To win the planetary endgame, we’ll have to rethink communications, finance, the corporation, economics, governance and aesthetics.

But none of that will happen without rethinking activism as well.

The tone of what we do must change. This is a huge historical moment and we absolutely have to meet it with urgency. Not just the same Lefty talking points. Not sanctimonious essays. We’ve gotta stop even reading that stuff. (Most of it is written by armchair intellectuals who never put their own asses on the line.) We need to sniff the wind, feel the jeopardy, and write from the heart.

And we need to pick up the pace. Waiting till we’re mad enough about something to organize a one-off protest: that won’t cut it anymore. To really change things we’ll have to generate a constant drumbeat of revolutionary fervor that keeps growing louder and louder week after week.

Used to be activism was all about numbers. The bigger the mob marching through the streets, shouting slogans and waving signs, the better. That kind of collective energy is still part of answer. But we also need people moving in small packs and even striking out alone. Lone-wolf activism.

And we’ll have to reconsider our attachment to pacifism. And put monkey wrenching in a different moral category. It may be time, as Andreas Malm and others have suggested, to destroy the machines that actually produce the carbon that is killing us.

Changing the world is about us the people breaking out of our funks, our fears our anxieties. It’s about rejuvenating our revolutionary spirit.

It’s about millions of us in cities everywhere responding to our conscience, screwing up our courage and pulling off striking, meaningful, personal acts of civil disobedience Friday after Friday after Friday.

To win the endgame, we have to get world leaders to listen and act on our demands. We have to threaten to bring this capitalist doomsday machine of theirs to a sudden, shuddering halt if they don’t.

— from The Third Force — A Politics Beyond Left and Right