The struggles here are myriad and urgent and point to the call for a living wage, food security, accessible education, jobs programs (especially for the young), the democratization of power, economic equality and a massive shift in funds away from the machinery of war and big banks. Any collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of unfettered "free-market" capitalism. In addition, too many progressives and people on the left are stuck in the discourse of foreclosure and cynicism and need to develop what Stuart Hall calls a "sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things." (40)
There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other cultural workers to develop languages of both critique and hope along with an educative politics in which people can address the historical, structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state, and to make clear that government increasingly subsumed by global market sovereignty is no longer responsive to the most basic needs of young people. All the issues that matter in a substantive democratic society are under siege by the forces of neoliberalism and any viable challenge requires movement building that is a long-term project. Young people need more than demonstrations and demolition squads; they need to take on the future by merging the power of the imagination and a politics of educated hope with long-term strategies, durable organizations and new political formations.
The issue of who gets to define the future, share in the nation's wealth, shape the parameters of the social state, steward and protect the globe's resources and create a formative culture for producing engaged and socially responsible citizens is no longer a rhetorical issue. This challenge offers up new categories for defining how matters of representation, education, economic justice and politics are to be defined and fought over. This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities such as Chicago, Athens, Quebec, Paris, Madrid and other sites of massive inequality throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the institutions, values and infrastructures that make communities the center of a robust, radical democracy. I realize this sounds a bit utopian, but we have few choices if we are going to struggle for a future that does a great deal more than endlessly repeat the present. We may live in dark times, but as Slavoj Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek rightly insists, "The only realist option is to do what appears impossible within this system. This is how the impossible becomes possible." (41)
Footnotes:
1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York: 2001).
2. See, for instance, Andre Spicer, "Adults with colouring books, kids with CVs - it's a world turned upside down," The Guardian (April 8, 2015). Online:http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/08/adults-colouring-books-kids-cvs-lego-children
3. This theme is taken up powerfully by a number of theorists. See C. Wright Mills,The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1974); Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Henry A. Giroux,Public Spaces, Private Lives (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).
4. Noam Chomsky, "The Death of American Universities," Jacobin (March 3, 2015). Online: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-death-of-american-universities/
5. Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 91.
6. J.F. Conway, "Quebec: Making War on Our Children," Socialist Project, E-Bulletin No. 651, (June 10, 2012). Online: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/651.php
7. Jennifer M. Silva, "Young and Isolated," International New York Times (June 22, 2013). Online: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/young-and-isolated/?_r=0
8. Zygmunt Bauman, On Education, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), p. 46.
9. Zygmunt Bauman, This Is Not A Diary, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), p. 64
10. Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, (London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
11. Sara Mojtehedzadeh, "Q&A with precarious work expert Guy Standing," The Toronto Star, (April 09, 2015). Online:http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/04/09/qa-with-precarious-work-expert-guy-standing.html
12. Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 18-19
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
