It’s Time To Unleash A World-Shaking Amount Of Revolutionary Action

On Monday, the day of the September 3rd general strike, we’ll need to disrupt the system by not going to work and by refusing to buy anything. After that, we’ll need to keep organizing strikes and protests-not just the ones that happen on May Day and Labor Day, but a relentless series of uprisings that put more and more strain on the corporate oligarchy as time goes on. This has already been happening in the last year with the worldwide teacher strikes, which have won some reforms. But this part of the movement for social change has to become much more intense as the next months and years go by.

The world’s poor and working classes are a social tinderbox, with mass unrest being inevitable at this point. Neoliberal austerity has been imposed in many countries for the last forty years, the Great Recession is still going on, and America has been pummeled by the ever-expanding imperialist wars of the last two decades. Ruling class ideas have been discredited, and there are now hundreds of millions of people who would take action if they had the opportunity. But in a civilization where all of mainstream politics is oriented towards serving the powerful, most of them don’t have the information or resources that they need to take this action.

We can empower these people by doing what revolutionary movements have always done to pull a population out of political apathy. These tactics mainly involve building the organizations for revolt, spreading dissenting information, and creating mass protest events, which make a lot of people aware that there’s hope.

And the internet has given us unprecedented abilities to accomplish these things; the Arab Spring uprisings, for instance, couldn’t have been nearly as successful as they were without social media. The ruling class knows this, though, and that’s why governments and corporations are now censoring online speech on unprecedented levels.

This is how the world’s growing social movements tie in with the online censorship that we’re seeing right now. While apathy is still widespread, the oppressed people of the world are now a lot more active than they were just a few years ago, and the elites are trying to reverse this trend. The elite’s war against dissent is only going to get more intense as this power standoff goes on, and the recent militarizations of police show that this backlash from the establishment has already gotten violent.

What makes me willing to continue with this struggle is the fact that there are so many people who refuse to let their world be ruined by war, ecocide, and corporate tyranny. As CounterPunch columnist Chris Wright recently wrote: “Reading the daily headlines, it’s easy to forget that the corollary of a civilization in precipitous decline is a world of creative ferment, a new world struggling to be born. If you could have a God’s-eye view of all the creative resistance rending the fabric of political oppression from the U.S. to Indonesia to Colombia, you would surely be persuaded that all hope is not lost.”

So keep taking action, and keep encouraging others to do the same. If enough people join this fight, a tipping point will be reached.