What the new paradigm brings to the discussion

Steven Welzer
Apr 9, 2021

Bernie Sanders has his heart in the right place, but he’s an old-style leftist. He’s all Eugene Debs and FDR.

Last week he said, typically: “You don’t start off by coming up with a sum and working down. You start out by looking at the needs that need to be addressed and adding them up.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/07/opinion/biden-infrastructure-taxes.html

The “new paradigm” re-thinkings associated with the Green movement started to broach new questions, like: What, really, are “needs”? Is the idea to “lift everyone up” to Affluenza standards?

http://debate.uvm.edu/asnider/Ivan_Illich/Ivan_Illich_history_of_needs.pdf

And: Can remote statist bureaucracies (like the US federal government) really know what’s needed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization

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Steven Welzer

The editor of Green Horizon Magazine, Steve has been a movement activist for many years (he was an original co-editor of DSA’s “Ecosocialist Review”).