If we are to deal with the threat to the planet’s biosphere, it should be obvious to all that there has to be both political and economic democracy if we are to stand even a chance of stabilising what we’ve totally buggered up. And judging by the concern people are expressing about what’s happening to our Home (let alone how it’s actually impacting on those with no control over anything and what they feel, what’s the betting that if we had the opportunity to directly participate in the economic process as more than damn drones of capital, we would arrive at very different conclusions than our so-called political leaders have as to what steps to take. Nobody’s pretending that at this late date, it’s not an immense task, and one with no guarantee of success, but at least folks if we are truly in charge of our own destinies, if we screw up, we have nobody to blame but our good, collective selves. — The Red and the Green Part One

The word development implies ‘progress’ but by whose definition and anyway, what is progress, and where exactly, are we progressing to?Are the rainforest peoples’ of the Amazon for example, ‘given’ progress when they are forcibly resettled and their forests chopped down (for their own good you understand)?

When we, in the ‘testosterone world’ are forced to go into debt and our children, for all of our lives, is this progress?

And how does the socialist conception of development differ from that ‘offered’ by capitalism? I think we are seeing glimpses of it emerge out of South America (see below) and once more in the ‘undeveloped’ part of the planet. Is there a message here? I think so. For so long it has been assumed that ‘real’ socialism could only be created in the developed world, at least that was the one of the implications found in Marx’s writings on the subject (not that he wrote an awful lot about the future, being naturally more concerned with his present, and anyway I think he pawned his crystal ball on the way to the British Library).

Continue reading →