SOS 2.0
the Long Game Revisited
The goals of SOS are laid out in the articles enumerated in our petition, which appears on the homepage of our first website ( https://sosplanetearth.net/ ) The means by which we seek to attain those goals are outlined on the page https://sosplanetearth.net/long_game .
The events triggered by the terrorist attack on Israel of the 7th of October of last year have caused such a rapid development of the global strategic situation that we have been compelled to update our analysis.
As we argue in ‘the Long Game’, the chaotic conditions arising from the collapse of the present Western dominated (so-called) ‘rules based’ order, in which the only ‘rule’ is that of the wealthy and powerful minority, has necessitated the creation of a global system of democratic governance.
The outline of that system already exists in the United Nations; an organization ironically created by the very countries that are determined to prevent the creation of an enforceable adherence to international law.
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Before we proceed to a discussion of the current revisions to our original plan, we need to go into more detail as to our organizational structure.
We do not aspire to become a mass-based organization.
In the era of the dictatorship of Monopoly Capitalism, the demands of an endlessly growing ‘bottom line’ and of heavy industrial production, required the labour and constant consumption of material goods of billions of working-class people.
As workers and consumers, we implicitly accepted the notion that only massive organizations could effect social change. As westerners schooled in the specious notions of liberal democratic Majoritarianism, we were taught that history only moved forward once 51% of a given population agreed that it should (while simultaneously believing the opposite notion that a ruling elite decided that it should.) As in the age of the dinosaur, Big was beautiful; and we tiny mammals existed only to be trodden upon.
Came the asteroid. And we tiny mammals inherited the Earth.
Such is the Revolutionary Moment. Such is the moment in which we live. Such was the moment in which tiny cells of Russian revolutionaries brought down a massive empire which seemed destined to live forever.
Bolshevism has come and gone; but not without showing us the power of organizations built on the principle of the cell. Our current situation has the added advantage of not imposing an ideological ‘litmus test.’
We're nobody. And we’re everywhere!
Ultimately mass movements arise. They are vital to changes like the ones demanded by our times. They already exist. We link to them at our website SOS2.0 (sos2point0.org/hotLinx ) We see our role as helping to build them, and to promote their principles, while urging them to contribute to the work of reforming and building the organs of the United Nations.
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When our organization began, we envisaged a movement explicitly focused on the Climate Catastrophe. Then the genocidal assault on Palestine captured the attention of the world: and rightly so!
Our conception of Climate Catastrophe is the broadest possible. In this context, it should be noted that no human activity is so destructive of the environment as war.
The greatest organizational contributor to CO2 pollution is the military of the United States. Meanwhile, the IDF’s effect on the environment, not simply on Gaza but on the entire eastern littoral of the Mediterranean, will take decades to be adequately measured; but given its use of munitions like depleted uranium alone, it’s certain to be devastating.
Perhaps it will be possible to continue large-scale intra-species conflict in the future, if we either design solar powered heavy weapons, or return to the use of cold steel and chariots. Until such time, we simply cannot continue to fight civil or international wars.
Turning to our first revision of ‘the Long Game’:
We assumed that the building of an international resistance to the depredations of the modern nation-state would be the work of at least a decade; but the sudden, totally unexpected, birth of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine has allowed us to leap-frog the first stage of our projected timeline.
We had conceived of the campaign to restructure the United Nations as a ‘ground up’ effort. Instead, the attention of the world has been focused on the crucial role of the International Court of Justice as the ultimate arbiter of international law.
The supremacy of right over might has been tacitly acknowledged, as even that unparalleled scofflaw Israel has been compelled to defend itself, not only in the world’s highest court of law, but beyond that, in the court of global civil opinion.
Finally, we had hoped that the struggle to bring the full weight of Civil Society to bear on the dangers before us would be preceded by the building of autonomous communities capable of taking the initiative in building viable alternatives to Monopoly Capitalism. In this, we feel that the time isn’t yet right. Rather, such a development will probably not occur before the complete collapse of the current social order; but we remain confident that such a development will occur of necessity once we become clear that the alternative is starvation.
In short, though the mountain remains dizzyingly high, we’ve reached our first basecamp much faster than we could have imagined when ‘the Long Game’ was first published.
Such, we repeat, is the nature of the Revolutionary Moment!
