February 04, 2013

Frances Fox Piven: Movements Making Noise

In her essay on political change, past and present, she concludes: "We need to reimagine our collective life so that it doesn’t depend on producing more and more stuff for more and more people, which is what most of our ideas of progress have usually been about. I don’t know whether it is possible to expunge our obsession with economic growth, but if it is, I suspect that only a cultural transformation fueled by the utopianism of contemporary movements can do it."

An important political observer, commentator and professor, Dr. Piven reflects on how change comes about, in this article for The Nation magazine: Movements Making Noise.

It starts: "Movements are powerful when they threaten to disrupt major institutions. Think of society as a complex tangle of cooperative relations that we call “institutions.” Capitalists invest in plants and machinery, workers run these machines, warehouse workers distribute the products, salespeople contract to sell them, and so on. All of these activities must go forward for the economy to work. Similarly, for cities to work, people have to walk the streets, or drive their autos or ride the subways, and for these systems to function, people also have to cooperate, to obey the rules and fulfill their appointed roles."...

Read full article here