Stephanie McMillan: Killing Capitalism in the Name of Self-Defense Global capitalism is killing the planet.

It is turning the living world into dea d commodities by exploiting the many for the profit of a few. Ecocide is the most urgent and immediate problem we face. If we don t solve it, no thing else will matter. Economic troubles (not to mention our personal issues) w ill seem trivial. The ability of the planet to sustain life of any kind is becom ing increasingly threatened. It may already be too late to avoid runaway global warming; and it s certainly too late to avoid radioactive rain, shrimp without eyes in the Gulf of Mexico, and tap water that can be lit on fire. It s too late to save 78 percent of the world s o ld-growth forests or bring back the 200 species of plants and animals that went extinct today. The situation is extremely dire. But we can t give up not without a fight. Precisely as the economic and ecological crises converge, the possibility of liberation and social transformation also o pens up. But only if we organize to make that happen. Ecocide is accelerating because of capitalism s constant need to expand into new a reas. Capitalists have entered a period of extreme extraction, even in areas tha t were previously off-limits geographically and politically. They re now ripping u p North America as wantonly as they ve already wrecked other parts of the world, w ith fracking, oil from tar sands and deep-sea drilling, and mountaintop removal. Because of competition between capitalists, which leads to a falling rate of pro fit, capitalism is structurally compelled to expand. It can never economically c atch up with itself and must constantly break through its limits in a vain attem pt to resolve its own inherent internal contradiction. Feudalism and all forms of class society have also had internal contradictions t hat drove them to expand. But capitalism has taken this to a new level, because instead of just requiring more resources to continue existing (to feed an expand ing agrarian population, for example), it requires the constant growth of produc tion to expand for its own sake. The needs of the population aren t the point, and commodities aren t even the point accumulating surplus value to expand capital it self is the entire point. This is what pushes it to exceed limits on a scale pre viously unimaginable. But we live on a finite planet with physical limits, which are being reached. Th is is a difference from earlier economic crises. Capitalism is driven to consume everything external to itself, converting it to commodities, and it won t stop do ing so on its own until it kills all life on the planet. Capitalism is fundament ally in contradiction with life itself. The system won t stop unless we stop it. The system has many methods of dealing with dissent. One is open repression. Before they resort to that, they try everything else, including co-opting dissen t. They draw it into dead ends created for this purpose. As long as we don t threa ten the actual relationship of power, we have many ineffective means of dissent that we re permitted to exercise. But capitalism can t be reasoned with, escaped, reformed, redeemed, cajoled, aband oned, or rejected. It does not care what we want or how persuasively (or how nic ely, or how rudely) we request it. Elections won t change this. Less evil politicians still serve and represent capital

ist interests. It s their job. Personal lifestyle changes, though nice, will not make it stop. Protests and dem onstrations won t make it stop. A better-regulated or reformed capitalism would still kill the planet. So-called green capitalism and technotopianism are lies to make us believe an expansionist economy could be sustainable. We can t buy our way out of it. If we are to liberate ourselves from this horror if we are even to survive we mu st work together to fight global capitalism and its crimes, toward the ultimate goal of bringing it down. The system has been built on land theft, war, and slavery. It steals the means o f subsistence from indigenous populations and small farmers, putting everyone in a situation of dependency, forced to sell our labor to get food and shelter. A system based on the pursuit of profit and perpetual expansion can never be fai r or sustainable. We need to study and analyze its mechanisms and motion, and id entify its weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We can attack it on many fronts, but at the center of it is the conversion of ra w materials (life) into commodities through the capitalist exploitation of labor . The point is the creation of surplus value (profit) by the worker, which the c apitalist appropriates in other words, steals. There is no other reason for comm odities to be produced. To end this nightmare, workers will have to organize to liberate themselves. The y are the only ones who can break the social relation of class domination, a rel ation that is at the core of a mode of production that requires the extraction o f resources and the exploitation of workers, and results in the destruction of t he environment. In addition, we must build organizations of various types that bring to bear the energy and interests of all the popular classes and social groupings to weaken capitalism. As the crises become more acute and affect people more immediately, increasing numbers of people will come into motion to oppose it. We need to find ways of uniting all those who are antagonistic to capitalism, from various pers pectives, and work together to defeat and dismantle it. Movements for social liberation must ally with movements to defend the natural w orld, or we won t be able to achieve either goal. We need a diverse, non-sectarian mass movement that can increase our chances for victory against our common enem y. If we want to win, we must organize and align our efforts. Individually we re weak and ineffective; together we are strong. Let s build a broad and autonomous movement to fight capitalism, before it destroy s us!