Dr. Chris Wright
2013
The world has changed since 2007, when I wrote the preface to the first edition of this book. That was still the age of capitalist triumphalism, of glacial politics in the U.S. and the Despair of the Activist. Cultural ennui—personal ennui for me. Aimlessness. Since 2008, though, and especially since 2011, life has taken on a new coloring. Horizons have opened; the world is in tumult, even more than it was, and nothing seems permanent anymore. Things have continued to get worse for most people and will continue to do so for decades, but now at least in activist circles there is the sense that the old world is crumbling and a new one is beginning its laborious birth. In other words, between 2008 and 2012 the world, particularly the West, began the long transition from an age of sick individualism to an age of healthy collectivism. Social movements began their long march back into the mainstream—social movements against economic injustice, the most fundamental kind of oppression. The recent evolution of economic power-structures— the institutions around which society pivots—is responsible not only for the brute material horrors of increasing class polarization and the global immizeration of billions but also for all the social atomism that has grown in the U.S. since the 1970s (or really the 1940s), the privatization of life, the human alienation, the destruction of public spaces and public discourse, the erosion of civil society so that now *churches* are practically the only functioning institutions that have some kind of positive relation to popular empowerment. Society has been gutted, because that has been in the interest of certain segments of the capitalist class. (Marx’s historical materialism, in its essence, is merely common sense.) The task for *human* beings now, as opposed to the *capitalist* beings who have brought us to the brink, is to reconstitute the public, the social. That is the way to save the world. And that is what Occupy Wall Street began in t
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