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Ecotopia: A Bet You Can't Refuse |
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"The men who rule the world today are the officers of a ship drifting rudderless toward a rocky shore, busy looting the cargo, locking up the passengers and crew below decks and fighting among themselves for the booty. The only hope is that the passengers and crew can figure out a way to get organized and take over the bridge before it is too late."
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1. One Chance in a hundred? Let's be optimistic! Let's bet there's still one chance in a hundred that the Earth will be habitable at the end of the 21st Century. Think I'm putting you on? Try answering the following questions honestly: Do you personally believe you will live to see an end to weapons of mass destruction proliferating? Do you sincerely expect an end to poverty increasing? Can you honestly predict an end to glaciers melting? I could go on with this litany, but you know as well as I do that under capitalism each of these trends will continue, leading to foreseeable disasters. Now I dare you to imagine all of these catastrophic trends interacting in horrid synergy. 'One chance in a hundred?' Call me an optimist! Now for the sake of argument, let's assume that there actually is one chance in a hundred for a livable world in 2100. If that one chance exists, shouldn't we be able at least to imagine it, visualize it like a realistic Sci-Fi movie? Shouldn't we be able to invent one or more future scenarios - historically and technically possible scenarios - in which Spaceship Earth is saved from self-destruction? Let's put our imaginations to work. Can we imagine a realistic salvation scenario for a planet in the thralls of a powerful social and economic system (capitalism) which seems inexorably to be leading us to predictable catastrophes? If we exclude divine or extra-terrestrial intervention, then we need to imagine the emergence of some kind of positive revolution in human relations, that is to say in global society. 'But that's not practical,' you object. 'It's purely Utopian.' So be it. When reality becomes practically impossible, the impossible may become the only practical way out. 2. The Power of Utopia In any case, the human imagination is a powerful thing, and Utopian ideas expressed in myths and the writings of Plato, Augustine, Thomas Moore, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris, have long been a major influence in human society. Indeed, Utopian visions of humanity's oneness and holiness have inspired vast peasant revolutions down through history. During the English Revolutions of the 17th Century, the Diggers and Levelers shared out the land and wealth; In Germany in 1563, the city of Münster Germany was transformed into a radical commune by Anabaptists under Jan of Lyden; and in China, beginning in 1851, the idealistic Ta'I-p'ing rebels practiced equality and occupied major provinces for over a decade. Meanwhile, in the West, secular Utopian socialist schemes were elaborated in France by Fourier, Saint-Simon and Proudhon, while the British philanthropist Robert Owen established successful Utopian Colonies in Britain and the U.S. Utopian thinking also gives humans the intellectual power of historical perspective, freeing them from the unhistorical prejudice that the present system is somehow immutable or natural. Only from the perspective of our one-chance-in-a-hundred Utopia we can look backwards, in the guise of historians of the year 2100, and ask the essential historical questions: how did we get here from there? What technological/material and ideological/spiritual elements - latent in early 21st Century globalized capitalist society - enabled the emergence of planetary social movements leading to sustainable post-capitalist societies? In the 1840's the works of the Utopian socialists inspired the historically-minded German philosopher Karl Marx to see that capitalism as a transitory stage of human society preceded by feudalism and likely to be followed by socialism. Meanwhile, the Utopian dream of socialism was expressing itself in the practical struggles of the working people of all lands. The new class of 'proletarians' or property-less wage-workers, tired of waiting for philanthropists to set up ideal communities, were beginning to unite, struggling against the employing classes, even organizing internationally with socialism as their avowed goal. These workers, with their vast numbers, concentration in factories, key role in the economy, and growing self-awareness, seemed to have the potential force to take power away from the capitalist owners and to unite all the world's producers in creating a cooperative commonwealth. Thus Marx came to view history as a succession of class struggles between exploited majorities and small, but powerful, elites: slaves against masters, serfs against landlords, commoners against nobles, workers against capitalists (billions against billionaires in our day) leading either to a new society or to mutual destruction. 3. Utopia's Tragedy It is often forgotten that for Marx, the essence of socialism was democracy - the government of the majority based on free speech, free press, free assembly - to which socialism added equality - democracy carried into the economic sphere. Marx lived to see his vision put into practice by the (mostly anarchist!) workers and craftsmen of Paris, who in 1871 armed themselves to save the City from the invading Prussians, elected their own self-governing Commune to run their political, economic and military affairs, and held out for three months before being crushed when their revolution failed to spread nationwide. But even worse revolutionary tragedies took place in the 20th Century, decades after Marx's death, in Communist Russia and China, where socialism was separated from democracy and new bureaucratic elites turned the Utopian dream into totalitarian nightmares of forced labor. The horror inspired by such Communist dictatorships has naturally left succeeding generations afraid of all Utopian and socialist dreams. But is it logical to condemn all Utopian ideas, and with them all hope for a better world, as necessarily totalitarian? By the same logic we would have to reject Jesus' 'Love each other like yourselves' message because it led to the corrupt Borgia Popes and the terrorist Spanish Inquisition! Nonetheless, Utopia continues to have a bad name, and it's a sad commentary that in the 21st Century, only wackos, racists, survivalists and end-of-the-world fundamentalists seem to have a vision of the future - however negative. Yet our strife-torn world cries out for positive visions. To move forward, we need a goal, a dream. It isn't enough for good people merely to protest, to struggle eternally 'against' the latest outrage. Of course we must resist war, racism, sexism, police-state repression and a host of other evils. But what is missing today is a vision of a possible future without which our awareness of the endless evils of this world only makes us passive and cynical. Without Utopia, the only alternatives are despair or 'realistically' choosing the lesser (!) of two evils while things go from bad to worse. 4. Mutiny on Starship Earth The men in suits who rule the world today have no plan for the future. Their main preoccupation is holding onto their power and wealth. Their perspectives are limited to inflating quarterly balance sheets and winning biennial election campaigns. If they don't see any further into the future, it's also because they unconsciously understand that there will be no future - since they are busy murdering it. They are the officers of a ship drifting rudderless toward a rocky shore, busy looting the cargo, locking up the passengers and crew below decks and fighting among themselves for the booty. The name of that vessel is Starship Earth. Its only hope is that the passengers and crew can figure out a way to get organized and take over the bridge before it is too late. Even with the odds against us, it's a bet we can't refuse. Because like it or not, we are the all in the same boat, passengers and crew alike - far out at sea and drifting toward shipwreck. One chance in a hundred may seem like pretty slim odds, but look at it this way: The bad news is that we have nothing to lose but the dismal spectacle of a dying world - made uglier every day by increasing injustice, suffering, and stupidity. The good news is that we have a finite chance to save a beautiful planet with all our friends on board. Nothing to lose against an infinity of life and beauty? Mathematically speaking, it's zero against infinity - pretty good odds in my book. Talk about a bet you can't refuse! And if planetary destruction is an idea that confronts us as an absolute end - it follows that its opposite, Life itself, must also be taken as an absolute end. Assuming then the necessity of Utopia, how will we get from here to there, from capitalist ecocide to ecotopia? In other words, what are the technological (material) and ideological (spiritual) elements - latent in globalized capitalist society - that can combine to enable the emergence of the planetary social movements capable of stripping the billionaires of their power and creating sustainable post-capitalist societies? 5. 'I will raise the Earth!' They say that in ancient times, that bold philosopher and inventor Archimedes boasted: 'Give me a lever long enough, a fulcrum, a place to stand, and I will raise the Earth!' Of course, we know Archimedes' amazing feat was only a hypothesis - a 'thought experiment' that could take place only in the mind. But Archimedes's discovery was no less powerful for being a mere idea dreamed up by a philosopher. Long after Archimedes, inventions based on his hypothesis vastly multiplied the puny strength of human beings so that they were able to circumnavigate the globe and eventually to dominate it - for better or for worse. Can anyone then doubt the ability of an idea - a thought experiment - to multiply human power? Our problem, if we want to successfully imagine a plausible science fiction with a happy ending, is to think up a similar hypothetical formula for multiplying human power so that our passengers and crew can 'lift the Earth' before it is shipwrecked. Our mutineers will need a lot of leverage to overpower the officers who are fighting among themselves, looting the ship, and steering it toward disaster. How to imagine such a lever, platform, and fulcrum? History seems to indicate that whenever people are ready to pose new questions, the answers are already present - if only as possibilities for science fiction. 6. The Modern Archimedes Hypothesis In the case of Starship Earth, the three elements are already on board, ready to be configured into a new power strong enough to halt the onrush of planetary self-destruction and release the human energy to build a new society. These elements are: the social lever, the electronic platform, and the philosophical fulcrum. • The Social Lever is the vast untapped power of planetary solidarity. Once the billions of passengers and crewmembers aboard Spaceship Earth unite and act together, no force can stop them. Divided, they are pitiful and weak. United, their power is irresistible. • The Electronic Platform is the World Wide Web. Its emergent technology is tentacular, infinite in its connections, interactive, and indestructible because its center is everywhere and nowhere. As accessible tomorrow as the telephone is today, the Internet can provide a place to stand large enough for billions to interact. The Web is a planetary platform where each can speak for her/himself on equal footing, where billions of passengers and crew-members can connect, unite, empower themselves and take initiatives on a planetary scale - the only scale on which it makes sense to confront the power-mad officers of predatory global capitalism. • The Philosophical Fulcrum is planetary consciousness: the awareness that planets are mortal. It is a vision which places the survival of Starship Earth and its inhabitants at the center of all things. It is the affirmation of Life on Earth as a new universal, as the common spiritual and practical basis around which billions can unite. | |||||||
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7. The Lever of Planetary Solidarity Solidarity is the most familiar of the three powers. We all know that there is strength in numbers. 'United we stand, divided we fall.' 'An injury to one is an injury to all.' 'Better to hang together before we all hang separately.' Ever since the revolt of Spartacus and the Roman slaves, the poor, the downtrodden, the exploited have shown their power to unite and use their numbers to win concessions from their wealthy, powerful oppressors - even to overthrow them. This power of the people united has been demonstrated down through the ages - from the vast peasant uprisings in Feudal times to the mass revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It follows that only by joining together can the passengers and crew of Starship Earth - locked below decks in separate compartments and divided by language and religion - ever hope to take over the bridge from the well-guarded, power-drunk, money-crazed officers. Make no mistake. In no time or place have the wealthy ever shared any of their power or privileges without a struggle. It was only by uniting in mass movements, unions, and political parties that the working people won such democratic rights as universal suffrage, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, the eight-hour day, and legislation mandating universal education, healthcare, job safety and social security. Moreover, such reforms were achieved only in certain places, such as in Europe, the Americas, and a few Asian countries, and only after generations of struggle. Today, these rights are under attack on a global scale, even in the economically advanced countries. Of course, in vast portions of the world the common people still have not won personal freedom, civil liberties, a say in government. As a result, their labor is cheap. Globalization allows transnational businesses to exploit that cheap labor, and capital has been flowing from the democracies - where workers can protect themselves - to the dictatorships, where they can't. Moreover, authoritarian rule - the business-friendly police state - seems to be strangling democracy in the 'advanced' countries, as Second and Third World poverty spreads to the West. Thus advantages won by people-power have remained partial and temporary - largely because they remained isolated. Just as Spartacus' rebel slaves were eventually hunted down by Legions brought in from other provinces of the vast Roman Empire, so in modern times, isolation seems to have condemned every revolution to a similar sorry fate. The common people in France, Russia, Spain, China, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia have successfully united in times of crisis to wrest power from the hands of their overlords - whether feudal, capitalist or Communist. But as long as their revolutions were confined to one city or country at a time, they were doomed to either military defeat - like Spartacus and the slaves of Rome - or to degenerate into bureaucratic dictatorships. Solidarity must be international to be effective, as the workers of Europe concluded, following the defeat of the Europe-wide 1848 revolutions, by forming the first International Workers' Association to coordinate their struggles in 1864. Nearly a century and a half later, under globalized corporate capitalism, it is obvious that unless the lever of solidarity is extended across oceans and borders, it is no longer an effective tool against the profit-driven 'race to the bottom'. Unless the billions unite, the billionaires - who can move their money from country to country - will always dominate the working people, who are rooted at home and barred from seeking higher wages by militarized borders. Today's ruthless corporations are off-shoring their operations, not just out of the U.S. but even out of impoverished Mexico, to countries in Asia where the wages are even more pitiful. On the other hand, the ongoing wave of international popular movements - sweeping across Latin America, into the Hispanic U.S. and even reaching out to Asia - holds a real promise. To remain secure, the same rights, benefits and popular reforms must be enjoyed by working people in all countries. If they are not achieved in the poor lands, they will disappear (along with jobs) within the rich. In a globalized economy movements for peoples' rights must be planetary to succeed. But how can such global solidarity be organized? 8. The World Wide Web: a Planetary Platform Historically, advances in communication and transportation have generally enabled advances in popular self-organization. During the democratic revolutions of the 18th Century, cheap printing and the post office (both recent developments) enabled revolutionary committees of correspondence in the American colonies and France to share local grievances, inform each other, discuss ideas, organize congresses, publish and circulate revolutionary pamphlets. In the 19th, the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph and the daily newspaper spread the democratic revolutions of 1848 all across Europe within months. On the negative side, radio and later television - organized in the 20th century as one-way, top-down broadcast media - became the favorite tool of 20th Century totalitarian dictatorships, while today right-wing commercial media monopolies dominate the airwaves in the democracies. In the 21st Century, the Internet promises to give the advantage back to people-power. It also may give a new meaning to democracy. For the first time in history, this new technology has placed at the disposal of the billions a platform large enough and accessible enough for all to participate, decide and act together. With its infinite interconnections, the World Wide Web enables groups in struggle to communicate, exchange information, discuss ideas, work out common programs and coordinate actions on a planetary scale in real time. Translation is apparently becoming less of a problem. The technology of the Internet has the potential of creating vast, world¬wide assemblies where true international democracy can take form; forums where consensus can be reached on an ongoing basis; platforms where massive planetary actions can be coordinated from hour to hour around the globe. The value of the Internet as a new weapon in the struggle has already been demonstrated, while cell-phones and social networking sites have enabled masses of demonstrators to out-maneuver the forces of repression. These are precisely the communications tools the passengers and crew of Starship Earth will need to break out from below decks and take over the bridge from the officers who are looting the hold, fighting over the spoils and driving the ship into the abyss. The Web is also a vast public library where the passengers and crew can find (among other things) the uncensored information and revolutionary ideas they will need to unite. The collective creation of Wikipedia, the ever-expanding, self-correcting resource, is a model of Internet emergence. For the first time in history, the storehouse of revolutionary internationalist thinking and the recorded experiences of centuries of struggle is accessible to all. Thus the Web weaves together ideas and planetary communication, connecting the Lever of solidarity with the Fulcrum of planetary consciousness. 9. Democracy, Internet, Emergence Before going further, I want to make it clear that I do not believe that technology can substitute for active human solidarity and collective organization on the ground. 'Revolutionary' chat rooms can never replace face-to-face workplace and neighborhood organizing; radical Websites are no substitute for popular movements, unions, parties, newspapers, alternative broadcasting, international meetings and other forms of human interaction. Nor do I maintain that the Web is immune to police-state censorship and spying by authoritarian regimes like China, which simply blocks certain subjects (with the complicity of 'do no evil' Google) and mines emails and postings (with the help of Yahoo) in order to arrest and punish dissidents. On the other hand, hackers in China and around the world often find ways to get around police-state censors and their U.S. corporate accomplices. (Indeed, the hacker mentality and the 'freeware' movements incarnate a Utopian spirit and are the allies of social movements around the world.) What I am suggesting is this: 1. the Internet is a powerful new tool for struggle whose revolutionary potential is beginning to be understood by popular movements around the globe. 2. the Internet makes technically possible the old internationalist dream of a global movement of working people establishing a harmonious, self-governing post-capitalist world. 3. the model of the Internet's global network, whose 'center' is everywhere and nowhere, may turn out to be a more effective model for the emergence of planetary, democratic and working-class movements than the traditional hub-and-spokes, center/periphery, top down model of centralized parties and 'internationals.' To begin with, the Internet has already been appropriated by global justice movements and proven itself an invaluable tool on the ground. For example, by the Zapatistas who opened the anti-globalization era with their anti-NAFTA rebellion in 1994 and used the Internet to gather global support against the invading Mexican Army, by the locked-out Liverpool dockers who organized a successful international dockers' boycott of scab shipping in 1997, the anti-corporate globalization protesters in Seattle, Genoa, Cancun who eventually crippled the IMF and WTO, the global social movements that have connected at the World Social Forums, the demonstrators who freed President Chávez from the coup plotters in 2002, the millions of demonstrators in 57 different countries who protested invading Iraq in April 2003, the workers and students of the Korean General Strike of 1997, the rebels in China, who reportedly pulled off 83,000 strikes and uprisings against overwork and pollution in 2006, the many blogs and alternative news sites around the globe that get behind the 'official' story put out by governments and the billionaires' corporate media. The Web has also enabled and perhaps influenced new types of organization, based on the network model rather than the traditional pyramid and hub-and-spokes models. (The symbol of the web, powerful, yet delicate, has already been proposed by activist women as an alternative to male-dominated, top-down power.) In Latin America, for example, new forms of horizontal organizations are emerging, rooted in urban neighborhoods and rural communities, in factories and on the land, yet networked nationally and even internationally. For example, self-organized, autonomous groups of peasants and indigenous peoples have been networked all over the Americas since 1992, when the Internet helped bring them together to celebrate 500 years of survival and resistance to colonialism. Today, they meet online and at World Social Forums, connect with networks of workers, ecologists, and activists, compare conditions, discuss strategy, and organize global solidarity with similar movements in Asia. In the context of national politics, these autonomous networks are at the base of the vertical power of progressive presidents like Lula, Kirchner, Correa, Chavez, and Morales - pushing these governments to challenge the power of local landowners and the global corporations. Far from being 'historically backward,' these rural communities have successfully appropriated 21st Century capitalist communications technology at its highest level and used it as a weapon for their own emancipation. They are in today's planetary vanguard, challenging capitalism, protecting the land, saving nature from the ravenous corporations. If the Web model of a network of networks continues to prove effective as a structure for an expansive, flexible, practical transnational organizing, might it not also foreshadow the structure of a future self-organized planetary society? The Achilles' heel of democracy has always been the necessity of delegating authority to representatives, who all too often end up forming a separate political class with its own interests. But what if direct 'town-meeting' type participatory democracy could be organized not only locally, but also regionally, and globally via Internet hookup? What if every citizen of the planet could make her/his voice heard equally with every other? Have access to experts' advice? Unite with others of the same persuasion. And then vote - whether in their own mass assemblies or internationally via a secure Internet hookup. What if the great issues facing humanity could be debated everywhere and then decided in global referendums via the Internet? What if the necessity of economic planning on a global scale could be combined with worker self-management and maximum local autonomy? What if every individual could participate in each of her capacities as resident, producer, consumer and citizen. What if, after centuries of successful revolutions being hijacked and perverted by new 'democratic' or 'Communist' elites, the common people were able to control the destiny of a new society as it emerges from below. Back in 1958, when computers were in their infancy, the (then) Marxist philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis - was the first to imagine such a computer-connected self-managed society in 'The Content of Socialism.' [1] A professional economist, Castoriadis was able to elaborate in concrete detail a complete national economy, free of all the waste and coercion of Communist or corporate central planning. There, in 'Planning Factories', would be produced alternative plans - to be debated and eventually voted by the producers via wired hookups - explaining in simple terms the relative costs and consequences of each proposal in labor time, resources, growth and consumption levels. The concrete images in Castoriadis' Utopian model made such an impression on me a half-century ago that I have never since doubted democratic socialism's practical 'do-ability.' Castoriadis' vision derives the Marxist notions of revolution as 'evolution in the fullness of time,' and of 'the new world emerging out of the shell of the old' - adopted by the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) in 1905, the year Rosa Luxemburg analyzed the revolutionary mass strikes in Poland-Russia as emergent forms of spontaneous self-organization. What was original in 1958, was Castoriadis' appropriation of the theories of the socialist-minded mathematician Norbert Weiner the pioneer of computer science who explored the feed-back principle and recognized the emergent quality of cybernetics. [2] 10. Connectivity, Chaos, Complexity and Emergence Today, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, cyberneticists and scientists in other fields are studying and analyzing the emergent phenomena of spontaneous self-organization from below in the context of Chaos/Complexity/Emergence theory. Emergence - the spontaneous creation of order and complexity out of chaos - is observed in various natural phenomena which were previously inexplicable in terms of the standard top-down scientific models of cause/effect, leader/follower, Quantum physics being the most celebrated example. [3] For those of us without access to higher mathematics, biology provides a more graphic example of emergence in the slime molds that suddenly appear out in the woods. Under certain favorable conditions thousands of autonomous cells spontaneously come together and form a new, more complex autonomous organism - a goopy vomit-like blob, which emerges, changes shape and moves. However, when conditions change, the organism disaggregates into individual cells and seems to vanish. Emergence is also observed in insect colonies when thousands of chirping cricket and flashing fireflies suddenly start chirping or flashing in unison - just as human concert audiences sometimes start clapping in unison, without any leader intervening; it is observed in the development of the infant human brain, where billions of brain-circuits spontaneously grow out of a few cells and connect into complex networks; we see it in the history of the world's cities where people of many trades came spontaneously together, each pursuing his/her own interests, and 'accidentally' produced what we call civilization. Order and complexity thus emerge out of chaos, based on connectivity between large numbers of free agents following their own paths. However, for this complexity to emerge, there must be a critical mass of individuals. 'Many is different' is the rule in Chaos-Complexity-Emergence theory. The other critical condition is freedom to communicate and interact 'horizontally' free of distortions imposed by a one-way organizing power, for example state and corporate mass media. A corollary of complexity theory is that free of such interference, tiny events may trigger huge changes, like the proverbial beat of a butterfly in China provoking a hurricane in Bermuda. Such is the nature of epidemics, fads, and religions, which grow exponentially once they reach the 'tipping point.' Utopia may turn out to be such an 'idea virus,' spreading through the Web and provoking the emergence of planetary consciousness. In any case, the recognition of emergence as a powerful natural phenomenon makes it scientifically plausible to imagine a world-wide movement of multitudes of ordinary working people rising up to save the planet. The new factor that makes the age-old dream of humanity rising actual in the 21st Century is connectivity. There are on an average only six degrees of separation between each of the six billion humans on the planet. That means that you probably know someone, who knows someone else, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone who knows me - or even more unlikely, who knows a certain poor peasant in China. These are weak connections, of course, but another of the paradoxes of Emergence is that weak connections are the fabric that makes up the strength of complex structures like the Internet and the human brain. Connecting up the cells of collective brain of humanity is precisely what is needed to save the world from the pseudo-rational liberalism that is consuming it like a cancer. The Internet provides the connectivity for the Emergence of what I call 'Planetary Consciousness' - the fulcrum of the modern Archimedes Hypothesis. And although the phrase 'the collective brain of humanity' sounds mystical, recent experiments and research have confirmed what Wall Street Journal writer James Suroweicki calls 'The Wisdom of Crowds.' (Subtitle: 'Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations.') It turns out experimentally that the judgment of large numbers of randomly chosen people is often strikingly superior to that of the experts. What is the explanation? The diversity and impartiality of opinions in a freely associated group or random mass apparently combine in positive ways to create this collective intelligence. But it only works when people are free of the kind of hierarchical constraints that produce 'group-think' in committees. This can be seen as the wired version of the 'wisdom in the heads of many' we old socialists used to talk about. In any case, there is nothing impractical or unscientific in the romantic image of the collective brain of humanity connecting up its myriad nodes through cyberspace, or of humanity acting with collective wisdom and the strength of billions to take charge of our poor world. 'Only connect!' as they say. But to stay connected, people around the world will need a purpose, a common vision around which to unite, a 'fulcrum of planetary consciousness' on which to ground the force of billions. 11. The Fulcrum of Planetary Consciousness Planetary consciousness is still in its infancy. Only relatively recently have the earth's human inhabitants become aware of lands and continents beyond their own village or country; only in the 19th Century did humans discover they belong to a recently evolved animal species sharing the planet with other species; only recently has history been conceived as peoples' history - rather than as the official chronicle of dynasties, wars, kings, emperors and popes acting out God's will; only since the two World Wars have we begun to think of history as world history or as planetary history (including geology, ecology and the evolution of species). Indeed, only in the past half-century - since Hiroshima and Nagasaki - has it become evident that our survival as a species is threatened by our own ingenuity in inventing machines of unprecedented power and destructiveness. Since the annihilation of the two Japanese cities - followed by sixty years of nuclear proliferation and stockpiling - awareness of humanity's mortality has slowly been imposing itself on all but the simple, the selfish and the self-deluded. Likewise, awareness of the slower, yet deadly destruction of the natural world, ruthlessly ravaged for corporate profit, is becoming universal. Such awareness is the first stage of planetary consciousness: stepping out of denial and acknowledging the possibility - increasingly probable - of the destruction of life on earth. We now understand we live on a planet where life has evolved from viruses through plants and animals down to our own species of intelligent toiling monkeys who, too smart for our own good, have monkeyed around with the atomic structure of matter-energy and unleashed powers we are unable, within capitalist society, to control. The planet that emerged out of the first Big Bang it is now heading for another Big Bang if we don't take control of our technology, that is to say if we fail to connect up our collective brain before engaging gears! The material prospect of universal Death forces us to consider Life - Life on this planet - as a new universal. For no other reason than that all other ideas would be unthinkable without it. The second stage of planetary consciousness is making the unavoidable existential choice between irreconcilable absolutes: People and Profits. Nature and Money. Life and Death. The third stage consists in realizing we need a positive revolution in human relations, a new society based on solidarity and cooperation rather than greed and oppression. This planetary consciousness speaks in the new voices now being heard around the planet. Thousands, perhaps millions of people have begun proclaiming in chorus: 'Another world is possible!' 'The Earth is not a Commodity' to be bought and sold for money. By organizing and resisting corporate globalization, by educating themselves and others, these global justice movements are helping to save the planet on a practical level by fighting pollution, forest-destruction, privatization of social and natural resources. In the meantime, these alter-mundialistas - like all of us - are searching for alternatives, for a planetary vision of a possible better world, for an idea capable of drawing together billions and focusing their power. In other words, for Utopia. 12. Conclusion In conclusion, the Archimedes Hypothesis poses a theoretical model for visualizing the material-historical possibility of a planetary revolution in our age of globalized corporate capitalism and planetary connectivity. The power of solidarity has proven itself capable of overcoming tyranny again and again, wherever people have united. The consciousness that a positive revolution is necessary if the planet is not to be destroyed is more and more widespread. Today's revolutionary Internet technology at last provides a space for people around the planet to connect and take positive action on a global scale. Scarcity is no longer an issue. Modern technology produces such an abundance of food and material goods that overproduction undermines market stability. Inequality, not scarcity, is the cause of want. Utopia may thus be a realistic possibility - however remote it may seem at the moment. At the very least, the Archimedes Hypothesis permits us to imagine realistic science fiction scenarios about successful Mutinies on Starship Earth. It gives us the theoretical right to dream. And if one or more of these scenarios is compelling enough to fire the imagination of people around the world, who knows what may result from small beginnings when the idea-virus of Utopia reaches the tipping-point and becomes epidemic? That, at least, is our Utopian bet. Between nothing to lose but the dismal spectacle of a dying world against a chance to save the beautiful planet we live on. In any case, it's a bet we can't refuse. In the 18th Century - the age of scientific and political revolutions - radical writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Thomas Paine and the Encyclopedists boldly proclaimed, 'The pen is mightier than the sword.' History proved them right. Feudalism was overthrown. Today in the 21st Century - the age of connectivity and retrogression - the Archimedes Hypothesis entitles us to state a claim of our own: 'The electronic keyboard is mightier than the nuclear missile!' All Power to the Imagination! Longtime socialist Richard Greeman is best known for his translations of Victor Serge. His Beware of Vegetarian Sharks: Radical Rants and Internationalist Essays (Illustrated) is available on line at www.lulu.com/content/923573. He can be contacted at: rgreeman@gmail.com
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