Mutiny on Spaceship Earth

The most serious problem for our time is realistically imagining how we can get from here (capitalist ecocide) to there (Ecotopia) without invoking supernatural or extraterrestrial intervention.

ZNet is hosting a massive debate between a multitude of world-changers, called Re-Imagining Society. (see my own short contribution formulated as a series of theses). A good place to start is Ted Glick’s essay on the Clean Energy Revolution, who argues that if we do not get our house together on this one, nothing else will be worth fighting for.

But how do we get from ‘here’ to ‘there’? That is the topic of Richard Greeman. He is the editor of the Wikitopia platform that aims to re-ignite our imaginations for other futures.

In his text, he proposes a 3-fold strategy for change, which is worth reading and pondering over.

Richard Greeman:

“In our scenario for ‘Mutiny on Spaceship Earth’ the three elements are already on board, ready to be configured into a new power strong enough to halt the onrush of global self-destruction and release the human energy to build a new society. I call them: The Social Lever, The Electronic Platform, and The Philosophical Fulcrum.

* The Social Lever is the vast untapped power of planetary solidarity. Once the billions of passengers and crewmembers aboard Spaceship Earth unite and act together, no force can stop them. Divided, they are pitiful and weak. United, their power is irresistible.

* The Electronic Platform is the World Wide Web. Its emergent technology is tentacular, infinite in its connections, interactive, and indestructible because its center is everywhere and nowhere. As accessible tomorrow as the telephone is today, the Internet provides a place to stand large enough for billions to interact. The Web is a planetary platform where each can speak for her/himself on equal footing, where billions of passengers and crew-members can connect, unite, empower themselves and take initiatives on a planetary scale – the only scale on which it makes sense to confront the power-mad officers of predatory global capitalism.

* The Philosophical Fulcrum is planetary consciousness: the awareness that planets are mortal. It is a vision which places the survival of Spaceship Earth and its inhabitants at the center of all things. It is the affirmation of Life on Earth as a new universal, as the common spiritual and practical basis around which billions can unite.”

Here are the details. Excerpts only.

1. The Lever of Planetary Solidarity

“Solidarity is the most familiar of the three powers. We all know that there is strength in numbers, and it’s six billion of us against about six thousand billionaires. It follows that ‘united we stand, divided we fall,’ for in the words of the old song ‘union makes us strong.’ Solidarity is not merely a realistic tactical, practical necessity; it is a positive social ethic and a fundamental human value as well. The old labor slogan sums up the lesson of all the great religious teachers of the past two thousand years: An injury to one – to the humblest child among us – is an injury to all.

If we base our successful Mutiny on Starship Earth scenario on real human history, it reveals that the potential power of mass solidarity has shown itself successful at revolutionary moments from ancient times. Ever since the revolt of Spartacus and the Roman slaves, the poor, the downtrodden, the exploited have shown their ability to unite and use their numbers to win concessions from their powerful oppressors – even to overthrow them. Down through the ages – from the vast peasant uprisings in Feudal times to the mass revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries – numbers, united, have overcome armed entrenched power structures… At least momentarily.

Make no mistake. In no time or place have the wealthy ever shared any of their power or privileges without a struggle. It was only by uniting in mass movements, unions, and political parties that ordinary working people won such democratic rights as universal suffrage, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, the eight-hour day, and legislation mandating universal education, healthcare, job safety and social security. Moreover, such reforms – today under attack – were achieved only after generations of struggle and only in Europe, the Americas, and a few Asian and ex-colonial countries.

Today, neo-liberal capitalism is attacking these basic rights on a global scale, even in the wealthy advanced countries. Moreover, in vast portions of the world, the common people still have not won personal freedom, civil liberties ora say in government – in spite ofgenerations of mass sacrifice in the name of revolution and national independence. As a result, their labor is cheap. Globalization allows transnational businesses to exploit that cheap labor, and capital has been flowing from the democracies – where employees can still protect themselves to some extent – to the dictatorships, where they can’t. Moreover, authoritarian rule – the business-friendly, security-driven police state – is on the rise even among the traditionally liberal democracies: a contaminated export blowing back to the capitalist homelands along with third world poverty in first world cities.

Solidarity must be international to be effective, as the workers of Europe concluded after the defeat of the Europe-wide 1848 national-democratic revolutions. In 1864 they formed the first International Workers’ Association. Nearly a century and a half later, under globalized corporate capitalism, it is all the more obvious that unless the lever of solidarity is extended across borders, it is no longer an effective tool against the profit-driven ‘race to the bottom.’ Without it, the billionaires – who can move their money electronically and ship their factories cheaply from country to country – will always dominate the billions, who are rooted at home and barred from crossing national borders seeking work in the so-called free labor market. Thus the same ruthless U.S. corporations who moved their operations to impoverished Mexico after imposing NAFTA are now relocating to Asia, where the wages are even more pitiful.

Why did the advantages won by people-power in the past remain partial and temporary? Largely because they remained isolated. By uniting, the slaves of Ancient Rome were able to win military victories under the leadership of the gladiator Spartacus. But they were eventually hunted down by fresh Roman Legions brought in from other provinces of the Roman Empire. In modern times, the same isolation seems to have condemned every revolution to the same sorry fate. At various times, the common people in France (1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1968), Russia (1905, 1917), Spain (1936), China (1911, 1949), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), the Warsaw Pact nations (1989) have united to successfully wrest power from the hands of feudal, capitalist or Communist overlords.

But as long as their revolutions were confined to one country, they were doomed to ultimate defeat – just like Spartacus and the slaves of Rome. These revolutionary moments flash out like solitary beacons across history, illuminating at once the liberatory potential for mass self-organization latent among oppressed people – as well as the seemingly inevitable doom of their struggles when left isolated. Today, more than ever, the motto ‘United we stand, divided we fall’ must be understood globally. ‘An injury to one is an injury to all,’ anywhere on the planet. Movements for justice and equality can never succeed if they are confined to a single country. This lesson becomes more and more urgent as capitalist globalization imposes a ‘race to the bottom’ of pay and conditions on wage earners in every land. The Lever of Solidarity must be planetary before it can ‘lift the world.’

Thus, if we want our scenario for a successful Mutiny on Starship Earth to be historically realistic, we must visualize something quite amazing: global movements directed against multi-national capital – including, for example, planetary demonstrations for peace; women’s rights; environmental and social justice as well as world-wide general strikes supported by consumer boycotts targeting multi-national corporations; all leading to an international wave of uprisings and takeovers broad enough to surround and isolate the billionaires and their reactionary allies.”

But how can this planetary solidarity be achieved???

The answer lies in the electronic platform:

It is becoming increasingly obvious to all that in a globalized economy, human rights, social benefits and popular reforms must be enjoyed by working people in all countries before they are secure in any, and that movements for human and environmental rights must be planetary to succeed. The question remains, how, practically, will the passengers and crew of Spaceship Earth be able to unite internationally instead of being isolated and repressed like so many revolts of the past? Here we must move on to the technological basis for our modern Archimedes hypothesis, the new material element that makes a successful Mutiny on Spaceship earth practically possible, a realistic one chance in a hundred.

2. The Internet as a Planetary Platform

“Historically, advances in communication and transportation technology have gone hand in hand with advances in popular self-organization. During the democratic revolutions of the 18th Century, cheap printing and the post office (both recent developments) enabled revolutionary committees of correspondence in the American colonies and the French provinces to share local grievances, discuss ideas, organize congresses, inform each other of plots, publish and circulate the revolutionary broadsheets and pamphlets that made the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 possible. In the 19th Century, railroads, steamships, the telegraph and the daily newspaper spread the democratic revolutions of 1848 all across Europe within months. Unfortunately in 20th Century, radio and later television – organized as one-way, top-down broadcast media – became the favorite tool of totalitarian dictators like Hitler and Stalin, manipulative politicians like Churchill and Roosevelt, and wealthy advertisers whose right-wing commercial media monopolies dominate the airwaves in the so-called free countries…

On the other hand, in the 21st Century, the Internet promises to give the advantage back to people-power. It also may give a new meaning to informational democracy. For the first time in history, this new technology has placed at the disposal of the billions an uncensored source of information as well as a planetary platform large enough and accessible enough for all to participate, decide and act together. With its infinite interconnections, the World Wide Web enables groups in struggle to communicate, exchange information, discuss ideas, work out common programs and coordinate actions on a planetary scale in real time. The technology of the Internet has the potential of creating vast, world­wide assemblies where true international democracy can take form; forums where consensus can be reached onan ongoing basis; platforms where massive planetary actions can be coordinated from hour to hour around the globe. With ever more powerful computers joined together, even problems like translation are being solved. Precisely what the passengers and crew of Spaceship Earth will need to break out from below decks and take over the bridge from the squabbling, pilfering officers.

The Web is also a vast 24-hours/day 7 days/week public library where the passengers and crew can find and propagate (among other things) the uncensored information and revolutionary ideas they will need to unite. The collective creation of today’s Wikipedia, the ever-expanding, multi-lingual self-correcting information resource, is a model of this kind of Internet emergence. For the first time in history, the storehouse of revolutionary internationalist thinking and the recorded experiences of centuries of struggle is accessible to all. Thus the Web potentially weaves together ideas and planetary communication, connecting the Lever of solidarity with the Fulcrum of planetary consciousness.”

Indeed, the platform itself is not enough:

The Internet is a large enough platform for all humanity to stand on, but in order to unite, to join their collective strength, the Billions will need to focus their energy on a single idea. Planetary Consciousness is the philosophical fulcrum on which the Archimedes Hypothesis stands. As such it is less easy to describe than the Lever of Planetary Solidarity (whose basis is historical) and the Web (whose basis is technological). Moreover, like the Internet, Planetary Consciousness is still in its infancy.

3. The Fulcrum of Planetary Consciousness

“For hundreds of thousands of years, humans’ horizons were limited to their immediate environment, to their band or tribe or settlement. If the ancient Greek philosophers were the first to speculate that the Earth is a planet and plot its orbit, only in the last five hundred years have people actually learned to measure it, map it and sail around it. Only very recently – thanks to radio and TV – have the vast majority the earth’s human inhabitants become aware of lands and continents beyond their own village or province. In the 1960s the transistor radio transformed the world-view of millions of Africans and South Americans living on the land. And only in our own times have humans actually seen, via photos taken from space and viewed by millions, the amazing, cloud-swirling blue-green globe we live on. Today, most of the planet’s six billion humans are aware of living on a globe inhabited by many other peoples. I consider this a revolution in human consciousness whose power and depth have as yet not been realized.

Tragically, this revolution in planetary consciousness coincides with humanity’s growing awareness that life on our planet is menaced with extinction. For the past half-century – since Hiroshima and Nagasaki – it has become evident that our survival as a species is threatened by our own ingenuity in inventing machines of unprecedented power and destructiveness. Since the annihilation of the two Japanese cities – followed by sixty years of nuclear proliferation and stockpiling – awareness of humanity’s mortality has slowly been imposing itself on all but the simple, the selfish and the self-deluded. Likewise, awareness of the slower, yet deadly destruction of the natural world, ruthlessly ravaged for corporate profit, is becoming universal. As more and more people experience the palpable effects of pollution and global climate change, they are more likely to attribute these dramatic droughts, storms, floods and epidemics to global causes – indeed to global corporations – than to local gods or spirits. Another revolution in human consciousness as yet unevaluated.

Meanwhile, humans have already learned to split the atom and manipulate the genome. Like great children, we are playing with the very building blocks of matter and of life. We are also breaking them. Regrettably, our technical abilities have developed far beyond our level of social and political organization. As a result, atomic power and genetic engineering have been used exclusively for power and profit: monstrous weapons of war, Chernobyls and Three-Mile Islands built on the cheap; and genetically modified seeds imposed by force and fraud to contaminate traditional crops, turn farmers into corporate serfs and destroy self-sustaining peasant agriculture. Our species, which Victor Serge once depicted as intelligent monkeys toiling on a green globe has become too smart for its own good. Human monkeys have monkeyed around with genome and the atomic structure of matter-energy and unleashed powers they are unablewithin capitalist society, to control. Thus the planet that emerged out the first Big Bang it is now heading for another Big Bang if we don’t take control of our technology, that is to say if we fail to connect up our collective brain before engaging gears! Such awareness is the second stage of planetary consciousness: stepping out of denial and acknowledging the possibility – increasingly likely – of annihilation in the foreseeable future. Like the proverbial elephant in your living room, there is no getting around the looming specter of extinction, whether it takes the form of Nuclear Winter or of the gradual death of the polluted biosphere. At this level, planetary consciousness is awareness of the unavoidable existential choice between irreconcilable absolutes: People and Profits, Nature and Money, Life and Death.

Planetary Consciousness means understanding that the same human ingenuity which threatens the planet with destruction also holds the promise of a life of abundance, once it is liberated by freely associated human subjects. For if creative humanity manages to unite on a planetary scale; if our species, instead of destroying the planet, comes together to save it; if we are able to build a new society based intelligence and love, balancing community and individual freedom, competition and cooperation, ingenuity and harmony with nature, then we may discover a new, truly ‘human’ nature and begin true human history – a post-history, truly ‘common era’ whose infinite development we can barely imagine. A new society in which humans, liberated from the bonds of fear, greed, competition for survival, solitude, self-alienation, class antagonism, war, hatred, and servitude, will be reintegrated into the biosphere and free to develop the full human potential for creativity, discovery and spirituality.

This final stage of Planetary Consciousness consists in realizing the necessity of a positive revolution in human relations, the emergence of a new society based on solidarity and cooperation rather than on greed and oppression. This planetary consciousness speaks in the new voices now being heard around the planet. Thousands, perhaps millions of people have begun proclaiming in chorus: ‘Another world is possible!’ By organizing and resisting corporate globalization, by educating themselves and others, these global justice movements are helping to save the planet on a practical level by fighting pollution, forest-destruction, privatization of social and natural resources. They are also creating their own producer and consumer cooperatives, mutual credit societies, faire-trade networks and self-organised communities – the embryos of future societies. Like all of us, they are searching for alternatives, for a planetary vision of a possible better world, for an idea capable of drawing together billions and focusing their power.”

All the above are but excerpts of a longer article.

The author, based in Montpellier, France, invites readers to dream up realistic scenarios for Mutiny on Starship Earth at www.invisible-international.org

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