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Showing Original Post only (View all)Rebecca Solnit: The Age of Capitalism is over [View all]
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).
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Highly misleading title. I wish the title were true but, if anything, the periodic
KingCharlemagne
Dec 2014
#3
If King George had had Fox "News" and hate radio, we'd still be flying the Union Jack
Doctor_J
Dec 2014
#6
Every time I see someone saying that I wonder - where to from here? We seem to be heading to
jwirr
Dec 2014
#10
Thank you for the honest answer. And unfortunately that is exactly what I fear. And I have assumed
jwirr
Dec 2014
#13
To agree that this is what's coming for us could be called tin foil hat conspiracy.
ladyVet
Dec 2014
#44
If voters in Richmond voted against Chevron, it's cuz Chevron has been shitting on them for decades.
Warren DeMontague
Dec 2014
#21
I didn't notice solnit taking credit, I noticed her reporting. I also noticed you have some kind of
NewDeal_Dem
Dec 2014
#22
I dont know why, since the refinery catches on fire every few years. Do you know anyone who actually
Warren DeMontague
Dec 2014
#25
If Rebecca Solnit is worried about climate change, maybe she should stop trying to force Google
Warren DeMontague
Dec 2014
#16
Happy to. She was a big poop-bah behind the SF protests trying to shut down the google commuter
Warren DeMontague
Dec 2014
#19
all i see in your article about solnit is that she wrote a newspaper article about the buses.
NewDeal_Dem
Dec 2014
#23
those aren't the link you gave me and i'm really not in the mood to read 4 links now to see if one
NewDeal_Dem
Dec 2014
#27
Every time there was an article about those goofy protests, they interviewed her first.
Warren DeMontague
Dec 2014
#29
if so, maybe because she's well-known and had already written the first article? maybe because
NewDeal_Dem
Dec 2014
#31
She didn't say it. So, "full of shit" is just perpetuating the misunderstanding here.
ancianita
Dec 2014
#41
Agree that "the age of captalism is over" is sweeping. NOWHERE does Solnit claim that.
ancianita
Dec 2014
#38
And if anything is going to move the human race off of its primary energy source, it's a Salon Op-Ed
Warren DeMontague
Dec 2014
#39
And I say that your discrediting a writer based on an editor title, or the writer's tackling Google
ancianita
Dec 2014
#40
That her writing can weather your criticism I'll agree with, however humble you claim it is.
ancianita
Dec 2014
#45
When the true master completes the great work, the people say "it happened of its own accord"
Warren DeMontague
Dec 2014
#46
Solnit's work against Google brought attention to many levels of injustice in SF,
ancianita
Dec 2014
#47