Evolution or Extinction

Humanity has suffered a loss of vision and direction. Life, as it is, cannot carry on in this way forever. We continue to destroy our forests, pollute our air, soil, and water, and wreak havoc upon our eco-systems. If we continue with our current practices, we may destroy ourselves. Socialists recognise the looming catastrophe, but a few of us also realise that this crisis can also be driving us toward positive change. In the midst of this nascent consciousness, the capitalists try to maintain the status quo despite the many warnings that the old ways are no longer sustainable. We still are lacking a coherent social potential movement to connect our communities and society as a whole. But the fact that people are now awakening is evidence of the emerging progress of humanity. A leader-free network is working to bring about radical change.

Capitalism is built on violence and it was created with violence. Make no mistake there is a class war. Nevertheless, the socialist movement is not here to attack but rather to transcend and include the best of what has come before and to attract that which needs to come forth for the flourishing of our human and planetary potential. Its objective is to evolve all of us, our communities, and our world so that all people are free to fulfill their highest potential. Its aim is not to destroy, but to fulfill. Socialists recognise that we have inherited enormous resources from capitalism and that many of those resources can be re-purposed now for the social good.

We as individuals have not changed much physiologically or intellectually in the past thousands of years, but our larger social body has become radically empowered. We have now been born into an extended social and scientific capacity that has never before existed on Earth. We are beginning to discover a path of collaborative action that will lead us toward an immeasurable and positive future. The crises and opportunities we face today are triggering the next stage of social evolution in which we can cooperate and re-pattern our economic and political systems. We need people who are willing to stand together, build a transformative movement for social change that unites people behind a vision of a world based the economics of production for use and not for profits. The role of the Socialist Party is to simply unlock and open doors to get people thinking more deeply about the world they live in and what is around them.

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign which misdirects us into believing that life-style and individual consumer choices will change things rather than organised political resistance. We so often hear that the world is running out of water and people are dying from lack of water so we need to take shorter showers. The truth is more than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual individual humans. Golf courses use as much water as human beings. An individual’s consumption compared with commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government and military is a negligible impact on energy use, global-warming, and atmospheric pollution. Town and city waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States. Let us not delude ourselves that going “green” is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change. It incorrectly assigns blame and guilt to the individual, not to the system. Our only option is to act decisively to stop the industrial capitalism.