Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Noam Chomsky: "The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination" (58:00m video)

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

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Noam Chomsky: "The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination" (58:00m video)

from Democracy Now. Amy Goodman devotes the hour program to Chomsky's recent speech in New York at the Left Forum on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq .

Chomsky begins with the case of Joseph Andrew Stack, who crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide, as an example of the tragic lives that working people experience in many other countries as a result of the dynamics of capitalism. He goes on to the describe the many crimes throughout the world and illusions used by the ruling classes to cover up their crimes and confuse working people. He concludes by calling for a "radical imagination".

Well, for the radical imagination to be rekindled and to lead the way out of this desert, what is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully contrived illusion, reveal the stark reality, and also to be directly engaged in popular struggles that they sometimes help galvanize.