My Take-Away from the System Change Initiative

There are of course many different but complementary take-aways  from the Council of Canadians System Change Initiative:  systemchange.ca. 


This is a summary of what seems salient if not crucial to me:

Global Warming is caused by unsustainable economic production in the material world, a process that has been driven by an abundance of energy, the main component of which is oil, which has, unbeknownst to many, already peaked.  As a result, we will have to - whether we want to or not - move to sustainable local economies eventually in order simply to survive.

Neoliberalism (and liberalism before it) is the ideological (social and political)  economic ground of this phenomenon, which assumes that aggregate economic growth is the order of things and can go on forever without repercussions in the natural or social world in which we dwell. 

Global Warming in turn generates climate change, and these together are gradually destroying the planet and, with increasingly less subtlety - because of the necessity for environmental reparations and social adaptation - our socio-economic lives. 

And so our political efforts should focus on the “system" that is the root cause of this unsustainable, destructive set of conditions - on assaulting the particular policies of neoliberalism that facilitate the enabling of this pernicious way of thinking and acting into which the entire western world and much of the developing world as well have inscribed themselves. Neoliberalism's destructive effects extend way beyond the discipline  of economics as such.  

This is the political space in which we need to develop strategies to shift public discourse on our current economic-political-social system, for in 2012 this is the only place where change might actually happen.  As a co-operative endeavour, the occupy movement is a promising beginning, for it has already opened up a gap in public discourse for progressive voices to be heard in the mainstream. The forthcoming Occupy Handbook, which mixes progressive and mainstream voices together, is a testimony to that extraordinary effect - at least in the U.S. Would that we had that sort of revelatory opening up here in Canada.

We Do Have a Moral Licence to Resist the Dictates of Harper Regime

McQuaig: Occupy moves us into a new era - thestar.com

Linda McQuaig says "Canada isn’t a dictatorship, and so protesters — like the group now ordered evicted from St. James Park — don’t have the same clear moral licence to ignore bylaws that their Egyptian counterparts had." I'm not so sure, Linda, given all the autocratic, authoritarian, centralizing policies, protocols, and legislation perpetrated by the Harper Regime since their first ascendance to power. It seems to me, to countless activisits, and to many even in the mainstream media that we have all the makings of a dictatorship. And so I'm beginning to think we do have the moral licence to resist the unjust and democracy destroying initiatives of the Harperland bunch, be they nominally legal or not - a growing conviction that many others also share. Couple our growing awareness of the malfeasance of the Harper Regime with the ever widening conversation the occupy movement has begun, and we're on our way to some sort of revolution. Something is slouching towards Ottawa.

Note: In the meantime, we also have a right to do a Pat Martin whenever we see an outrageous breach of democracy inflicted on us by, as Joe Thomas calls them, Harper and his Stepford wives.

Big Media's Search for the Meaning of the Occupy Phenomenon

#BigMedia 's search for coherence, for  an articulated purpose or clearly enunciated demand -  for the  "real meaning" of the #occupy movement - is  amusing if not characteristic.  ("What do they want?"  "What are their demands?" "Who are the leaders?" "Who are the spokespeople?"  "It seems so incoherent." "They're not proposing solutions.")  If we can centre it, if we can reduce it to this one thing, if we can structure it, we can understand it and then either control or, through  binary oppositions, confront it.  And the media, especially TV, if it loves anything, it loves binary oppositions - black and white, wealthy and poor - and its ever faithful sidekick, reductionism, which involves depleting the complexity out of an issue. 


The most common reduction strategies we've seen since the beginning of #occupywallstreet  include the following:  it's about fixing abuses in the banking system (Mark Carney's take), it's about economic or income inequality, it's about corporate greed,  or it's about the failure of governments.  All of these presuppose, as Carney does, that all that is required is some sort of fix  of the current system, be it banking or government.  But it's not about fixing. It's about changing, transforming, the system completely - maybe even creating a new one - and in order to begin that public conversation we need all the disparate social and economic elements to mass in one giant incoherent mess, as they are now, across the globe both in physical and virtual space.


Critics of the movement are saying it will fail since it appears to lack coherence and a so-called goal, but the absence of these protest conventions are the very things that give the movement a heretofore unseen and unusual power. Demand implies negotiation, as Naomi Klein has said, but this is not a negotiation. This is not a protest. It's  a self-enabling distribution of power - a dispersal of power if you will.  It's a magnificent sloppy movement in which everybody is talking to everybody about everything.