How the Revolution could Happen

by The Free 03/08/17 Late capitalism is like an express train screeching down a hill towards a cliff edge.. and the only way to stay on the rails, as is unanimously agreed, is BY ACCELERATING the ‘growth rate’..

So how will the revolution happen? The classic answer is that the workers will unite, strike, takeover, banish the insane 1% and put the world to rights.

Not likely to happen any time soon. For one thing we are divided and marginalised and being replaced by precarious labour and willing anti-union robots.

The Nation States each demand a monopoly of violence and coercion. They need to be abolished, ASAP, but they have 24.7 million bored troops, armed to the teeth and just longing for us to attack.

Capitalism needs to crash to the ground in smithereens, but most of us are dependent on its crumbs to survive and feed our kids.

And even if socialism or communism were to triumph we have generations of proof that top down State Control just Doesn’t Work.

So how will it happen? Or is it just wishful thinking?

First of all, we are not naturally greedy, selfish, cruel, self centered, bastards. Those are the qualities demanded of us by a perverse system.

Usually we are incredibly cooperative, practicing mutual aid and sharing with our friends, families and comrades at every opportunity in a million daily ways.

Though the alternatives to lunatic predator capitalism appear tiny and laughably weak that’s often because capitalism continually breaks them down.

They could suddenly go viral and become powerfully exponential. That is IF the financial system were to crash in pieces and if it were totally clear that the climate and biosphere could take no more insane, stupid, suicidal capitalism.

So what are these Revolutionary Embryos that could suddenly mushroom like crazy?

First the economy. Coops have always suffered, for one thing because you end up competing with capitalists and exploiting yourself.

But all over the world there are thousands of small and big coops, surviving and expressing our anti capitalist dreams, which could multiply and become immensely viable in the context of capitalist collapse. Take the Cooperativa Integral in Catalonia. . It’s a mixed consumer and producers coop and like many Iberian ventures has its own money, the Ecu. (which is interchangeable with the Euro and other alternative currencies, but not issued or directly controlled by the banks or the State). You can exchange, or gift or buy online, via Faircoop.

Tiny tiny, you may say, but this coop is also behind FAIRCOIN, which is a blockchain currency, like Bitcoin but collectively owned and managed without speculation to finance alternative projects and coops., In theory Faircoin could expand exponentially. It could develop into a world Coop currency and money-free credit system quite apart from State and Bank control.. (see #faircoop.. Occupying free economy with Anti-money.. #faircoin and many links below.)

Okay coops… they could expand, but that will hardly self organise 8 billion of us.

The hot organisational topic right now is ‘Democratic Confederalism’, a system elaborated by the heretical anarchist Murray Bookchin. The ideas were adopted by the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan in his lifelong prison cell, and proposed, taken up and adapted by the revolutionary ‘Kurdish Spring’. The Kurds replaced the old hierarchical stalinist resistance of the PKK movement and renounced the goal of a new Kurdish state..

The Turkish dictator Erdogan rose to power on a fascist/nationalist/religious anti-Kurdish campaign based on military occupation, mass murder, imprisonment and repression. The result was a new generation of PKK fighters, and coincided with the takeover of Kurdish part of north Syria, Rojava.

Rojava Revolution Plan: Organising and Funding Projects and Volunteers

The Kurdish YPG and womens’ YPJ militias in Rojava trained and implemented the anarcho-municipalist ideas of Bookchin. They soon extended them to Arab, Assyrian, Christian, Azidi and International solidarity militias in the new umbrella Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance, now 100,000 strong. Captured cities were organised for the first time from the bottom up. And with quotas for the various ethnic minorities and women,(see Manbij)

The womens’ revolution has been especially strong, lifting women from truly feudal conditions to running their own army and directing attacks in ISIS HQ in Raqqa. The YPJ are much more than photo opportunities for the rabid western press, indeed both the Yazidis and impressed allied Arab militias have women’s sections and are embracing women’s liberation, unthinkable until very recently.

The ‘Democratic Confederalism ‘ anti state system has thus been shown to work, despite the total blockade and military attacks, until recently from all sides. As such it represents right now an embryo for a new ‘Middle East Spring”, and could very well ‘go viral’ in a context of capitalist and oil price collapse. Especially if it were combined with an anarchist mutual aid type union on the lines of the CNT or the CGT in Iberia. .( see SYRIA: The life and work of anarchist Omar Aziz)

Whether the Rojava Revolution can survive the ambitions and machinations of the US, Russia, Syria, Israel, Iran and all the various, voracious, vulture States remains to be seen.