well, what are your capabilities? Who do you know? Where are you? What resources can you access? What problems does your community face? How can you mobilize people and resources to mitigate or solve these problems?

What is the very next action you can take?

If you're just one person, your next action is to link up with someone else. Congratulations, you are now an affinity group, an insurgent cell. Your task now is to find an answer to the above questions, and to find more people to join you in answering them.

Are there a half-dozen or so of you, maybe a dozen? Cool beans! You're a reading group, or a coordinating group, or an organizing committee.

You're not an assembly, or a cooperative, or a party - yet. But it's a start!

Keep answering the questions. Keep reaching out to others.

Throughout this process you will learn more about what you can do, and what needs to be done.

The buzzword here is "base-building" - not activism, not protests, not electoralism, but *organizing the unorganized* - solving real problems for people that don't know solutions exist

Together, all of you will find out that most people's day-to-day problems are inextricable from capitalism and its ecological and social consequences

With small numbers and little resources, you will be able to treat symptoms but not causes

At some point, this must change

You will reach a point where to do more good, you will need ASSETS

Labor, Land, Capital

You will need to start removing these assets from the capitalist system and pulling them into your own brand-new post-capitalist system, whatever form that takes

Say you have a community garden.

Do you keep it an informal collective or incorporate as a cooperative?

Do you buy the land? Squat? Lobby the city for a conservation easement and form a non-profit to manage it?

Do you steal cash for equipment? Take up a collection? Crowdfund?

All of these options might work in different situations. Context is key.

A lesson we take from ecology is that mutual adaptation to local conditions is the difference between life and death.

So at this point you have a core group of comrades, a few projects going, some hard assets - maybe an infoshop, or a garden, or a community center, a maker space, whatever. You're accumulating resources and people, while remaining focused on base-building efforts.

What's next?

Chances are you're not the only group working on this stuff. Find one other organization in roughly the same area. Do you have roughly the same goal of achieving ecological, democratic post-capitalism through dual power? Sectarian labels matter less than the actual folks involved

Start talking. Now formalize the relationship based on shared goals in a way that transcends but includes both organizations, creating a higher level of organization.

Congratulations, you're now a federated dual power organization that can scale up while remaining democratic.

From here, your situation determines your strategy. Some specific organizational formations to consider:

- Municipal assemblies to contest civic power
- Cooperative federations to unite worker co-ops in your locality & fund startup co-ops
- Commons & community land trusts to democratically manage land & natural resources
- Community defense groups to supplant state security forces

These organizations existing means that people have *real power* to actually tackle social problems at their root - the very meaning of what it is to be a radical - because these problems are caused by capitalism, and these formations are counter-institutions against capitalism.

OK, so what does all of this have to do with climate change?

We talked earlier & elsewhere about how the hegemonic ideology of late capitalism does not permit climate change to be "solved," because of the contradiction at its heart: an addict's endless hunger for profits on a planet with a finite endowment of nonrenewable resources

This contradiction means that capitalist gov't will never act in a way that would prevent climate collapse. The biosphere is merely an externality, a great storehouse of wealth to be pillaged, a landfill to be stuffed with garbage, not a life-support system & an ethical lodestar

The utility-maximizing play for those in whose interests capitalist gov'ts act is to maximize accumulation of capital from proletarian labor and the natural world while both of those are still a thing, so they can weather the apocalypse comfortably & come out the other side okay

This is obviously not in the best interests of either the majority of human beings, both the living and the as-of-yet unborn, or nonhuman nature.

In order for those interests to be centered, something has to center them. Something that doesn't exist yet. Something we must create

This new formation can't be legislated from above, decreed into existence...

The people who will create it don't know it yet, don't know anything about it, are so alienated from each other and the world that they wouldn't even know where to start...

(And I'm not much better)

It has to start from the bottom up, from one person to another, one conversation at a time

From the foundation up, brick by brick, with our hands and our minds and our hearts, we will build a future for humanity

The way forward to save ourselves and our planet is also the path to a utopian society - a unified human civilization in syntropic cooperation with itself and with nature, evolving to ever-higher levels of complexity, crossing the void between worlds, spreading to the stars...

This Cyber Monday, it's the Deal of the Aeon:

Solve One Planetary Ecological Crisis, Get One Utopian Galactic Civilization Of Lesser Or Equal Value Free

(Offer Expires In About Twelve Years, Give or Take)

So go talk to potential comrades about getting organized. If you're already in an org, help them center climate change in their work & rise to the urgency of the moment. When someone is saying a bunch of stupid shit about climate change, speak up.

You speak & act for all life.