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

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

How to Stop Capitalism’s Deadly War With Nature

Click here to access article by Paul Street from Truthdig.

Street's remarks about the urgency to stop capitalists from destroying our habitat is very good, however his comments about "how to stop capitalism's deadly war with nature" is weak and abstract.
No intelligent person should mourn the demise of a “system that consumes unpaid natures as a condition of its existence.” As Moore almost casually observes in the middle of his monograph: “Calls for capital to pay the ‘true costs’ of resource use ... are to be welcomed, because such calls directly contradict capital’s fundamental logic. To call for capital to pay its own way is to call for the abolition of capitalism.” Let the calls spread wide and far. A system based on private profit from the uncompensated and geocidal extraction of massive value from the earth and its inhabitants surely deserves to die.

But it’s no time for dancing in the streets. We can’t skip the barricades and the hard work of making revolutionary change. There remains the question of how to develop and spread an alternative, popular, democratic and eco-socialist model of human development to ensure human survival and to prevent a reversion to sheer barbarism amid capitalism’s pestilential burnout.