Opening the Cave is a website exploring and evaluating, revolutionary-socialist and environmental ideas and social movements of change.
Socialism is always about democracy – that is, each human is valued, and each of us has the right to the good life. That is why socialism is about a classless society, free of oppression, exploitation and war. In our contemporary era, this is also about the environmental crisis that is engulfing our planet, threatening along with the greed of capitalism, to plunge humanity into a dark age of barbarism and perhaps wipe-out the human race and much of existing life on the planet entirely.
Revolutionary-socialism, principally the ideas of Marxism, has historically analysed the nature of capitalism and worked to build powerful mass movements of workers to bring about change.
Much of what was tried in the past, either failed, was distorted and corrupted, or else the power of existing capitalism crushed all attempts at change. We can learn from that past. But if we give up because revolutionary-socialism has not worked before, we merely confine humanity to its fate under capitalism. For as Rosa Luxemburg is often cited as saying from the early 20th century, that before us is literally the prospect of either “Socialism or Barbarism”. In the third decade of the 21st century, it is now either socialism or extinction.