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

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Naomi Klein: The Romantic Revolutionary

Click here to access article by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH from The Greanville Post.

Jonas provides an excellent examination of the core weakness of Klein's new book in which she places all the emphasis on the current neoliberal phase of capitalist development, and calls for a vague plan of organizing.
She does offer a plan for organizing an international movement to achieve the replacement of the current “neoliberal” form of capitalism.  To do this she calls for the arising of mass movements around the world, which are apparently to arise more or less by themselves, as awareness of millions (perhaps billions) of people of the oncoming catastrophe expands.  This is where Ms. Klein’s romanticism comes in.
What is surprising to me is that Jonas wants to return to a vanguard model of revolutionary action best expressed by Leninism, and he quotes directly from Lenin's writings. It doesn't seem to matter to him that this first major version of a worker's revolution had, by his own admission, "major flaws". This begs the question which he doesn't address: why should we do the same thing again which failed quite dramatically in the past? And, will people rally around such a revolutionary movement?

No, I don't think that there is a viable revolutionary scheme that can do the job of ridding the planet of the cancer of capitalism--yet. This is what activists must be consciously working on throughout the world by experimenting with various forms of anti-capitalist political actions and organizations. To some extent, they are. But, much more is needed. What is holding back this kind of determined activism are naive political writings such as Klein's, and questionable corporate sponsored activist organizations such as The Rules.