How We’ll Defeat Tyranny

Corporate power is shaking right now. After a month of rapidly growing teacher strikes around the world, Arizona’s governor has announced that he’ll raise teacher pay by twenty percent over the next two years. Some of the teachers have been insulted by their own legislatures in response. The kleptocrat billionaire education secretary Betsy DeVos has tried to pit students against them. But by threatening to destabilize the corporate state that’s outrageously neglected and sabotaged public schools over the last several decades, the system is being forced to give into their demands.

We all need to do our own version of this strike, or else the system will consume us. In a recent Pentagon training video titled “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” the deep state revealed that it plans to establish martial law by 2030. In response to the social, economic, and environmental crises that are expected to emerge in the coming years, says the video, troops will be sent in to restore order.

Constitutional rights aren’t mentioned in the Pentagon’s presentation. Neither are the horrendous assaults on the population that such a project would entail, possibly since the military will want to keep its troops obedient when they’re ordered to attack their fellow Americans. All that matters to the ruling elite is keeping their control, even as the systems they’ve built prove to be unsustainable. The end result, as John C. Whitehead writes about the Pentagon video’s implications, will be dystopian:

“The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by ‘criminal networks,’ ‘substandard infrastructure,’ ‘religious and ethnic tensions,’ ‘impoverishment, slums,’ ‘open landfills, over-burdened sewers,’ a ‘growing mass of unemployed,’ and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.”

This is the future we’re being subtly and slowly conditioned to accept, through the active shooter drills, war propaganda, militarized police, public military demonstrations, and surveillance which increasingly pervade society. And it’s the complete opposite of the future we’ll really need in order to survive.

We need to decentralize power. We need to demilitarize society. We need to totally dismantle corporate power. In my view, we’ll need to replace the current system with an eco-socialist society, one where decisions are made mainly on local levels. But we’ll be able to choose what kind of world to create after we get rid of this current global oligarchy, which is choking out humanity’s potential. And we can do this by refusing to take part in the system.

If we stage massive, repeated general strikes with, the ruling class will be forced to respond to them. Studies of past revolutions have shown that it only takes 3.5% of a population to overthrow a government, with nonviolent uprisings being the most effective. These strikes will have to involve millions of people, they’ll have to be made with clear policy demands towards dismantling military and corporate power, and they’ll have to be organized soon. But organizing them is entirely possible.