Surviving Capitalism (Not) : We Are All Luddites: Fighting Post-Modern Enclosure

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, March 31, 2012

We Are All Luddites: Fighting Post-Modern Enclosure

Click here to access article by David Rosen from CounterPunch.

The author accomplishes so much in this excellent essay. Among other contributions, he offers a broad historical perspective of the past 500 years which has seen the rise of a new class of people who claim "ownership" rights over technology and its applications. This has produced a dialectic between the social versus the private in societal development which is reflected in the history that has played out in various working class opposition movements over the past 500 years until the present day. He begins this story by telling the true history of the Luddites which he salvaged from the distorted history propagated by capitalist academics.

Those with power stamp a certain definition on historical reality, shaping popular consciousness and the meaning of the very words we use. Such is the privilege of power.