Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Escaping extinction through paradigm shift

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

Friday, May 31, 2019

Escaping extinction through paradigm shift

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed from his blog Insurge Intelligence.

This British commentator senses that something is wrong with "the system", but only names it one time in this essay, and then identifies this system with all kinds of qualifiers: it's "contemporary neoliberal capitalism-as-we-know-it". So, one can infer that capitalism is not the problem per se (def.), but it is that we have strayed from the wonderful system our "Founding Fathers" left for us.

Maybe I am being too cynical, but I can't help it. These soft critics of capitalism were "educated", or rather trained by the system and amply rewarded; and now that it is too late, they sound the alarm and say that we need to escape "extinction through a paradigm shift", a cleaned-up intellectualization of the messy concept of revolution. I expect we will see a lot more of this type of hand-wringing in the very challenging days ahead.