https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/22/imagine-life-after-capitalism/
The Manual for the New Society has been presented!
Tomorrow! Do it! Restart the leftist project! Let’s take the ideas in this book and convince as many people as we can! Enough so as to have the support we need to implement these ideas!
It can be done!
“Parecon’s guiding values turn out to be not only well founded, but logical and simple”!
“It is an economic system that institutionalizes self-management, equity, solidarity, diversity, sustainability, and internationalism”! For all!
OMG!
Just what we’ve always wanted!
New Beginnings! Never-before-thought-of-imaginings!
In the spirit of beginnings, the imagination runs wild after deeply…
Earth Day and the first Green parties date from about fifty years ago. Some of the enduring intentional community settlements were established during the 1990s:
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2021/07/30/BC-Celebrates-Quarter-Century-Co-Housing/
These are different manifestations of the greening movement. It now has enough of a legacy as to be subjected to meaningful evaluation.
There are, of course, many particular books about different aspects of the movement. In 1991 Andrew Dobson published a good “broad overview” type of book, The Green Reader, and the following year Kirk Sale offered The Green Revolution. It would be great to see someone follow-up with a similar text now, thirty…
It’s encouraging to see that the eco-summit starting this Friday, Sept. 24 (running through October 10) will include some bioregional content. For example:
https://transitionus.org/event/bioregional-breakouts/
Our friends at Possible Planet are co-sponsors of the event:
The historical life-experience disadvantagement of females is undeniable, but current statistics regarding psycho- and socio-pathologies indicate males to now be less thriving:
* male life expectancy: 72; female life expectancy: 79
* males commit suicide 3.5 more often than females
* more than nine times as many males have ever been incarcerated
* males constitute 73 percent of those arrested overall and about 80 percent of those arrested for violent crime
* the prevalence of depression in males is not, as had previously been thought, lower; it’s approximately the same (older studies had relied on disclosure of traditional symptoms such as sad/depressed mood, loss of…
I’ve been reading Kirkpatrick Sale’s After Eden.
It’s one of a number of books of a particular kind . . .
Since Darwin there has been interest in the question: How did homo sapiens evolve from the line of great apes? Since the advent of anthropology there has been interest in the question: How did modernity (having the characteristics of statism, class division, private property, institutionalized religion, complex division of labor) evolve from aboriginal culture?
At first the latter inquiry flowed from a perspective of “progressive development.” The most famous book of that kind was Engels’ The Origin of the…
Our civilization is stuck in a rut.
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Analysis . . .
After reading articles like this one:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/uk-conservatives-are-banking-on-a-losing-strategy
. . . we can observe that the democracies vote in the liberals, nothing all so much changes, they vote in the conservatives, nothing all so much changes, then they cycle back through and through and through. And not all so much changes.
Meanwhile, the autocracies can’t depose the autocrats.
The world is stuck and it cannot imagine what to do.
* * * *
What the wealth/power elites want more than anything else is stability and complacency…
Let’s make a distinction between the term ‘socialization’ (which has something of a leftist or progressive connotation) and ‘statification’ . . .
Trying to buoy up a flagging economy, the governments have gone into overdrive re: subsidies, bailouts, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_company
One thing hyper-low interest rates accomplish is to enable a zombie company to keep repaying the interest on its debts even though it can’t repay principal.
Bonds were traditionally issued into the private market for purchase. Now many are bought up by the central banks. In Japan the latter have started to buy up private-sector equities as well as debt.
…
Marx was the quintessential modernist.
Most leftists still keep thinking in terms of “historical progression” from capitalism to socialism.
. . . keep thinking in terms of the capitalist system being The Problem; a “more advanced” system being The Solution.
Clueless in regard to the critique of hypermodernity.
The critique of hypermodernity goes deeper than the critique of capitalism.
The solution is more alternative than what the left has had in mind.
Re-considerations begun during the Sixties resulted in the start of a transition of thought toward the “greening” idea and its expression in Green politics during the Seventies. The transition is ongoing. What it’s all about is so alternative that the left keeps backsliding toward its old comfort zone.
They keep trying to manage the capitalist system. Quite a challenge, indeed!
In regard to the unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies we’ve been witnessing over the last twenty years or so (huge deficits, zero interest rates, rampant money printing, governments buying financial assets that formerly had been under the purview of the private sector) there’s an explanation that comes under the heading of deflation anxiety.
For many years the global capitalist system had been building up unfunded future liabilities:
https://ballotpedia.org/Unfunded_liabilities
This figured to become deeply deflationary at some point. The Japanese economy was the harbinger. …
