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We live through a slow crisis of global proportions. The climate is about to collapse due to capitalism enabling the externalization of costs to a dramatic degree. And now we face the consequences, together. This requires solidarity, and minimizing the use of energy and raw material. In all of this, capitalism and communism have failed us, and as always the vultures of war are circling, encouraging us to war, to xenophobia, to political division.

We need to find ways to cast off the chains from past ages. This world has no room for fascism, no room for fearing, hating, or ridiculing people with different skin color, different gender identities, different sex lives. This world has no space for white supremacy and patriarchy. We are in this together, and together we shall suffer through it all, and together we shall emerge on the other side, diminished, changed, but more whole, more at peace with ourselves and each other.

We need to find new ways to organize: ways to experience how we are in this together, to see that the doves vastly outnumber the falcons, that mutual aid works, that capitalism can be reigned in and made to work on a small scale, if we decentralize accordingly.

We need to reform the laws, and if we cannot, we need to reform the system. We need to redistribute the land, to break down the giants, dismantle the monopolies, make sure that this insane drive empowering global players has an end: they are too big to fail and too big to jail, and this must change. The fact that the state sometimes doesn’t work in our best interest doesn’t mean that we need to hand our lives to corporations because they also don’t work in our best interest. We need to reform the system.

We need to do less and use less. The answer to our cars burning dead dinosaurs is not to build cars that require power plants to run and rare earths to be mined but to ride bicycles. The answer to long distances requiring cars is not to build more roads for cars but to move things closer together so that we can do most of the things we want to do using bicycles. Having our offices and factories far from our homes was a mistake. We moved them far apart because of the pollution but the pollution is our problem and moving away does not solve it.

The solution to cows farting our atmosphere to death is not lab grown meat or eating fish but to eat less meat and less fish, to eat less dairy products.

The solution to the immense CO₂ cost of building and heating our homes is not just better insulation but also building less. We need to learn to live with less space. We need to use less concrete.

But, the economy! This is the T-Rex speaking, pointing at the meteor approaching. Who cares about the economy if there are no humans to participate in it. Wealth is when we exchange things, because they make us richer. The time to rip raw materials and dead dinosaurs from the earth in order to make plastic toys and big machines is coming to an end. We need to give each other ephemeral things that me make with our own hands. We need to go back to singing, dancing, reciting, writing, reading, painting, drawing, music making. We need to go back the muses of old. These things disappear without a trace. These things can entertain us without pollution and without industry.

We need to go back to human scale and we need to mistrust anything on an industrial scale. Anything on an industrial scale is polluting or plundering the world somewhere, exploiting employees and giving to the rich.

In fact, seen from the nuclear age, this is going to be a huge step back into effective poverty because many of the things we thought would make us rich are now our downfall. The point of scaling back voluntarily is that this is how we hope to keep the advances that we think to be indispensable. Medicine. Dentistry. Antibiotics. Warm water. The alternative is to crash and burn and trying to rebuild from the ashes but without easy access to coal and oil.

In all of this, fascism is not going to help. Being tough on crime is not going to help. Building walls around our countries is not going to help. Going to war is not going to help. Putting down women, queer people, trans people, people of colour, migrants, sex workers, followers of other religions, or followers of no religion, or whoever else you feel needs putting down is not going to help. All of these things are just distractions.

We are being distracted so we cannot fight the rich lobbying for tax breaks. We are being distracted so we don’t fight for land reform, police defunding, military defunding, better protection of the environment, better education, better health care, better public transport, and less work. We need the system to change and those benefiting from the current misery are trying to divide us and to distract us. Pay them no heed. We need the system to change, and they know it.

We want a more egalitarian society, justice for all, irrespective of wealth and connections; we want a world where the wealth gap is small, were we all ride bicycles, where all our homes are small, where our carbon footprint is small.

We all want to be part of the solution. The first step is to agree what sort of solution we want. We need to talk about the world we want to live in. We need to believe that change is possible and that results are possible in our lifetimes, even if the changes are big and the results are small. If we don’t do it, our world will crash and burn. We need to use our human faculties, our hearts and our minds to find a way forward.

The rich are growing richer, the monopolies are growing larger, our earnings are being sucked up by landlords and bonus-receiving bankers. All of this is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Air planes, mass tourism, and all things computationally expensive including cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence are part of the problem, not part of the solution. The minimal state that can no longer defend its inhabitants from exploitation by the rich is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

We need to talk about the future we want, the necessary changes that need to happen, the political actors we need to support, we need to vote accordingly, and organize locally.

We need to prepare for the arrival of the slow apocalypse. We need mutual aid in all its forms to exist before we desperately need it.

We need to build those networks while they seem optional. Those networks of support will save us, not fascist fear-mongering.

Priorities