Perhaps it is time after all to begin plotting a revolution. Governments formed by parties from across the political spectrum at all of the national, provincial and civic levels have utterly failed to address key serious problems that have been known for long enough to give them a good chance at it. These problems—disintegration of the life-sustaining environment and the depletion of life-dependent natural resources—require nothing so much as political leadership to address. But leadership has failed to materialize in our current system because political offices offer no chance to move on these problems.

Political power has been effectively hemmed in by a greater power in the business and investment communities. Corporate power is now so great political power pales by comparison, and whether political power is used to serve the public interest or not is irrelevant now, because corporate power has no mandate to serve the public interest. That’s why citizens in droves have lost interest in political power, a phenomenon most evident in declining turnouts on voting days.

That fact would not itself justify the tumult of a revolution to re-order the distribution of power. But combined with the facts of environmental disintegration and resource depletion, problems finding their headwaters in the same corporate boardrooms, it becomes clear why voting for change within the system will never change the established hierarchy of power outside the system. It doesn’t matter who you vote in as first mate on a ship if the captain remains the same.

And so revolution it must be, if the environment and resource problems are to be somehow addressed. Yet the idea is laughable, isn’t it. That’s because “revolution” is most strongly associated with its four biggest historical examples, none of which are very good examples. The French revolution dissolved into an orgy of elite-killing; the American revolution wasn’t a revolution at all so much as a revolt against an overbearing empire (the British government itself was never close to being overthrown); the Russian revolution went the full circle and returned to the same feudal system bent on preventing the rise of a middle class, as always; and the Chinese revolution didn’t so much overthrow a government system as form one where none really existed. But a deeper conceptual problem confronts any call for a revolution in Canada today. All four big revolutions and each of the smaller ones that have come in their wake around the world have had as their raison d’etre the promotion of democracy. This may or may not have been ultimately delivered and it may be interpreted and sold in a wide variety of ways, but so much do all revolutions seem predicated on delivering the water of democracy to the parched deserts of tyranny that it seems absurd on the face of it to suggest revolution where democracy already exists. However weak and riddled with holes it may be, when it comes to political power at least, we do have in Canada pretty well-functioning democracy, and so it would be hard to justify all the ruckus of a revolution only to incrementally adjust a few aspects of an already entrenched democracy.

The problem is, while political power may be acceptably democratic, it isn’t where real power lies anymore, and where real power lies, it isn’t at all democratic.

Furthermore, while it is often an educated elite who talk of democracy and tyranny and egg on a revolution, it is usually a badly-treated mass of humanity who give any revolution its juice. Here, however, despite some complaints around the edges, we’re a fairly well-paid and well-treated mass of humanity. There may be the homeless and harassed in the downtown eastside, but a revolution of the typical kind would require something more than half the country to be experiencing the conditions seen today in that one area of one city. We won’t have a revolution by some mass mobilization of oppressed humanity. Like the absence of political tyranny, lack of bread is not a problem here.

A revolution here would be unlike any other around the world and in history. It would not be about improving the lives of a people or democratically transforming their politics. It would be for no reasons of personal gain at all.

So why have a revolution if starving, tyrannized masses don’t exist? Because those holding power today are destroying the climate and wasting the last of resources and have proven themselves unresponsive to our pleas to change and are completely insulated from any push to change coming from any place of democratic political power. That’s a pretty good reason for revolution, isn’t it?

It is revealing how we have come to enjoy in Canada exactly the two things that in the past have always been the antidotes to revolution. We have at least a reasonable facsimile of democracy and we enjoy at least a moderate living standard. One could write a history in which we and others in Western nations were deliberately set up with the facades of democracy and prosperity precisely so we would not overthrow anybody in a revolution. It is after all the home of two of the world’s biggest revolutions where the middle class were first treated with democracy and general prosperity, in France and in the US. Certainly an advanced industrial economy requires workers to push more complicated levers in computers doing financial transactions and record keeping, for example, than those found in steel factories. More educated monkeys are needed in the labour pool, and more education inadvertently informs people of rights, histories, and the ways of power. That’s knowledge that leads to demands that can only be addressed with at least the façade of democracy and at least the trinkets of prosperity.

And so the whole notion of a revolution is laughable in Canada because we have what we sheepishly admit is pretty lame democracy and pretty vapid trinkets of prosperity—like new plasma screen TVs that pipe into our homes even more urgent exhortations to buy more trinkets. If revolution came legitimately and happily to Czechoslovakia in 1989 but is laughably impossible to imagine in Canada today, and the only real differences between the two is only a slight difference in prosperity and only a fairly narrow gap in real levels of democracy, then we may measure how cheap it costs to make us put off revolution. It isn’t much. Just a little bit more prosperity and a little bit more democracy than what existed in Czechoslovakia in 1988 would have made revolution laughable there too.

By the same token, however, if the differences in levels of democracy and prosperity between Czechoslovakia in 1989 and Canada today is enough to go from laughing at the notion of revolution to actively carrying one out to wide popular support, then if there were some other valid reason to plot a revolution besides levels of democracy and prosperity, it likely also wouldn’t take much of a difference to go from laughing at the notion to gaining wide popular support for revolution.

The destruction of our living environment and the headlong rush to depletion of our life-supporting natural resources are certainly good and valid reasons on which to build the case for revolution. These conditions are at least as worrisome and problematic as lack of sufficient democracy and prosperity ever were for revolutions in other places in the past.

So it isn’t the lack of a need for revolution that makes the notion so laughable. There is one more critical element that tips the scales in favour of wide popular support for revolution: there needs to be a widely-shared belief that a revolution stands a fair chance of addressing the problems. If the French, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese or the Czechoslovaks did not in general believe a revolution would address to some significant degree their problems of democracy and prosperity, then all talk of revolution there would also have ended in dismissal and laughter long before it got off the ground.

So the only real question about revolution in Canada is, might it stand a good chance of addressing environmental destruction and resource depletion? The answer to that question, just as it was to the question of democracy and prosperity elsewhere, is one of degree. No one proposing revolution in America or France or Russia or China promised that everyone would immediately be very rich and totally in control of all aspects of their lives. But we do have a baseline to measure from: we know for certain by now that if power were to remain located where it rests today, we can be absolutely sure our living environment will be largely destroyed and our natural life-supporting resources will be quickly used up. There are only minor quibbles about how long we have on both counts but there are no real doubts that our time is limited.

There may be no way to live on this planet forever, but any new system of power that promises only to extend our time may well be worth pursuing. After all, while we all know we are each fated to die eventually, if we’re faced with a disease, no one opposes the idea of radical surgery if it promises to keep us alive some significant amount of time longer. A revolution to be successful doesn’t have to promise to completely solve the questions of the environment and resources. It only needs to offer the chance of extending our time on the planet to a sufficiently long degree. That’s not too much to ask.

Popular opposition to revolution has in the past been found among those treated to just enough power and prosperity by the elites to think the status quo is better than revolution. The same situation exists for us today. Those who laugh at the notion of revolution in Canada are those treated to just enough power and prosperity to make them think the status quo is better than any radically different system of power.

Since the point of a revolution today would not be to raise power and prosperity but to change the trajectory of environmental destruction and resource depletion, the question of revolution is a bit more complex: it is now a question of whether people in general feel they are treated to just enough power and prosperity to abide by the rapid destruction of their environment and the rapid depletion of their resources. What makes the question complex is that their level of power and prosperity depends on the continuation of rapid environmental destruction and resource depletion.

This is why political leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper continually tie environmental and resource policies to economic threats. He knows the game: counter-revolutionaries have always relied on the blunt tool of cutting enough associates in for enough of the take to keep the balance interested in the status quo all the way to the end. If the economy takes a tumble, however, and the counter-revolutionaries can no longer afford to buy off their associates, look out.