The following YouTube audio presentation is a speech that, I estimate, was delivered by Alfie Kohn sometime in the latter 1980s. I discovered it as a comment-response to Patrice Greanville's recent post entitled "Of militarism’s wedding to sports—not an accidental match" from his website. I was very surprised that I never encountered his views before--the likely reason is because our capitalist culture forbids such views.
The video made a very powerful connection to my life's experience, and in addition, Kohn's speech touches on a very profound issue of which few leftists are aware: the comprehensive influence that a ruling class has on every aspect of culture--ranging from institutions down to our very behaviors and thoughts. This has been a theme that I have been hammering at for the past nearly nine years that I've devoted to this website. Thus, the topic is very current and will remain so until revolutionaries become aware of this insight and act accordingly.
I don't think that even Alfie Kohn is aware of this comprehensive nature of class rule. In this speech he acknowledges that he doesn't thoroughly understand this overwhelming emphasis on competition and the conventional view of human nature throughout our culture, and he correctly asserts that more study is needed of this phenomenon. He has made a career out of talking to mostly educators about how they can create positive change by teaching cooperative values and encouraging cooperative modes of behavior in their classrooms. This, I am thoroughly convinced, is a mistaken notion. I think his career is an excellent illustration of this faulty notion: these competitive values and behaviors are worse than ever before, and wars and the assaults on the environment threaten our very existence as a human species! We can't change beliefs and behaviors without changing the fundamental structure of our societies!
Nothing less than a thoroughly democratic revolution can promote cooperative values and behavior. Yes, that means taking away the cornerstones of capitalism: the sanctity of ownership of social property (nearly all property beyond strictly private property), inheritance of wealth, etc, and replacing capitalist class rule with a thoroughly bottom-up and a comprehensive participatory governance of our societies. The only question remains is how this can be accomplished. This question must be answered--and soon before it's too late--by a people's revolutionary movement that prefigures in its very organization a participatory governing structure.
