Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I have come to think that the themes we on the Left should be coalescing around are dismantling rentier capitalism, offering a new income distribution system in which basic income divorced from the performance of labor is the anchor, and reviving all forms of commons and commoning.
A few weeks ago I wrote about black-and-white movies like Stagecoach, and how they often dealt with our modern, 21st-century problems in a way that modern media does not. Someone might ask: So What? If a movie made nine decades ago had a timely message, how does that affect my problems now? The question motivated me to write about the stories we tell each other about *class*.
Little support for actual Malthusian policies can be found in scientific literature about the Anthropocene. Population growth is included as one element of the Great Acceleration, which it obviously is, but it isn’t identified as the main problem.
A comment from a Swedish businessman caught my ear: “When you have heavy taxes, it takes away the desire to get rich, and then you start focusing on things that are more important than money. You care about other things than just getting ahead.”
We like to think, as Transitioners, we are classless, but we are not…We are constructed socially to fit into tiers. No matter what class we are born into, there are always people above us and people below us. And every transaction we make or thought we have is tempered by our conditioning: to keep ourselves on that rung, or climb the ladder, and for that we have to push others down. Them, Her, that district, those people.
