Join Paul Roland in his discussion with Victor Wallis about his new book Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism
Red-Green Revolution is an impassioned and informed confrontation with the planetary emergency brought about by accelerated ecological devastation in the last half-century.
Its author, distinguished political scientist Victor Wallis, argues that sound ecological policy requires a socialist framework, based on democratic participation and drawing on the historical lessons of earlier efforts.
Wallis presents a relentless critique of the capitalist system that has put the human species into a race against time to salvage and restore what it can of the environmental conditions necessary for a healthy existence. He then looks to how we might turn things around, reconsidering the institutions, technologies, and social relationships that will determine our shared future, and discussing how a better framework can evolve through the convergence of popular struggles, as these have emerged under conditions of crisis.
- KBOO
Comments
Very Useful Intro\Discussion w/Victor Wallis;Rovics Failed State
Thanks Paul for very useful intro to the work of Victor Wallis. I'm glad he is speaking at Rose Villa in Milwaukie this evening and I will try to attend to learn more of his views. This is precisely the sort of experience with social movements and the dynamics of ideological group efforts that requires critical thinking. Not simply to shut an effort at social organization down, but merely to vet it from the standpoint of those groups and movements that came before in similar historical periods of resistance and activist ferment.
The book I thought might have been written by Prof Wallis until I came to this web site and found his first name is Victor and not Roy Wallis, was written in 1976 in Belfast and published in the U.S. a year later on Columbia U. Press studying the dynamics of Scientology and is titled THE ROAD TO TOTAL FREEDOM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Total_Freedom
I keep re-reading it (along with other studies of cult formation) to balance my own activist impulses and political efforts to change our nasty form of crony caputalism and restore a media focus on PUBLIC INTEREST criteria of political coverage.
The blowback of Washington's Cold War efforts to persuade our Post WW II world to accept U.S. as the top point of a global social hierarchy ruled by 'Market Forces' instead of Centrally Planned societies led government contracted academics like Milton and Rose Director Friedman with Ted Schultz at the University of Chicago to propagate via the Mighty Wurlitzer of U.S. information along with mis and disinformation projects a substitution of the GREED IS GOOD ideological\economic\philosophical concept weaponized into a media meme to subvert socialist movements, even those that remained true and functional social democracies rather than devolving into the sorts of warped Cults of Personality that came to characterize our Iron Curtain Cold War rivals.
What we see the whole wide world over to varying degrees is Corporate Capture. The Corporate Capture of the university, of professional trade unions, of regulatory systems, of judicial systems (now with Free Trade Agreements being revised keep your eye on ISDS which has its own explanatory Wiki page), of mass media news and public affairs and broadcasting\publishing. Most noxious has been the subversion and conflation of non-productive and purely speculative financialization of once diverse and productive economies in a way that mimics the commercialization of PUBLIC INTEREST journalism and broadcasting.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cold-war-led-the-cia-to-promote-human-cap...
Thanks also for opening and closing today's program with that new David Rovics song "FAILED STATE." Rovics lyrics have always been subversive of dominant paradigms in a most useful way, but this time he's got the musical textures to create a sound I have to explore more. Off to band camp I go and hope he issues CD-R's since I don't use this clunky ol' PC for archiving music.
Keep on doing, Paul, Victor, David et al
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Shifters
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
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