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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... "
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