We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, April 14, 2014

Mobilizing for the common: some lessons from Italy

Click here to access article by Jerome Roos from Reflections on a Revolution.

Bravo! Roos and this website continue to impress me as being on the cutting edge of revolutionary thought. This article, which contains a wealth of excellent links to other resources, is an outstanding example of such revolutionary thinking. I have been surveying websites intensively for the past five years and I have found no single website that is as advanced in revolutionary thinking as this one is. 

As with many of the articles posted at the site, this one needs to be studied rather than merely read casually. Some linked resources are better than others, but that is for each person to decide depending on their experience and orientation. I found the best link to be to the article entitled "Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power" by Max Haiven that was posted in January (which I missed for some reason!).

I have tried to argue previously that capitalism is not merely a system which is preoccupied with the accumulation of material wealth and power. It is a comprehensive system that affects all of our existence, that distorts our relationships, our interpretations of realty, and our imaginations. In other words, it has colonized our very minds. This is the secret of its success; it is the secret of its exploitation of us; it is why we continue with our daily grind of serving the interests of those few who preside over the system regardless of all the profound devastating consequences on our lives and on the planet. As Haiven observes, capitalism is not only about the...
...dynamics of class struggle and capitalist accumulation of a century ago, the system is more invested than ever in preoccupying and enclosing our sense of self and of the future; our hopes, dreams and aspirations; and our capacity to imagine. As such, the possibilities of meaningful solidarity and class struggle depend on the politics of the imagination. The imagination is a material process: it emerges from and informs our capacity to cooperate and labor together, and as such is at the core of the reproduction of value. If we can understand capitalism as a system based on the reproduction of value, the role of the imagination cannot be gainsaid.
As capitalist crises deepen under today’s new regimes of austerity, the desire to reinforce our ignorance, apathy and fatalism becomes stronger.