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Revolutionary transformations cannot be accomplished without at the very minimum our changing our ideas, abandoning our cherished beliefs and prejudices, giving up various daily comforts and rights, submitting to some new daily regimen, changing our social and political roles, reassigning our rights, duties and responsibilities, and altering our behaviours to better conform to collective needs and a common will. The world around us - our geographies - must be radically reshaped, as must our social relations, the relation to nature and all of the other spheres of action in the co-revolutionary process. It is understandable, to some degree, that many prefer a politics of denial to a politics of active confrontation with all of this.

It would also be comforting to think that all of this could be accomplished pacifically and voluntarily, that we would dispossess ourselves, strip ourselves bare, as it were, of all that we now possess that stands in the way of the creation of a more socially just, steady-state social order. But it would be disingenuous to imagine that this could be so, that no active struggle would be involved, including some degree of violence. Capitalism came into the world, as Marx once put it, bathed in blood and fire. Although it might be possible to do a better job of getting out from under it than getting into it, the odds are heavily against any purely pacific passage to the promised land.

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