Liberals and moderates assure us that the “checks and balances” are operating as they should, that the current Trump presidency is an “aberration,” and that things will soon return to normal under a democratic administration. But, for a large segment of the population, “normal” leaves a lot to be desired. Real wages for workers in the U.S. have been falling since the mid-1970s. Corruption in the political class has been given official sanction in the Citizens United decision. Reproductive rights for women are being rescinded in many states and may soon be voided nationwide. Immigrant families are being torn apart by hired thugs from ICE and CBP. LGBTQ rights are under assault, and people of color are routinely executed by police or placed in indefinite detention. Even in “normal times,” the middle class becomes increasingly inaccessible, marginalized people are targeted, and imperialism continues apace. The forests burn, water resources disappear, and plant and animal life die.

We are told to be patient, to work through legal channels, to peacefully resist. And, indeed, lawful strategies have been tried and found wanting. The massive protests leading up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan failed to stop those invasions from taking place. Occupy Wall Street was certainly inspiring and led to forging new alliances, but the encampment itself was quickly dismantled by the police state. No one will be able to forget the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of women descending on Washington, DC, in their pink “pussy hats,” but the groper-in-chief still took office. He went on to appoint fellow misogynists, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, to the Supreme Court for lifelong terms. Standing Rock was also very inspiring and drew much attention to pipeline projects and indigenous rights, but the encampment was cleared, and construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline continues toward completion.

The legal channels do not work for the majority of people, because they are tilted in favor of large corporations and their lackeys in Congress. Marxist analysis allows us to see that the laws and the state apparatus are working as intended, that is, to serve the class interests of the wealthy. The fourth estate, the “free” press, acts in concert with the state in preserving the illusion that the U.S. is a country of “free and fair elections,” “checks and balances,” or whatever the false cliché of the hour may be. There is the United States as it appears in civics textbooks, and then there is the way things actually operate. Liberals insist that we can get things “back on the right track” through electing the right candidates or through campaign finance reform or through some other fantasy scenario. It is not clear how a thoroughly corrupt system can be fundamentally changed by tinkering around the edges.

So we come to the subject of revolution, and by this we mean armed resistance, the missing ingredient in U.S. politics since the violent and ongoing repression of the Black Panther Party (let us not forget the Panthers still incarcerated). We, the non-pacifist left, hold that nonviolent tactics alone are an insufficient means of achieving lasting change within the country that has been known as the United States. We believe that nonviolent tactics work best when they are combined with organized, armed resistance to the controlling powers of corporate-backed fascism and imperialism. We ultimately work for the overthrow of the United States government and the dissolution of capitalism worldwide. We seek the return of land to indigenous people, the abolition of prisons and internment camps, a restoration of power to organized labor, the complete liberation of women and LGBTQ people, justice and reparations for people of color, and a drastic realignment of human activities that affect non-human animals and the environment.

Naturally, we will be told right away, by well-meaning liberals, that it simply cannot be done. We face the might of the largest and most deadly military that the world has ever seen. We also face unprecedented surveillance mechanisms, both in real life and in virtual spaces, an apparatus that is always on, always watching. We are dependent upon globalized, interconnected markets to supply all of our basic needs. We would love to wage revolution, the liberal says, but we simply can’t handle that level of disruption to daily life. And so we are prodded along into this vicious delay, while things get worse and worse as we wait for the right moment that never comes. And we pass along the various forms of oppression from one generation to the next, all because we were afraid to take the risk of actually standing up to the powers that make our lives miserable.

Remember how many lies have been told to us over the years. We were told that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be over in days and not years. We were told that if we got an education and worked hard, we would have better, easier lives than our parents did. We were told that America may get some things wrong, but it ultimately moves towards justice and inclusion. America comes to seem like cruel farce, like a parody of itself. Neo-nazi goons parade openly in the streets with the support of the police. Elections come to resemble auctions, with offices going to the highest bidder. There is now no last line of defense against a theocratic or authoritarian regime taking complete control of society.

No one relishes the thought of civil conflict. War means bodies on the street, people displaced from their homes, destruction on a massive scale. And yet it has come down to that. We do not choose between war and peace: we only choose the form that the conflict will take. We do not choose between violence and non-violence: we simply shape the inevitable violence, the already-existing violence, and direct it towards the least bad outcome. This should not be read as fatalism: we act within history, and each person has agency. We choose now to end the status quo, which has as its key feature the deliberate and systematic deployment of violence, both domestically and in imperialist wars around the world. The end of the United States may be the best hope that the world has for a better future.

If the U.S. were to fall into a prolonged civil conflict, the prison-industrial complex could be truly dismantled. We might have some shot at loosening the stranglehold that fossil fuels have on our way of life. Revolution offers the best hope of a more equitable distribution of wealth, land, and resources. The wealthy will not allow their fortunes to be taxed away, nor will they allow any serious transformation of the stratification of society. Bad news for the status quo means good news for the planet and good news for oppressed people at home and abroad. The longer capitalism remains intact, the more certain mass death becomes. An earlier confrontation means more lives saved in the long run. Each day of delay means more human lives lost, more ecosystems destroyed, a less viable future for our grandchildren.

We must experience each tick of the clock as a personal form of agony. We must hold ourselves to higher standards, to do something every day for the revolution. We must be vigilant against the strategies that capitalism uses to lull us into sleep.

The conflict ahead has been misconstrued as a fight about “red states” versus “blue states,” or conservatism versus reform. This portrayal fails to acknowledge the depth of the problems facing late stage capitalism in the American imperial sphere of influence. The choice comes down to business-as-usual or revolutionary change. The powers that be have already decided that they will accept, at most, incremental approaches to social and environmental problems, which assures a dark future for human and non-human life. On the balance, business-as-usual scenarios offer comfort in the short term in exchange for irreversible pain and suffering ahead. A violent break with business-as-usual offers no comfort, but it does preserve some possibility for future generations to have a livable future on earth.

Liberals, centrists, moderates, and conservatives want the public to believe that they can have the “American Way of Life” without sacrificing the environment or infringing on human rights. Socialists, anarchists, and primitivists recognize this propaganda as the ideology necessary to uphold consumerism and the profit motive, which protects only the most wealthy at the expense of everything else. The wealthy nations of the world now play musical chairs. Each time the music stops, another community goes up in smoke or winds up under the sea. Of course, the game is fundamentally unfair, as wealth, race, and privilege have rigged the game in favor of the least vulnerable. Centrist approaches refuse to acknowledge the rigging of the game, while the revolutionary alone can see the cruelty and demand an end to the game.

But let us eschew all utopian talk. Revolutionaries today seek a more just social order and a more balanced way of life on earth, but we make no guarantees and promise no rosy future. The path ahead will be filled with great difficulty, no matter what. The twenty-first century will be unlike even the horrors of the twentieth century. The stability of nature itself can no longer be assured, as the Holocene gives way to the Anthropocene. There will be disasters, wars, and refugees no matter what course of action we take. The question is not whether or not there will be violence, but simply how to best direct violence so as to minimize human suffering and the suffering of non-human creatures. It has been clear for a long time that the United States has committed itself to the unlimited projection of power abroad, to the fossil fuel infrastructure which upholds the dollar, and to a market-based system which guarantees that human needs will go unmet.

Leftists must offer a stark contrast: either stand with the corporate state or stand with people and nature. If the planet is to have a future, corporate globalization, as backed by the capitalist state, must go. This means that Washington, D.C., and corporate C-suites around the world, must be made to face the full wrath of the people as they struggle for a better way of life. The masters of the universe, the elites in charge of both market speculation and government lobbying must be held to account for their crimes against the earth and its creatures. This task of holding to account will never in a million years be accomplished through incremental reform. Both the ballot and the bullet will be necessary to put the power structure on a less ecocidal footing. It should be remembered that ecocide and genocide are two sides of the same coin, as we are all earthbound creatures who need the web of life in order to survive.