Unlike other ecosocialists, I have long argued that the path to radical social transformation called for the formation of the most inventive social movement the world has ever seen. But as a scholar of twentieth-century revolutions and twenty-first century movements for radical social change, I have started to come around to the idea that the urgency of the crisis in which we find ourselves, and the lack of adequate action on all sides (myself very much included) means that we need to consider the necessity of imagining something akin to a new kind of party. What if we rejected the binary between movement and party, elections and direct action, acted upon the urgency of the mandate for thinking in new ways, and embraced a creative synthesis of the two? This essay will explore our predicament and the prospects for ways out of it along these lines.
The world as we know it is crashing around us. The signs are evident, and they are everywhere: intense, extreme storms, floods, drought, heat, rain, fire, and winds – nothing is as it was. Politicians don’t know what to do, and the actions of so many of them seem downright cruel, vacuous, or incompetent. The devastation of war, military operations, policing, lethal drones, and physical attacks roll over populations entirely innocent of any crime. The slow grind of debt, privation, and daily exploitation wears on more than half of Earth’s human inhabitants. Non-human creatures are dying out in record numbers as Earth’s systems are polluted, contaminated, and wracked by the endless extraction of fossil fuels, minerals, and the loss of healthy soil and water.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
