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, January 8, 2016

Decommodification, Liberation, Education: Commonwealth as Aesthetic Form of an Alienation-Free Society

Click here to access article by Charles Reitz from the Heathwood Institute.

This a chapter from retired Prof. Reitz's forthcoming book entitled Philosophy & Critical Pedagogy. As such it is written for a more academically oriented audience.
The 1 percent’s enormous accumulation of private property has not led to the self-actualization of the human species or its individual constituents, as the neoliberal business utopians assert, but to the continuation of war and poverty, and to the delusions of grandeur and self-destruction on the part of our current Masters of the Universe on Wall Street. The radical goal of socialism is to reclaim our common humanity through public work for the public good. Sensuous living labor, through its own agency and revolutionary humanism, has within its power the transformation of the social wealth production process into the production of our common wealth.

A commonwealth counter-offensive is the political challenge today.