We All Seize Our Future Together

Contribution from a New Reader 4/11/2025

RNT Collective Presents this article because of its importance. We hope that you find it thought provoking and encourages a dialogue. Please Join Us and present your Voice as an Contributor ! email RNT Collective Here: revnewstoday@gmail.com

There have been times for delay and compromise; now is the time to organize for all that humanity needs to survive. This will be very difficult to achieve, but we can.

People’s lives are under attack. Industrial workers, retail, farmers, teachers, tech, artists, government workers…you name it.

Take the Offensive, Organize!

We have to go beyond just defensive strategies, and take the offensive. We have to build for political power; the power to direct and coordinate human and material resources to the tasks of survival and dignity for all people and the planet. Many organizations and individuals are already fighting bravely, but our actions are mostly to defend against these attacks – and even where we’re on offense, our efforts are still scattered. We need unity, and unity is built around the practical needs we all face.

Essence of Fascism

Trump, Musk and their cronies are declaring “we will make your public property, and your personal property, our private property to profit from.” This is the essence of fascism; an aggressive campaign to bring everything under corporate control for oligarch profits, and a corporate dictatorship. Fascism can’t be fought defensively, or from the middle; it has to be attacked, from an opposite pole.

Project 2025 is the open declaration of the fascist program of the capitalist class. The Democratic Party is in disarray. Government by either party consistently fails to protect humanity against corporate crimes, and consistently defends corporate rights to commit crimes against people and planet.

Tasks Ahead, What can be the pole opposing this?

When you think about the tasks facing us if humanity is to survive and thrive, their vastness and complexity, is it possible to imagine that we can accomplish them with the materials and processes of the planet owned by private companies and billionaires?

Capitalism is killing us, and destroying the planet. We need huge change. We will need to make their private property our public property. To do that, we need to create a new kind of political power, and a new kind of political party that represents the needs of humanity and the planet, not corporations and the rich. The foundation for that isn’t candidates or slogans; it’s a comprehensive program stating all of our necessities.

Program of the People of the World

The next step needed is the development and open statement of the full program of the people of the world – the global working class, the 99.5%. Not simply a list of necessities or demands, but an in-depth, programmatic discussion of how the tasks for survival will be organized, resourced, integrated, and carried out, how an economy based on people and planet can replace the failing capitalist, “I’m rich, make me richer” economy, and how the political unity and political power needed for those tasks will be achieved. Our needs will unite us. People are already starting to do this on any scale they can. This paper is an attempt to accelerate that discussion.

What are the practical needs of humanity? They are not incremental, not partial, and not narrow. They can’t be siloed, they’re interdependent and interconnected. They are concrete, specific, strategic, and they are physical, political, economic, environmental, social, emotional and spiritual. They are transformational. They are all essential. These are our demands. They require a new kind of politics.

While a list is not a program, spelling them out comprehensively is a crucial step now that can unleash the motion toward a revolutionary party of our class. Seeing all our needs in one place makes crystal clear that capitalism is incapable of the solution.

Working Class Party

Let any proto-party formation take up that challenge, and say; “This is what we need, this is what we will have; this is what our candidates will stand for, this is what we will do. We’re calling the first of an ongoing series of interdisciplinary conferences to begin strategizing how we will do this; we will identify the issues and forces that block the necessary changes, and how we intend to overcome those blocks. In doing this, we will lay the foundation of a new way of governance.”

PRINCIPLES central to accomplishing our tasks for survival (THIS IS A SUMMARY; see Appendix 2)

1. An absolute guarantee for all people of equal, universal access to all resources as a human right regardless of ability to pay. This includes natural, technological and social resources, food, shelter, medical care, education and culture. De-commodify all basic needs; housing, food, water and air; transportation; all modalities of health care; education to highest desired level at any age. This guarantee abolishes the market and exchange value as the means of distribution.
2. Full, transparent, and sustained democracy and equal government support for all peoples, nationalities, languages, cultures and religious beliefs.
3. Governance decentralized as much as possible, and centralized as much as necessary for effectiveness. Another way of saying it; governance organized at the lowest level possible, and the highest level necessary. We hold government accountable to build a healthy society, not corporations.
4. True democratic government is responsible to develop, support and sustain all forms of human productive democratic collaboration, labor, and the reproduction of labor and society. Democratic governance doesn’t “do things for us”, it’s not welfare; it is us, organized to govern, and it facilitates us organizing our activities on the large scale needed.
5. Organize popular sovereignty at every level: build a structure that runs from the block, to the neighborhood, to the district, to city, region, state, and national bodies. Each level has authority to determine how their local community will operate based on local conditions, and each feeding up to the next level of organization, with total transparency and community access.
6. Guarantee to all indigenous peoples full sovereignty and open the discussion of what it means to guarantee tribes control of ancestral lands
7. Reparations for all, to make everyone whole, whatever it takes in each case, in all forms (material, emotional, spiritual) and all modes of trauma healing, of everything that corporations and billionaires have stolen from the working class.
8. Abolish the punishment/warehousing system known as the Prison Industrial Complex. Put the power to prevent and remedy anti-social behavior in the hands of every local community
9. Arrest global climate/pollution/extinction catastrophe and halt the rapidly-advancing Sixth Extinction; cut global energy usage 33%-50% by dismantling the war machine and ending activities only necessary for capitalism: creating, controlling, fighting over, and hoarding wealth.
10. Every person on earth able must be able to live and move about freely without fear of attack or harm.
11. Guarantee to all sexes, sexualities, and genders full sovereignty over their bodies and their lives.
12. Re-orient and rethink manufacturing and transportation completely using integrative, sustainable, regenerative, creative planning. Apply automation to free up human labor rather than enslaving it.
13. End Private Ownership of Social and Natural materials and processes.

l. Implement true equality in society: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

APPENDICES:

THE PATH TO POWER AND THE USE OF POWER

The path to political power can be divided into two general categories;

1. Building toward political power; political power is the ability to plan, organize, allocate, and set in motion the materials, labor, and processes – human and natural – to attain the goals of the society, i.e., to ensure the basic needs of survival and the flourishing of all humans and the natural world. This goes far beyond simply defensive basic needs, like “don’t sweep my tent camp” or “don’t close the only hospital in my town.” Capital until now has had the political power to attain its goals, at the expense of humanity and the natural world. Real political power is the ability to solve our problems without blocking, backsliding, or sabotage by corporate power.

The battle for political power begins in earnest when groupings of the class join forces to batter the capitalist state in an organized manner, using electoral, legal, direct action, and parallel-governance attacks, with strategic intent to build a revolutionary class political force; a revolutionary class party.

Many of the necessary tactics are already being employed, but in fragmented ways and without the coordinated, strategic intention of preparing for governance by the people – the 99.5%.

A few examples of possible tactical maneuvers to attack the fascist state: things like these would be features of a coordinated legal/electoral/street heat/parallel-governance campaign to inflict ongoing damage to weaken the corporate regime; corporate crime against our communities is real, and much of it is legal. Thus, campaigns are broader than just legal, or just electoral.
- The California state government has the legal power, and the evidence, to seize the assets of PG&E and make it a public utility on the basis of its felony convictions for the fires and deaths it has caused.
- There is enough evidence to convict a broad network of financial, real estate investment, and developer corporations of colluding to drive prices up and unlawfully evict renters and homeowners from their homes through foreclosures. Government can then seize corporate properties as criminal asset forfeiture. Banks also launder huge amounts of illegal drug money into real estate investment.
- There is enough evidence to convict both nonprofit and for-profit hospital and medical care corporations, as well as pharmaceutical corporations, of conspiring to raise healthcare costs for all people, deny healthcare services, and introduce dangerous drugs into the community, for government to seize their assets as public property under criminal forfeiture.
- There is enough evidence to convict insurance companies and seize their assets under criminal forfeiture of assets, for conspiring to deny insurance to homeowners and raise insurance prices.
- Conditions exist today, that make it legal for cities, counties and states to declare emergencies in addictive drugs, homelessness, hunger and healthcare, and to invoke eminent domain to seize corporate assets and properties to ensure the public welfare and safety.
- The Federal government is literally breaking both United States and international laws by supplying arms to regimes committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as carrying out such crimes itself in the name of defending freedom and democracy.

Pursuing this agenda requires organizing interdisciplinary strategy conferences to develop the legal, electoral, and mass action infrastructures which must be combined to carry these out, and to attack the fascist power with “death by a thousand cuts”, also known as battering the capitalist superstructure. These conferences should be designed as governance-preparation conferences, toward building a programmatic class party platform.

There are already examples of this. The United States has a history of political parties engaging each section of a city, to draft and develop the specific programs that they require. The last time this strategy was tried was in Jackson, MS with the successful Chokwe Lumumba campaign for Mayor in 2012. Lumumba died while in office. His son by the same name became Mayor from 2017 to the present.

Upon and after seizure of power; What are the concrete actions of a revolutionary class party when it achieves the political power to set and enact policy? How are these developed, and how pursued, on local, regional, national and global levels? How will attempts at counter-revolution be suppressed?

This category constitutes a vast web of activities, coordinated at local, regional, national and global levels, on the basis of available and achievable resources and prioritization of necessities. The conferences initiated in the power-building phase must continue to develop, and constitute the foundation of a new, transparent, democratic mode of governance that will dismantle private property, hetero-patriarchy, and the metabolic rift. Possible methods of taking over corporate property and making it public are addressed in the next section.

HERE’S WHAT WE NEED TO DO TO SURVIVE

Reminder; a list is not a program. The task is to explore HOW we can accomplish all of this; what resources are needed, human and otherwise? How does that change if market forces don’t have to be considered? How can we creatively utilize our resources? How do tasks differ, how are they the same and how interlinked, and how can we create positive feedback loops between areas and categories of repair?

The Social, Political, and Spiritual;

Total commitment to building equality and unity; an economy that de-commodifies all basic needs.
1. Guarantee for all people equal, universal access to all resources as a human right regardless of ability to pay; food, water, housing, education, healthcare, transport, and work (the right to contribute one’s abilities to society). In other words, full inclusion in society and dismantling of white supremacy (the doctrine used to control our working class, both Blacks and Whites) and hetero-patriarchy, a fundamental feature of the epoch of private property.
2. Guarantee to all indigenous peoples full sovereignty and open the discussion of what it means to guarantee tribes control of ancestral lands, based on the principle of full, transparent, and sustained democracy and equal government support for all peoples, nationalities, languages, cultures and religions.
3. Guarantee to all sexes, sexualities, and genders full sovereignty over their bodies and their lives.

Governance decentralized as much as possible, and centralized as much as necessary for effectiveness. Another way of saying it; governance organized at the lowest level possible, and the highest level necessary. Governance is to serve the needs of people and planet, not itself.

1. Discuss models of governance structure for full democracy; block, neighborhood, district, city, region, state, national bodies. Councils of industrial, utility, transportation, farming, fishing, visual and performing arts, childcare, education workers. Each with authority to determine how their local community will operate based on local conditions, and each feeding up to the next level of organization, with total transparency and community access.
2. Fundamentally alter the nature of work from working for a capitalist, in the capitalist’s interest, to working with each other, in the public interest, with equal voice in decision making. Change the concept of work from “what job can I get to survive?”, to “how can I best contribute my abilities to the community?”
3. Capitalism is not capable of utilizing the brilliance of each human being. A new beginning might look like; 100% employment, equivalent to about 20 hours a week for all, acknowledging the arts, sports, housework, elder care and child-rearing as valued, necessary work in which all humans participate.
4. Promote a massive effort and engagement to guarantee resources to communities that have endured decades, centuries of intentional scarcity. A first step in true reparations and healing of deep wounds.
5. De-commodify housing to make a home an actual, inviolable human right; everyone owns a home debt-free, cannot be evicted from it for any reason, and can freely trade homes with another, but homes are not commodities for profit. Homes are shelters for human beings.
6. De-commodify all basic needs; housing, food, water and air; transportation; all modalities of health care; education to highest desired level at any age.

Reparations for all: Reparations has a particular meaning in the United States; to African-Americans due to the history of slavery and post-slavery oppression, murder and traumatization of Black people, and also to indigenous peoples of the United States and its colonial territories for outright genocide. True reparations must be much broader. Identity politics and the corporate state narrow it down to a one-time cash payment to a rigidly restricted grouping, which limits it beyond any recognition of the real meaning of reparations for the horrifying damage done over four centuries.

Reparations means “to repair the damage, to make whole”. This goes far beyond a pitiful one-time payment; it means guaranteeing people full access to all resources needed for healthy, dignified life equally with all other people, and addressing the deep damage done over centuries of mistreatment and terror. It means healing millions who have been deeply traumatized, wounded, and scarred.

This is the path to true equality, an equality that recognizes both the unique and the shared qualities of all humans. Everyone who must work to live has been harmed by capitalist exploitation for private profit and/or the political oppression that systematically reduces their human rights. Abolishing capitalism means reparations for all, appropriate to the historic theft. Reparations for all cannot be achieved unless we begin with addressing the massacre and marginalization of Native Americans, the vile history of slavery and Jim Crow, and beyond that the second class citizenship of women, LGBTIQ+ folks and all marginalized groups.

The disastrous reach of capitalist colonization requires a global effort to liberate and heal the peoples of the world utilizing multiple modalities, including Restorative Justice, Atonement like veterans did at Standing Rock, Truth & Reconciliation Commissions; community, family, and individual therapies using multiple modalities, and asking the question “what is needed to make these people or this person whole?” Justice and healing must flow down like water.

Abolish the punishment/warehousing system known as the Prison Industrial Complex. The PIC is a tool of social control in a society that constantly places human beings in crisis, and at each other’s throats. The extractive corporate economy drives communities into crisis. Put the power to prevent and remedy anti-social behavior in the hands of every local community, in the context of full equal access to basic human needs for all people and all communities, reparations and healing for all, and mutual, compassionate accountability between individual and community.
Re-orient global definitions and boundaries from national-political definitions and boundaries, to emphasize bio-regional governance and other genuine use-values.
Every person on earth must be able to live and move about freely without fear of attack or harm.

The Physical;

Arrest global climate/pollution/extinction catastrophe in the oceans, in the air, on land; end the extractivist economy. Survival requires a globally collaborative, full-engagement campaign to save ourselves and the planet. There must be no resistance, no backsliding, no diverting from this; the only resistance and backsliding comes from capitalism and capitalists.
1. Convert 100% from massive monoculture , fossil-fuel-fertilized & pesticided, factory farming-for-profit, to sustainable, regenerative agriculture as a vocation for healthy farm families and communities. Sustainable farming is more productive, per-acre; it also requires more people to do it well.
2. Phase out coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear power as rapidly as physically possible.
3. Decentralize power systems and grids, and move as rapidly as possible to electrification and solar/wind/tidal generation while minimizing their effects on other species.
4. Conduct massive tree planting, rain forest restoration and desert reclamation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNRyvhapKGo
5. Eliminate or redirect energy use that is only necessary for private property & profit.

At least 1/3 of global energy use is only necessary to control money and power. The ruling class can only talk about “new, clean sources of energy” to continue the extractive, war-based economy. We must slash energy use, but there’s no need to suffer for it.

1. 1. Dismantle the global war/surveillance/police/prisons machine; the largest single user of energy and fossil fuels in the world, as well as the worst polluters. The US military faithfully serves corporate power globally, destroying lives and communities worldwide while destroying the planet.
    1. Collaborate globally to verifiably locate and dismantle all nuclear weapons stocks, and cease manufacturing them.
    2. Collaborate globally to verifiably cease weapons & ammunition manufacture.
    3. Bring all troops home, close all bases in other sovereign nations and territories
    4. Clean up pollution and toxics at all bases everywhere before closing and leaving.
  2. Eliminate cryptocurrencies, which use massive amounts of energy.
  3. Curtail AI development, which uses 10x normal computing energy, until its value to humanity can be rationally determined.
  4. eliminate activities only necessary for capitalism; global speculative finance system (stock markets, hedge funds, etc.); marketing; packaging; anti-theft industries and others.
2. Halt the rapidly-advancing Sixth Extinction;
  1. Halt global ocean fish extinction by ending industrial overfishing, ocean heating, and pollution.
  2. Eliminate coastal and oceanic dead zones caused by toxic farm and CAFO runoff. Balance fishing to maintain predatory hierarchies in the food chain, end factory farming with its toxic runoff; Stop depositing toxics and heavy metals into oceans from all sources including plastics and fossil fuel emissions, begin getting them out of food chains that lead to the cancer epidemic.
  3. Re-establish wild spaces and networks of corridors for wildness in every region, to restore wildlife food chains and habitat as an essential foundation for domesticated civilization.
3. Remove plastics and other materials to clear Pacific and Atlantic garbage patches . Idea: send the Navies out into the mid-ocean gyres as full-family communities on Navy ships, to filter trash, toxics, and plastics out of the oceans.
4. Begin removing micro-plastics from the global food chain – this demands a revolution in the fashion industry; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB3kuuBPVys
5. Re-orient our understanding of technology to mean the totality of human understanding of the universal world and how we use that knowledge, whether ancestral or the very newest discovery.
Re-orient and rethink manufacturing and transportation completely using integrative, regenerative, creative planning;
1. Move away from production and transportation based on exchange-value-based market priorities such as cheap labor, extractivist sourcing of materials, inter-nation competition.
2. Implement local/regional sourcing, basing decisions on use-values (values for real needs, as opposed to exchange-values which are commodity/market values); bio-regional needs, what’s good for people and the planet. This will vastly reduce long-distance transport.
3. Reorganize based on earth-regenerative priorities, including communities organized to have most needs within walking distance and community sharing of resources, such as tool lending libraries and vehicle lending libraries, rather than mass purchasing.
4. Stop making cheap, planned-obsolescence consumer junk for markets created by marketing; manufacture for long life, upgradability, repairability, reusability, recyclability.
5. Expand and electrify rail for cargo and travel.
6. Convert the greatly reduced number of remaining cargo ships to sail/solar, with emergency diesel motor backup.

There is no way the changes listed above can be accomplished while global resources are privately owned, by corporations or individual capitalists/oligarchs.

Democratization and decommodification of all sizes and types of businesses is a significant discussion. While it’s obvious that a Google or a Chevron should be taken over and redeveloped under public stewardship and control, the question is – how. Taking corporations public is fundamentally a political process, not a mechanical task; employees must be won over to the task on a large scale, and assured that their work, and theirs and their family’s security will be supported throughout a difficult transformation. The initial change is simply who controls the process and conditions of production. Then, in an ongoing discussion defined by democracy and transparency we together will adjust it so that everyone’s needs are met as described in the principles above.

Fears must be allayed by openness and a collaborative, trust-building process. Upper management and owners must be disempowered in order to facilitate new, different structures; the intent is not to punish or harm, but to end unhealthy relationships and build healing ones. Very small businesses, on the other hand, employing a few dozen people, probably require a different approach, often inclusive of owners and managers, and de-commodification will be a tremendous relief to very small businesses, now under tremendous pressures and often failing in the current economic climate.

Companies that do not voluntarily become public will be brought into the public realm by the most peaceful means possible, but by any means necessary;
- Use criminal asset forfeiture laws to seize all property of any corporation convicted of crimes against society, such as PG&E’s conviction on 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the 2018 destruction and murder of Paradise, CA and its people, or all major banks laundering massive amounts of cartel drug money into real estate investment.
- Use Eminent Domain laws to seize corporate assets including buildings, machinery, finances, computer systems and records where it can be shown that private ownership of said assets constitutes a hazard to society at whatever level is appropriate.
- Establish parallel systems with full government support, to compete against private corporate systems; capitalists regularly complain they can’t compete with Chinese government-supported companies. If they can’t compete and can’t profit, offer to take the problem “off their hands”.
Companies which voluntarily agree to become publicly owned and hand over all assets, records and resources to a governance body, are allowed to keep all employees including all levels of management on condition that the existing power structures are dismantled; operations, management and computer access is turned over to a democratic process inclusive of entire staff, local community and all regions affected by the scope of the business whether local, national or global.