Surviving Capitalism (Not) : How class tunnel vision hurts social movements

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

Saturday, October 6, 2012

How class tunnel vision hurts social movements

Click here to access article by George Lakey from Waging Nonviolence.

The author essentially argues that lower social classes have been indoctrinated by the ruling class in their self-serving ideology of individualism to disable any kind of vision that includes collaborating and organizing across social classes.

I see only two alternatives for us in what Warren Buffett describes as a class war: either we become strategically sharper, or we become aware of how much our class conditioning makes us duller, and then develop work-arounds.