mattermorphosis

Neither elections, nor aesthetic fashions, nor financial crises, nor national outpourings of hope are going to do anything about it in the short or medium term, even though such things have to be attended to because they are the stuff that society is made of. If you don’t want the predictable future to take definitive hold—namely, the future of an authoritarian neoliberalism, modeled in some way after the big success story of capitalist communist China—then it becomes essential to start working on a critical, resistant, and constructive ethos for an egalitarian and ecological left, which has to be cooperative in its very essence and take imperial downsizing as a positive pleasure. What’s needed is a sharable willingness to change our own lives and our own relations to the reigning hierarchies, in order to advance principles and ways of doing things that will actually make the next half-century halfway bearable. How is such a mystical goal to be attained? Let’s at least try to begin that long and urgent conversation without the cozy irony, for a change. - Brian Holmes