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Land Defense and Class StruggleThe following is the text of a speech given by Stephanie McMillan in March 2012at the Left Forum in New York City. With this piece, and our previous posting ofDerrick Jensens Twenty Premises on Industrial Civilization and Fred Hos FutureForward: A Vision for Revolution, OR is hoping to begin a discussion around acritique of industrialism, something which needs to be seriously undertaken withthe looming general ecological crisis heading towards us at rapid pace (if indeed

it has not already arrived).

As usual the posting of this piece should not be taken as a sign of totalendorsement or affiliation.

Environmental destruction is the most urgent and immediate problem we face. If wedont solve it, nothing else will matter. I would argue that its the principlecontradiction of the current period. Through it, the common ruin of contendingclasses is becoming increasingly likely, but as the economic and ecologicalcrises converge, the possibility of liberation and social transformation alsoopens up. But only if we organize to make that happen.

The problem is accelerating because of capitals constant need to expand into new

areas. They have entered a period of extreme extraction, on a scale never beforeseen: fracking, oil from tar sands and deep sea drilling, mountaintop removal.Because of the falling rate of profit, capitalism can never economically catch upwith itself and must constantly break through its limits in a vain attempt toresolve its own inherent internal contradiction.

Feudalism and all forms of class society have had internal contradictions thatdrove them to expand. But capitalism has taken this to a new level, becauseinstead of just requiring more resources to continue existing (to feed anexpanding agrarian population, for example), it requires constant growth ofproduction to expand for its own sake. The needs of the population arent thepoint, and commodities arent even the point accumulating surplus-value toexpand capital itself is the entire point. This is what pushes it to exceedlimits on a scale previously unimaginable.

But we live on a finite planet with physical limits, that are being reached. Thisis a difference from earlier economic crises. Capitalism is driven to consumeeverything external to itself, converting it to commodities, and it wont stopdoing so on its own until it kills all life on the planet. Capitalism isfundamentally in contradiction with life itself.

As this problem becomes more acute, and affects people more immediately, morepeople will come into motion to oppose it. We need to find ways of uniting thosewho can fight capitalism from both the standpoint of class liberation, and froman environmentalist perspective, or more precisely, biocentrism. Alone, neithercan achieve a sustainable and classless future society. These movements areallied and complementary. Each will have different strategies and approaches, butboth will have better chances for success the more they cooperate in theimmediate period.

Each movement currently has gaps, which are filled in by the other. The majorflaw in movements for class liberation has been anthropocentrism, a total focuson human needs and a utilitarian view of nature.

The major flaw of environmentalism (and the contemporary labor movement in the USas well, which has been destroyed or co-opted by sold-out unions) has been a lackof class analysis and a lack of understanding of capitalism as a system thatneeds to be dismantled, an economic system characterized by class domination andprotected by a state that needs to be defeated. Because of this incompletepicture, many fall victim to illusions of reformism, bourgeois democracy,technotopianism, lifestylism, green capitalism, and other dead end schemes.

Many radical or deep green environmentalists get closer to the heart of theproblem and fight to defend land and decrease production. These are bothnecessary, but not alone sufficient. We can not win we can neither liberate

ourselves nor save the planet without defeating and dismantling the entiresystem of capitalism and fundamentally transforming the structure of society on a

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Land Defense and Class Struggleclassless basis.

We can attack capitalism on many fronts, but at the center of it is theconversion of raw materials (life) into commodities through the capitalistexploitation of labor. The point is the extraction of surplus value from theworker. There is no other reason for commodities to be produced. So we must break

the social relation of class domination that makes exploitation possible, andwhich characterizes a mode of production that requires the extraction ofresources and results in the destruction of the environment.

On the left, the theory of productive forces has led to a widespreadproductivist/mechanical view of reaching socialism: by developing and fullymechanizing production, we will reach reach abundance and the end of laboritself. It is increasingly obvious that this scenario at odds with the realityaround us, yet there is a general reluctance to tell the truth: that a lot ofproduction, everything not necessary for survival, simply has to end. No onelikes being the person who brings the bad news that we have to make do with less.Its harder to organize around.

And so the idea of socialism, the common ownership of the means of production andequitable distribution of goods, also doesnt go far enough. We need to change

our relationship with the natural world. It is not there for us to use, butinstead we are part of it and depend on its overall health. We need to define adifferent relationship with it than as a set of resources. A sustainable economycan only involve production that is subordinate to nature and that fits withinits physical limits to reproduce itself that is determined not by human desiresand whims, but by our actual needs, which are dependent on a healthy planet aboveall.

The system fosters the illusion of a contradiction between the interests of thedominated classes (the working class in particular) and the ecosystem that weall depend upon for life. Through the dispossession of land-based peoples at itsstage of primary accumulation, capitalism creates a situation of dependency forworkers, who no longer have access to their own traditional means of subsistence.

This is how theyve set us up to demand that our needs be satisfied in ways that

actually help the enemy and harm ourselves. For example, the demand for jobs isalmost unquestioned in the labor movement, but this demand only helps thecapitalist to further exploit us at cheaper rates. What we should be demanding isa universal income, which would hinder exploitation, hurt capital, and would becompatible with the ecological necessity of reducing production.

Instead of demanding a temporary job building a pipeline, for example, we need tobe insisting on the right to a livable income whether we have a job or not. Andif were unemployed, we should be spending our time joining those who are puttingthemselves on the line to stand in the way of oil pipelines, mountaintop removal,and nuclear power plants such as the five Lakotas who were arrested a couple ofweeks ago for participating in a successful community blockade of trucks thatwere coming onto Pine Ridge Indian land in South Dakota with materials forbuilding the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

We must build organizations that bring to bear the energy and interests of allthe popular classes and social groupings against capitalism. For reds, a majortask is to build autonomous organizations of the working class to breakcapitalists ability to accumulate surplus value. In addition, capital should beblocked at the various points in its flow, and alliances are needed to build massmovements that can attack capitalism at each of these points including andespecially (as the ecological crisis becomes increasingly acute), defending theland by preventing extraction.

Indigenous struggles, in particular, need to be supported and allied with as partof any anti-capitalist initiative. For one thing, it must be acknowledged andaddressed that the land that provides all our sustenance has been stolen andcolonized. Furthermore, indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers are the onlygroups who have practice with living sustainably, who can offer alternatives tothis way of life that have been proven successful.

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Land Defense and Class Strugglewithout dispossessing people of the land that previously sustained them, adispossession that continues and a subsequent degradation that has accelerated toan apocalyptic rate. These economic processes are intertwined, mutuallycompulsory, defining elements of capitalist production, and a combined effort tostop both have a much better chance of defeating our common enemy.

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