AN EXCHANGE

--- Anne Marie Teters wrote:

> Hell yeah. The war. The war that is centered
> around economic imperialism....that is radically
> polarizing extremists. What can I do?
> am

SDF: The first thing I think we need to do is to create a movement alternative to the two-party system, that offers continual struggle against the war until it is over. You have two parties, one (the Republican) to drag the US into the quagmires, the other (the Democrat) to blackmail us with the first while surreptitiously becoming more and more like the Republicans.

I've been spreading Howie Hawkins' argument:

A Democrat might beat Bush, but no Democrat is going to beat Bushism, which is to say the corporate oligarchy’s bipartisan consensus. If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2004, there will be no change in the basic US geopolitical political strategy of military basing and control of oil in the Middle East and Central Asia to keep Western Europe, Russia, China, and Japan from becoming potential rivals to US hegemony will not change. Nor will there be any change in the basic neoliberal policy of motivating workers to work harder by imposing hardship and motivating the rich to invest with corporate welfare incentives.

I've been working through a group called the Green Alliance:

& I've also been trying to make linkages between that work and my work for Food Not Bombs:

My own idea of the "meeting of the movements" comes in the form of a movement proposal, for a "Campaign to Establish a Right To Live Off Of The Land":

But all of that appears to me to lay the groundwork for the new society that will have to come about after the war is over.

What will really end the war? My own suspicion is that the "antiwar" movement is at present too weak and in tow to the Democratic Party to really present an effective challenge to the war both Bush and Kerry have declared themselves in favor of continuing. Hopefully there will be a collapse of the dollar and that will put an end to the war -- or so Marc Weisbrot predicted three months ago:

Besides that, I suppose we can wait until all of the oil is extracted from Iraq's soil and the empty shell of a desert nation is left behind. By that time, I'd imagine, global civilization will be in permanent decline.

I suppose the alternative is what I've been calling "ecosocialism" -- by which I mean the notion of a global sustainable society. Why "socialism"? My own personal tastes are much more like the anarchists than those of the socialists of old -- but my feeling is that it will have to be "socialism" because --

1) It will have to be everywhere. We cannot have a world where one part is sustainable and the other part isn't.

2) It will have to be powerful enough to defeat the capitalist system on whatever battlefield is left once the capitalist system itself has milked the world dry for the sake of profit.

3) It will have to guarantee all of us some basic human rights. The struggles continue today because not all are guaranteed human rights under capitalism.

4) We won't have a lot of choice as to its form. I would prefer a libertarian socialism; but the main task of the ecosocialist future will be to clean up the global messes which the capitalist system will have left behind.

So, in endorsing all anticapitalist movements, I put it out there that I will take what I can get as far as an end to the capitalist system is concerned. This is the very opposite of sectarianism, because it welcomes socialism, anarchism, pacifism, Green radicalism etc.

I suppose the answer to the "what can I do?" question is that I really don't know and that you'll have to develop one yourself through your own explorations. I hope this answer contributes something to them.

Regards,
Sam