Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
These are two very different books but with much in common. Both are concerned with how to respond to the climate and ecological emergency. Jonathan Neale’s (JN) focus is on the global level, while that of Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton (L&L-L) is primarily on the UK.
I’m an old union organiser, and the way you get a public imagination is that you organise from the ground up, and you get people together to begin to see a common world.
In today’s somewhat bleak political landscape, we need to get serious about building strong counterweights to the power of extractive rentier capital.
A glimpse at the headlines surrounding the upcoming presidential election in the U.S. reveals how we are still largely governed by the old dichotomy of business vs. society.
Behind today’s ‘free market’ advocacy is the power of financial wealth to appropriate the political, fiscal and central planning role that Polanyi, Marx and other socialists hoped to see expanded in the hands of democratic government.
Under capitalism the wealth, goods and services of a country are very unevenly distributed. Capitalists, banks and multinationals hold the lion’s share, while the vast majority of salaried, unemployed and marginalized people (including indigenous and black communities in Latin America) are left with the crumbs.
While an entire chapter of Understanding Socialism is devoted to defining the word, right at the outset Wolff provides one of the broadest definitions of the term socialism I’ve heard. Socialism is a yearning — a yearning for something better than the status quo, better than capitalism.
Prefigurative politics is the contemporary name for revolutionary strategies that take this insight seriously. It’s about shaping our cultures, norms and social relations, as well as our formal rules and policies, in the image of the society we desire.
Democratic socialism is, I think, at least potentially compatible with, and perhaps even capable of drawing strength from, the small towns and churches of U.S. society.
