5 theses that ought to guide all of our thinking about social change, it seems to me, are:

1) The mode of production based on wage labor has made it possible to feed, clothe, and house 8 billion people, vastly increasing the carrying capacity of the earth and breaking…

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out of the Malthussian trap of earlier modes of production.

2) This mode of production has also concentrated heretofore undreamt of wealth and political-military power in the hands of a tiny minority.

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3) This same mode of production has driven a process of scientific and technological development that has made at least one fourth and maybe half of the population of the earth superfluous from the standpoint of wealth production. This massive, “economically expendable”…

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population is concentrated especially in the global south, but found in pockets everywhere. We can feed 8 billion, but we can only employ 4-6 billion in profitable forms of production, a number that will likely continue to decrease sharply.

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4) Development has also upset the homeostatic regulation of the earth’s climate, unleashing a spiraling dynamic of climactic change that is already driving and will increasingly drive this economically expendable population into precarious migrations of immense scale.

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5) The goal of radical social change, I propose, is to avoid the mass slaughter that the current world, as captured in these first 4 theses, seems to be building towards. 

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