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Capitalist Catastrophism https://roarmag.org/magazine/capitalist-catastrophism/ by Kai Heron ROAR magazine, Issue #10, June 17, 2020 "First, we need to return to the problem of transition. If horizontalism failed with the Arab Spring and Occupy Movements and infiltrating bourgeois parties and municipalities failed between 2015 and 2020, then our collective task under capitalist catastrophism is to use our new found powers of imagination to support the difficult and patient work of building organizational and political forms, theories and movements to propel our struggles forward. "Though it is impossible to go into detail on the subject here, I am convinced that this requires the return of the revolutionary party. For all their flaws the movements around Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn and Sanders made a great advance on the so-called movements of the squares <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2439359> by demonstrating that the party-form is uniquely capable of cohering and furthering the interests of the working class. It was the party — albeit of a bourgeois kind — that opened the space for an affirmative, rather than a strictly negative, critique of capitalism to develop — the most notable example of which is perhaps the Green New Deal. "Yet as we now know these movements ran into trouble because they tried to do the impossible: to turn a bourgeois party machine into a party of the working class. Our task today, then, is to strip the party *form *of its reformist *content*, to build autonomous, *revolutionary*, working class parties. Such parties would refuse to participate in bourgeois electoral politics and would instead focus on building the kinds of movements, institutions, cultures and practices that can make a real difference to our lives within capitalism while pointing the way beyond it. "By unifying the left, by serving to bolster and consolidate the gains of the kinds of spontaneous uprisings that we have seen across the world in response to George Floyd’s murder, this kind of party can serve as an agent of revolutionary transition. "Second, we must forge what Samir Amin calls “the possible, but difficult, conjunction of the struggles of the people in the south with those in the north.” Today’s crises are planetary in scale and demand a planetary response... " _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com