Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The London Climate Protests – Raising The Alarm [another reaction to this article]

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 24, 2019

The London Climate Protests – Raising The Alarm [another reaction to this article]

Click here to access article by David Cromwell, editor of Media Lens, and from the latter's website (Britain).

I posted this article a few days ago after arriving from a grueling road-journey to the West Coast to visit activists. I was hurriedly sifting through articles that seemed important to me, and offered no comment to this one other than describing its contents. This morning I have another reaction, particularly to one statement made by Cromwell which I quoted in my original post:

Even if corporate interests were crazed enough to think they could promote mass public dissent on this scale in the cause of profit, they would have no way of controlling the outcome.

I counter this argument with one I have advanced for years: that our ruling class of capitalists are indeed "crazed enough", and thus perfectly able to lead such movements so that they can control the outcome to insure that such movements don't interfere with their obsession with power and profits. They are insane. Period. And ordinary people are so disoriented by our capitalist master's control of all ideological and media institutions that they will be led like sheep into benign forms of protest. I don't know, but I think it is too late anyhow; yet, I intend to continue my lifelong fight against our "crazed" executioners to the last breath (def.).