2015 is a new year, in desperate need of a new world. It won’t be a happy one, for very many people and for Earth as a whole, unless we MAKE it so. The first step is to free our minds: We must rip off the blinders - imposed on us, usually without our realizing it, by privileged elites - that have conditioned us, like Pavlov’s dogs, to treat the current patterns of privilege and domination as normal and inevitable, and that have kept our attention focused on only those paths and “solutions” which perpetuate and reinforce those patterns. We must stop repeating, like dutiful robots, thought-stopping refrains such as “There is no alternative to capitalism” and historically misinformed assertions such as “Socialism was tried, and doesn’t work.” We must stop mindlessly reproducing the responses of visceral negative emotions, which decades of propaganda, media spin, and misinformation have conditioned us to spontaneously reproduce, whenever we hear WORDS like “socialism,” whose original meanings we have never even learned, because the earlier historical conversations about them have been completely forgotten, and later people who used them made mincemeat of the original concepts. We must pick up the unjustly forgotten and neglected strands of a centuries-long conversation about freedom and justice and social cooperation, and consider them afresh today. We must update that conversation to take account of current knowledge and circumstances, especially as bearing on the interrelated crises of social injustice, environmental destruction, and resource scarcity that are rapidly diminishing the prospects for human and nonhuman flourishing. And we must translate ideas into practical collective action to achieve a new and better reality, in this critical do-or-die moment of history. Toward these ends, here is a thought to ponder, from Mikhail Bakunin in the 19th Century, that I hope may provoke fresh reflection on our problems and prospects today. Please let me know what you think… LIBERTY WITHOUT SOCIALISM IS PRIVILEGE AND INJUSTICE. SOCIALISM WITHOUT LIBERTY IS SLAVERY AND BRUTALITY.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 15:15:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015