Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The conversation you hear about the environment on CNN is not the conversation taking place in college dorms or outdoors clubs or in community centers or on farms or in the heads of those who hope and fight and when they sleep they dream of mountain air and when they close their eyes at work for just a moment are no further removed from the ocean than the fish who swim in it. And they are getting louder.
When we recognize that disaffection, anxiety and stress are not just our own fault but are connected to structural causes, mindfulness becomes fuel for igniting resistance.
We’re committed and excited about our attempts at cooperation between academics, movement activists, creative thinkers, and practitioners of alternatives to challenge the ever-tightening grip of corporate fundamentalism on the economy and the environment.
‘New Thinking for the British Economy’ – a new eBook published today by openDemocracy – brings together leading thinkers to outline the broad pillars of a new post-neoliberal agenda, and the type of policies that are needed to get us there.
An ontology is basically a set of principles or assumption about how the world works; about the fundamental ‘nature of reality’.
It seems that the short lived cycles of electoral politics means that politicians chase short-term goals, rather than tackling problems such as climate change which require long-term, global thinking. The test of a capable politician in 2018 is whether they take a stand against cavalier resource extraction.
Whether you consider yourself an economic veteran or novice, now is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find, scrub it out; or, better still, paint it over with new images that far better serve our needs and times.
We think there is now broad intellectual convergence across groups around a shared critique of the failings of neoliberalism and the need for a new paradigm. There is slightly looser convergence on the overall goals or values of a new paradigm, largely centring on equity, sustainability and democratisation. However, outside of one or two notable efforts, we have not seen common narratives or policy solutions emerge. Our conclusion is that this results from material barriers to progress, rather than profound differences between groups.
Despite my various friendly critiques here, it goes without saying that Naomi Klein is one of the most important figures on the radical left today. There are few other activists who are able to make radical arguments that are read by so many and taken seriously in the mainstream.
We may be living through one of those moments in history that future historians will look back on as a watershed, a period of flux that marked a transition to quite different economic and social arrangements. Unfortunately, in human history a ‘moment’ can be a very long time…
I think it is urgent that we overcome our fears of articulating grand narratives and lay out a vision that spells out the overcoming of the present world blighted by Capital through common struggle, with the end being the construction of societies that harness men and women’s deepest instinct— cooperation.
In India, economic development and modernity have transformed livelihoods into deadlihoods, wiping out millennia-old livelihoods that were ways of life with no sharp division between work and leisure, and replacing them with dreary assembly line jobs.
