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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRebecca Solnit: The Age of Capitalism is over
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/27/rebecca_solnit_the_age_of_capitalism_is_over_partner/It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document Ive ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed 1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over again.
In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the course of a speech she gave while accepting a book award she noted, We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. Its popular to say that the experiment failed, but thats too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere).
Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planets changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).
niyad
(112,432 posts)KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)Last edited Sat Dec 27, 2014, 08:53 PM - Edit history (1)
crises of capitalism promise to get worse and worse with no sign that capitalism itself (or the "Age of Capitalism" is ending. The nations that constituted the former USSR and China have reverted to capitalism, so I have to disagree (with the author or editor of the title), albeit somewhat ruefully.
2naSalit
(86,046 posts)this article is meant to cheer on those who see the futility of continuing down this dangerous path and who are trying to bring about the changes needed and those who should/will become engaged?
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)branford
(4,462 posts)2naSalit
(86,046 posts)good point.
2naSalit
(86,046 posts)I like Ms. Solnit's writing and range of topics.
Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)Predicting the "End Of Capitalism" on the eve of TPP being enacted is beyond starry-eyed. It is nice to dream but you should have a foot planted in reality.
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)allow for a degree of control and manipulation of the masses like nothing ever has before. The machineries are omnipresent and far more sophisticated than those used by Josef Goebbels though they are undoubtedly based on the principles he developed. And, to put it bluntly, the US populace of today is far, far dumber than the German population was in the 1920s-1940s. Add imbecile fundymentalpatient religion to the mix - the primary message is sit down, shut up and obey but never EVER think - and it adds up to a nearly perfect system of control, particularly when the masses are as utterly cretinous as America's are. Calling them sheeple is an insult to sheep.
Dirty Socialist
(3,248 posts)If you don't change the world, someone else will, and it might not be to your liking.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)But there is just nothing more to say than what Rebecca Solnit said, and she said it so perfectly.
daleanime
(17,796 posts)jwirr
(39,215 posts)fascism at the moment. And I do not see that as a good answer. Wonder if fascism can survive in a non-capitalist world?
We are going to need to stop, think and use our heads to get something that will include all of us and not just the 1% and the laborers they need. It would not hurt to have some real leaders - Elizabeth? Bernie?
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)The New Fascism is going to have to come and go of its own accord. There's no way to stop it anymore as both political parties are in total thrall to the New Fascist/tenth-percent elite. The propaganda machines are too big, too sophisticated and too well-funded to be stopped and a significant plurality of the populace is possessed of critical thinking abilities that make the proverbial bag of hammers look like Einstein.
The last 35 years have seen this country intentionally dumbed down to a degree I would never have thought possible back then. Stupid people are much easier to control. The propaganda machine, which includes the cretinous fundy "churches" has conquered all that has come before it. Politicians that have, for the last 35 years, been bought and paid for by the tenth-percenters and emerging New Fascists, serve only the masters that pay them, and that is true for BOTH parties.
Obama let the banksters go scot-free and will do nothing to prosecute torturers even though he is under a non-dischargeable legal duty to do so and is reifying War Now War Forever in the Middle East..He is complicit in all the crimes of the past 35 years because he has done nothing to punish those responsible and has actively pursued the same policies. The last six years have shown that the system is now wholly under the control of the New Fascists and it is NOT going to change anytime soon - probably not in the lifetime of anyone here on DU.
It will take a planetary catastrophe to topple TheNew Fascism, but that catastrophe WILL come as surely as the sun rises in the east. Asteroid strike, nuclear exchange, climate-related world disaster - something of that nature will be needed to clear the boards and make it possible to examine the possibility of a humane and sustainable society based on principles of democratic socialism.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)that it will take something huge to stop it. The last time this happened we were the thing that stopped it. But who is going to stop us? There is no one.
Boreal
(725 posts)Press Release - Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex
https://wikileaks.org/tisa-financial/press.html
If signed, the treaty would affect all services ranging from electronic transactions and data flow, to veterinary and architecture services. It would almost certainly open the floodgates to the final wave of privatization of public services, including the provision of healthcare, education and water. Meanwhile, already privatized companies would be prevented from a re-transfer to the public sector by a so-called barring ratchet clause even if the privatization failed.
More worrisome still, the proposal stipulates that no participating state can stop the use, storage and exchange of personal data relating to their territorial base. Heres more from Rosa Pavanelli, general secretary of Public Services International (PSI):
http://wolfstreet.com/2014/12/25/leaked-secret-negotiations-to-let-big-brother-go-global/
I had not heard about it because there so much evil afoot with the Hegemon there aren't enough hours in the day and night to even begin to keep up. I've spending most of my time following terrorist proxy wars, the attempt to start WWIII with Russia and police state here at home. I haven't read through the links above but for a brief look. I'm sure it's complicated, as usual, and requires deep investigation. I did look at the Wikipedia page (heh) and this particular trade treaty was initiated in the YooEssAy in 2012.
ladyVet
(1,587 posts)But I think it's more like a cold, harsh truth. The only thing that can stop it is natural disaster, economic disaster, or people getting on their feet with pitchforks. Which would probably go unnoticed or written off as kooky lefties by the corporate-owned media.
It makes me sad to realize that I'm watching the human race destroy the planet when we know better. We don't have to go down this road. We don't have to make our citizens ignorant and compliant with the destruction of our environment. But money talks. Maybe what ever follows us to the top of the food chain will have more sense.
I was watching a rerun of a show called "Prophets of Doom" yesterday. One of the speakers was talking about how there are five billion more people than the planet can sustain, almost all the population growth due to the discovery and use of fossil fuels. With peak oil a done deal, what's going to happen to all those people when the bottom falls out and they can't get food so easily? Ain't going to be pretty. But if the survivors are smart, they'll build a better world afterwards.
NewDeal_Dem
(1,049 posts)NewDeal_Dem
(1,049 posts)To use Le Guins language, physics is inevitable: if you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet warms, and as the planet warms, various kinds of chaos and ruin are let loose. Politics, on the other hand, is not inevitable. For example, not so many years ago it would have seemed inevitable that Chevron, currently the third biggest corporation in the country, would run the refinery town of Richmond, California, as its own private fiefdom. You could say that the divine right of Chevron seemed like a given. Except that people in Richmond refused to accept it and so this town of 107,000 mostly poor nonwhites pushed back.
In recent years, a group of progressives won election to the city council and the mayors seat, despite huge expenditures by Chevron, the corporation that also brought you gigantic oil spills onshore in Ecuador and offshore in Brazil, massive contamination from half a century of oil extraction in Nigeria, and Canadian tar-sands bitumen sent by rail to the Richmond refinery. Mayor Gayle McLaughin and her cohorts organized a little revolution in a town that had mostly been famous for its crime rate and for Chevrons toxic refinery emissions, which periodically create emergencies, sometimes requiring everyone to take shelter (and pretend that they are not being poisoned indoors), sometimes said by Chevron to be harmless, as with last Thursdays flames that lit up the sky, visible as far away as Oakland.
As McLaughin put it of her era as mayor:
Weve accomplished so much, including breathing better air, reducing the pollution, and building a cleaner environment and cleaner jobs, and reducing our crime rate. Our homicide number is the lowest in 33 years and we became a leading city in the Bay Area for solar installed per capita. Were a sanctuary city. And were defending our homeowners to prevent foreclosures and evictions. And we also got Chevron to pay $114 million extra dollars in taxes.
For this Novembers election, the second-largest oil company on Earth officially spent $3.1 million to defeat McLaughin and other progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That sum worked out to about $180 per Richmond voter, but my brother David, whos long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that, if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local politics, it might be roughly ten times that.
Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites, and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign can come up with, won.
If a small coalition like that can win locally against a corporation that had revenues of $228.9 billion in 2013, imagine what a large global coalition could do against the fossil-fuel giants. It wasnt easy in Richmond and it wont be easy on the largest scale either, but its not impossible. The Richmond progressives won by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life. They showed up to do the work to dent that inevitability. The billionaires and fossil fuel corporations are intensely engaged in politics all the time, everywhere, and they count on us to stay on the sidelines. If you look at their response to various movements, you can see that they fear the moment we wake up, show up, and exercise our power to counter theirs.
That power operated on a larger scale last week, when local activists and public health professionals applied sufficient pressure to get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign legislation banning fracking statewide. Until the news broke on December 17th, the outcome had seemed uncertain...
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)Kind of like the people down the hill from the port-a-potty, voting against the port-a-potty.
If Rebecca Solnit wants to take credit for that accomplishment, bully for her, but it's really not that Earth-shatteringly impressive, given the reality.
NewDeal_Dem
(1,049 posts)problem with her.
And if chevron has been shitting on them for decades I wonder why it's only now they got it together to fight back?
You got a problem with people fighting back, or you just like to spread FUD?
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)lives in Richmond?
Or is this just an abstract academic exercise for you?
As for the rest of it... Please be specific, what precisely are you suggesting I'm doing, here?
NewDeal_Dem
(1,049 posts)Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)I see you've been here 3 weeks or so, guess you've got the place all figured out for yourself.
Welcome to Democratic Underground.
Caretha
(2,737 posts)NewDeal_Dem!
I like the way you think -
Hopelessness & helpless is an enemy of change. Being a victim is much easier than getting off one's ass and doing something.
As a good friend of mine used to say, "don't let the bastards get you down".
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)Employees off of buses- and down onto the 280 in their cars.
Hrrrmmmmm, Just a thought.
NewDeal_Dem
(1,049 posts)Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)buses.
http://grist.org/cities/hey-protester-leave-those-google-buses-alone/
Fucking counterproductive inanity, if you ask me. Particularly if one claims to be worried about climate change. But, then, if one is a professional protester interested in scoring lame pseudo-hipster points against annoying tech workers who are actually trying to get to actual jobs, sure.
NewDeal_Dem
(1,049 posts)that makes her a professional protester and grand Pooh-Bah of protest?
http://grist.org/cities/hey-protester-leave-those-google-buses-alone/
"In February, San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit published a widely read takedown of Google in the London Review of Books, complaining that the company is ruining her city by bringing hordes of white or Asian male nerds who can afford high rents."
That's all I found about solnit in your link. I think you have a problem with solnit.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)NewDeal_Dem
(1,049 posts)backs up your claim that journalist solnit was some grand protest organizer.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)So do the math.
NewDeal_Dem
(1,049 posts)other writers (esp in the bay area) had her on their rolodexes?
your math is different than mine. when I see someone write an article, I don't assume they're the secret leader of a protest movement on the topic.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)And whether or not she's the 'leader', it's inane for someone claiming the mantle of environmentalism, to be advocating protests that force workers off of buses--- and into cars on already badly-congested freeways.
But a statement like "the age of capitalism is over" is goofy, too, and indicates to me someone who has spent way too much time enamored with the sound of their own voice.
It is wildly out of touch with actual reality.
Boreal
(725 posts)full of shit about that. Quite the opposite is the case and it's not just capitalism but corporate fascism. Wishful thinking on her part.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)I agree with you.
ancianita
(35,812 posts)ancianita
(35,812 posts)That you both ignore that fact means that you're misreading.
As an attention-getting rhetorical device, editors often encourage a provocative slant that writers often don't consider. Call the Salon editors goofy, if you must.
But you're both debating an editorial decision, but not the writer's actual Main Point.
Solnit herself actually says this.
She reiterates the thesis later:
And again:
These important junctures in a highly informative essay show a consistent support for her main point -- an update on humans' accomplishments in the face of fossil fuel power, and an encouragement to Salon readers to join in.
You may fairly criticize Salon's editor as title maker, but not Solnit as an essayist. From what I've read by her about women's and other issues, she's damned good. And if there's anything worthy of writing about, it's the environment.
So, anyway...
What is this "mantle" talk. Anyone, anywhere, writer or no, can advocate for ending fossil fuel economies through any kind of work -- activism, writing, divestment -- against fossil consuming sectors -- tech, transportation, agribusiness, etc. -- and they don't have to have any "mantle" of credentials or official approval to do it.
My favorite quote, one that Solnit credits to another media person -- "everything's coming together while everything's falling apart" -- sums up much of the mess and lack of perspective we have during the little and big fights of upheaval. Good title writing is one example; misreading the writer is another.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)....
Sorry, I'm still going to go with "goofy".
The people who are most likely to end the age of fossil fuel are the folks working on scalable fusion generators, or cheap solar panels, or some iteration/combination thereof.
Fantasizing about the French Revolution is... okay, can I say unrealistic? "Dismantling the fossil fuel economy".. yeah, sure, Rebecca.. but what are you going to do after lunch?
The only French Revolutionary name that springs to my mind, here, is Napoleon. Or maybe people who think they are Napoleon.
I think I've explained why Solnit, to me, has less than no on-the-ground cred when it comes to environmentalism, if she's busy shutting down google buses and forcing commuters into cars and onto the 280.
You're right about one thing, she has the 1st Amendment right to say whatever the fuck she wants, and I have the 1st Amendment right to say she's being goofy.
ancianita
(35,812 posts)is poor criticism. I have the 1st Amendment right, you have the 1st Amendment right, she has the 1st Amendment right. Cling to "goofy" all you want by proclaiming your right. But by doing so you've just shot down your own two criticisms of her as a writer.
"...what are you doing after lunch," indeed. This is how critics like you discourage good reading about a movement that needs all the encouragement it can get at any level by anyone -- including Salon -- without your purist attacks about what anyone's doing after lunch.
Your "right" doesn't make you right. "Goofy" is as goofy does, and since you've been not only been mistaken about her essay's meaning, and diminished her work against Google, you might as well claim the mantle of "goofy" yourself.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)I'm a "purist" because I think that it's not environmentally wise - much less morally consistent- to block workers from taking the bus instead of driving their own cars? Or because I don't think that appeals to the French Revolution are the best way to get people to move towards sustainable energy solutions?
This is someone inside a bubble talking to fellow bubble dwellers. Fuck, it's not even a bubble, it's a bubble inside a bubble inside another bubble, that's how fucking disconnected from anything resembling actual reality, it is.
But if she's really all that, the self-evident awesomeness of her writing can weather my humble criticism, can't it.
ancianita
(35,812 posts)I think you'd at least agree that we could all be more supportive of environmental efforts even when we don't agree on the methods. Support isn't to be conflated with agreement.
If you don't want to be interpreted as a purist, then don't sloppily interpret someone whose anti-fossil fuel capitalism activity is less than what you'd like an environmental supporter to be.
If your "after lunch" standard were applied to all of us, we'd all fall short.
Why not reconsider your critical approach.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)Lao Tzu said that, or someone said that Lao Tzu said that, or I said that someone said that Lao Tzu said that.
I don't really care how I'm interpreted, actually. Who the hell has time for that?
I thought Solnit's agitation against the google buses was goofy, not to mention counter-productive, which was my original point. Her stuff strikes me as a bit self-indulgent. But aesthetic appreciation is nothing if not subjective.
ancianita
(35,812 posts)and a greater public awareness of "Don't Be Evil"'s corporate behavior wasn't a goofy thing at all. You have yet to prove anything "counter-productive" about it, unless you're going to take Google's side on the whole event. But seriously, don't bother to re-hash it either way. Most of DU has read about that already.
I'd say you're the one who's been more than a bit self-indulgent here at the expense of both a good read and a more relevant discussion that tackles the environmental movement's work.
I'm not wasting any more time on your issue, either.
Feel free to indulge your getting the last word in, as well.
Take care. Happy New Year.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)If you must know, the "side" I'm taking is that of someone who has been stuck in traffic on the 280 enough times to appeciate a company doing what it can to reduce the automotive load from that rather atrocious commute. Along with the carbon emissions.
These are not abstract academic issues. And to complain about - much less harass- workers living in San Francisco who are trying to do the right thing; really, it seems, because they have the wrong demographics. Or haircuts. Or taste in music... Come on. The logic is profoundly flawed- like, would it really be better if more garlic fields in Gilroy were turned into exurbian subdivisions, for these folks to commute to?
Love em or hate em, Google still needs workers so that angry change-minded dialectical materialists can find Rebecca Solnit's work online, right?
Anyway,
...happy new year to you, too. Peace.
Boreal
(725 posts)and I agree with her. I have a good friend born and raised in SF who cannot live there anymore because she can't afford it due to exactly what was discussed in the article.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)but that's not the fault of Google employees. It's not. San Francisco is on a peninsula. There is literally no more room, and on the San Andreas you can't really build upwards too much- so it wouldn't take Nostradamus to see what would happen to real estate.
After decades in Northern California, I finally figured out how to live in the San Francisco I once loved- the arty, funky, weird, alternative, free-spirited, low key, funny, doesn't take itself too seriously, progressive, roll-your-own town that once was San Francisco.
It was called "move to Portland".
WillyT
(72,631 posts)dawg
(10,609 posts)Right now, it's so big it thinks it can push the people's government around. It needs to stick to its knitting and make me better ipods, coffee makers, and stain-resistant khaki pants. (And do so while obeying the rules that the people's government imposes.)
rogerashton
(3,918 posts)Capitalism is abut "growth" -- that is, accumulation of capital -- and the alternative to growth is depression.
dawg
(10,609 posts)Capitalism is entirely subject to the rules and regulations set by "We the People" through our legitimately elected government. While it is true that it will always strive to increase its power and influence, the electorate has the ultimate say.
Besides, the alternative to growth isn't depression. It's stability. Wall Street is obsessed with growth, but a sensible investor can do very well by investing in stable, low-growth businesses, purchased at reasonable valuations.
rogerashton
(3,918 posts)and I hope it has, then the electorate could substitute another economic system for capitalism.
There are limits to what can be accomplished by regulation within the system, though. Can you give an example of a stable capitalism? Aggregate demand depends on investment -- "capitalists get what they spend" -- and the motive for investment is to accumulate capital. Take away that motive and investment collapses. Result: depression.
What a "sensible investor" can do is not what the system can do. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.
dawg
(10,609 posts)Germany and France do a passable job as well. These are stable capitalist economies that are still, nonetheless, able to provide decent living standards for their people.
A socialist system, where the government owns all the means of production, would not be an improvement over a well-regulated system of capitalism. Human nature being what it is, instead of corrupt capitalists, such a system would breed corrupt socialists. We have seen it happen.