We live in a time when marketers happily use words like "revolution" to sell trendy goods. "Revolution" isn't the only word whose meaning gets twisted. Government and corporate media often call activists, "terrorists," and refer to terrorists as "militants" and "radicals." Police preparing for the G-8 Summit in Kananaskis, Alberta later this year talk about preventing terrorist attacks and demonstrations of the kind seen in Seattle and Quebec City, as if people protesting for global justice are the same as those who plant bombs.

Yet this is not a time to stop being radical. On the contrary: as the federal government passes repressive laws and tightens immigration controls, the BC government mounts a massive assault on public sector jobs and services, and companies lay-off thousands of workers, we need radical responses. When more Canadian troops head to Afghanistan and writers in Business Week openly argue to attack Iraq in order to open up its oil resources for investors, mild objections are just not enough.

But what does it mean to be radical in 2002? The word radical comes from a word meaning "root," so to be radical is to go to the root of the serious problems we endure. This involves recognizing the exploitation and oppression we experience. It is a very different way of understanding society than the view pumped out by the corporate media. In what we're told is just "common sense," things that really are connected are kept separate (like the interests of Western multinationals and the war against Afghanistan). Instead of looking for deeper causes, we get shallow explanations (such as the belief that the recession was caused by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11).

Sadly, much of the Left accepts this way of thinking about society. When union and NDP leaders blame layoffs on incompetent employers or uncaring politicians, never suggesting that capitalism is a profit-driven system that always produces recessions and unemployment, they remain trapped in this misleading "common sense" view of the world.

We can only understand society when we look at the world from the point of view of exploited and oppressed people - including women, people of colour, indigenous peoples, queers, and the working-class majority who to survive must sell our ability to work to those who need our labour. To understand the systematic ways we are exploited and oppressed and figure out how to fight back and win, we need to use tools of analysis that have been developed out of the real revolutions and mass movements of the past.

It makes no sense to give up when human suffering and the destruction of the environment are getting worse. Instead, more people need to get active and organize to resist the attacks we face. Real change comes through struggle, not by voting in elections for governments that only hold office while real power lies with unelected owners, bankers, top civil servants, generals and police chiefs. So rather than appealing to ruthless right-wing governments to mend their ways, we need to mobilize our greatest strengths: our numbers in the streets, and - above all - our power to withdraw our labour and strike.

Of course, organizing strikes, workplace occupations and mass demonstrations isn't easy. Unions and social movements as they exist today rarely use such tactics. Getting to the point where unions and other groups fight back with a determination equal to that of our opponents will take a lot of patient work among our co-workers and in our communities. Activists need to break out of comfortable "progressive" circles and work with people we have not worked with in the past. By helping to build militant, democratically-run movements today, we start to unlock our power to change the world.

Yes, the war continues, abroad and at home - war on freedom and social justice. While it does, opposition can, and must, continue as well.