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I keep hearing people say at Occupations, “We shouldn’t address that until we fix the electoral process;” “We can do” or “We can debate that after we win.” This is not a new argument.  Women and People-of-Color have been told this by every radical movement in the US, and every time it was wrong. Now is no exception.

In the 60′s the argument went this way: “Racism and sexism cannot be eliminated until AFTER the revolution, so discussing them BEFORE the revolution is divisive.” Because of this attitude, there is a lingering distrust of white activists who betrayed the civil rights struggle for their own interests, ending the Vietnam War. When the war ended, the youth who had been trained and inspired by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee went on with their lives and left Blacks to struggle against Reaganism alone. The result is schools are more segregated now than during official segregation.

The women organizers of the 60′s got sick of men using “after the revolution” as an excuse to avoid dealing with sexism within the movement, and left to form their own movement. What was discovered is women have their own contribution to make to the revolution, and that the personal is political. In other words, unless men are willing to challenge their own sexism, and white people their own unconscious racism, their isn’t going to be a revolution, and the Occupy movement has reached it’s peak and usefulness historically.

Yesterday, I got a tweet from Anonops saying to separate what has to be done to have “free” elections from what we can decide afterwards. Even if we excuse the historical mistake discussed above, these kind of comments show a lack of understanding of the enemy. The rule of the Plutocracy is a direct result of the representative government itself. Any attempt to “modify” the Plutocratic State will only result in the re-establishment of Plutocracy under another form. We have already reformed the system several times, and the corporations, being immortal, simply rewrite the law when people forget why they are there.

Only a radical democratic republic, with new Congresses for Workers, Women, Blacks/People of Color, LGBT, Youth and possibly more horizontal forms of organization, with the complete destruction of the state as we know it, can overthrow the Plutocracy.  Only a revolution which transcends democratic representation, grounded in the struggles against capitalism itself, which champions all the struggles of all the oppressed can end poverty, hunger, war, and all the horrors of Plutocratic rule. The general strike, on a continental scale or larger, is the only weapon capable of challenging international capital and should be the immediate goal of our struggle. From this we will learn the lessons necessary to reach the next step.

When the trans-national Corporations hold our planet hostage, and she has maybe 20 years to live; when the system requires 24,000 children to die each day to survive (and growing); this movement must be about international social revolution or it is nothing at all.

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