The Global Justice Project and Human Survival: We're Badly Off Track

by Blooming Barricade Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2019 at 5:08 AM

Something has gone seriously, seriously wrong.

The Indymedia project began as an outgrowth of the movement against corporate globalisation - our "global intifada," our effort to free humanity. Inaugurated with the clashes in Seattle, we had a clear focus on the threats facing the earth and ourselves: capitalism, defined by the operations of transnational corporations, political leaders representing them, and the metropolitan international institutions: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the European Union, and more.

We never expected this to be an easy fight: those wanting to preserve the "end of history" were armed with police, state, and corporate weapons that we could only counter with our solidarity, a winning weapon but one difficult to wield amid an environment of isolation and individualism.

Today, the conditions have undoubtedly worsened, the existential threats are looming closer than ever. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Club of Rome, the Global Footprint Network and other scientific analysts of the state of the climate all say we are running rapidly out of time. If you are under 60, you may just witness the end of organized human life on this planet. Some data say "we have 30 years," some say we have 12, others even less. In any case, the decapitation of the corporate monster needs to happen soon.

Yet our movements have taken not just a step backwards, but one-and-a-half steps into the grave. 20 years after we set the debate in Seattle, placing the key issues on the minds of citizens, philosophers and even politicians, we are in an unfathomably poor situation.

The key focus of the so-called "left" in the world's most polluting country, run by an ecocidal vandal who deserves to be in the running for most destructive rulers of all time, is whether or not that vandal is taking orders from the Russian Federation.

Let me repeat that: in the most wasteful society in human history, the forces designated to oppose the rape of the planet and corporate slavery are concerned with treason and betrayal of the "nation."

MSNBC: "The worst case scenario that we`ve all been talking about, which is the possibility that the president had somehow been co-opted and was in the pocket of the Russians."

THIS is the "worst case scenario" according to the "social justice" network of the American "left?"

If we were to step back and look at this terrible situation honestly, we could only conclude that American liberals, and the Democratic Party, are right-wing nationalist forces concerned with geopolitical gambits and preservation of military alliances.

This isn't the politics of 2019, or 1999. It's the politics of 1819 - but even then, it's the right wing politics of 1819, as there was already a left dedicated to popular solidarity and social ownership existing, clandestinely, in the shadows of European cities.

It's worth analyzing how a "Seattle" would play out if it were to occur in the context of today's US political discourse: the protestors would be seen as nationalist anti-Semites doing the bidding of Putin, and perhaps Xi Jinping. The leaking of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment would be condemned instantly as "information warfare." A focus on environmental issues would be viewed in the context of "energy geopolitics." Indymedia would be shut down by the authorities as a vehicle for "sowing discord" in Europe against NATO and liberalism.

But it's a moot point, because today's "left," at least in America, could never produce a Seattle today. In Europe, there are still some fires burning - the ZAD, the movement against the big trade deals, and an attempt, albeit small, to establish a Binding Treaty on transnational corporations. These are seedlings. But we need a lot of compost to make them grow in time.

If Americans continue this inane political dialogue and fail to join with their European sisters and brothers, overruling Liberal Order delirium, there is no way to avoid an actual "worst case scenario."

Whatever that might look like, we won't be around to see it.

Original: The Global Justice Project and Human Survival: We're Badly Off Track