Jeremy Brecher

Common Preservation in Action

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  Human Survival Movement

Posted by Jamie Cantoni

Part 5 of Save the Humans? explored the possibility of a “human preservation movement” specifically targeted against the threats to human survival.[1]

 

By pursuing our own individual, group, and institutional self-preservation, we are creating the very dynamics that are threatening to destroy the world and its people. It is as if each of us, by pursuing our own self-interest, is led by an invisible hand to mutual destruction. Whether in the universal destruction of nuclear holocaust and climate change or in less universal but still catastrophic forms like conventional war, economic crisis, toxic pollution, resource depletion, and species extinction, we see the pursuit of self-interest leading to mutual self-annihilation.

 

Yet we have also seen new strategies of common preservation emerging to overcome mutual destruction at every level from the local to the global. In fact, since the beginning of the nuclear era we have been witnessing the emergence, albeit unnamed and without an explicit identity as such, of a movement for human preservation. What else are the anti-nuclear movement, the climate protection movement, and movements that challenge other threats to human survival?

 

The threat of mutual destruction gives everyone an interest in resisting mutual destruction. It creates a global common interest that includes, to varying degrees, all individuals, groups, institutions, and nations, as well as the world as a whole. That of course doesn’t abolish other, conflicting interests. But it does establish a new and overriding one. The problem for us as human individuals and groups is to act on those common interests to transform states, markets, corporations, and other powerful institutions so that they no longer threaten our survival and wellbeing.

 

The most likely way I can think of to accomplish that end is to create a global peoples movement to halt mutual destruction and lay the basis for human preservation. We need to impose what is necessary for human survival on corporations, nations, and the economic and nation-state systems of which they are part. And the only way I know to do that is to do it from below by means of self-organization and people power.

[1] Save the Humans?, 9.

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ABOUT JEREMY BRECHER

11You and I may not know each other, but I suspect there are some problems that we share -- problems like climate change, war, and injustice. For half a century I have been participating in and writing about social movements that address those problems. The purpose of this website is to share what I've learned. I hope it provides something of use to you in addressing our common problems.

For the record, I am the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements. I have written and/or produced more than twenty video documentaries. I have participated in movements for nuclear disarmament, civil rights, peace in Vietnam, international labor rights, global economic justice, accountability for war crimes, climate protection, and many others.

PROJECTS

Common Preservation

  Human Survival Movement

Climate Protection

  Climate and Labor

  Climate Insurgency

  Against Doom

  Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs

Labor History

  Strike!

  Common Sense for Hard Times

STRIKE! Commentaries on Solidarity and Survival

  • Protecting Workers and Communities–From Below | Part 1: On the Ground
  • New Foundations for the House of Labor?
  • Commentary: The Green New Deal – The Current State of Play
  • Commentary: The Green New Deal in the States – Part 2
  • Commentary: The Green New Deal in the States – Part 1
  • If the Courts Won’t Protect the Climate the People Must
  • The Inflation Reduction Act and the Labor-Climate Movement

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