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   simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 16-May-2023 23:15:04 JST simsa04

   • scribe
   It saddens me to see that apparently there hasn't been made any conceptional or programatic progress in the past 40 years. All the mentioned trite proposals in this articvle are revamps of endeavours already widespread and practised in the 1970s and 1980s, with the same clichês (like #indigenous people having been egalitarian, etc.). And foremost: that people and their individual behaviour changes are centrepieces and origins of "change". That attitude led to the #Esalen Ideology of self-centered spiritual self-improvement in the first place.
   
   The most awful impact the #counterculture as well as the various other movements had since the early 1970s is that they never bridged the gap between the life of individual people and their immediate #communities on the one hand and the problems of how to change the foundations of #infrastructure, societies, and industries on the other. Not only did they deprive the #unions of at least two generations of new members (thus enabling #globalisation); as they couldn't come up with suitable proposals for industrialized societies as a whole, they became a lifestyle choice and a fad, presupposing for the viability of their daydreams the full-fledged functioning of an extractive economy and society they were out to critique and to be an alternative to in the first place.
   
   Like decades before, #degrowth and voluntary simplicity are ideals of the young affluent petty bourgeoisie, not of the working poor.
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     simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 09:56:33 JST simsa04

     • scribe
     I'm not sure the "working class" has been in need to come up with anything. For one, their inherent violence against deviations from their own lifestyle (which oscillates between exploitation and condescension, like in all lateral violence) proves to be far more reactionary than revolutionary.
     
     I was talking mainly about the snobbery of the #counterculture, the wide gap between their aspirations and reality, their moralistic entitlement, their inability to provide working solutions for societies, economies, and infrastructures as a whole. Even conceptually, approaches like systems thinking did not provide major progress but contributed further to a dehumanisation of people, their lifes, and the culture they live by. In that sense the may have been even worse than the reactionary "working class" (aka petite/petty bourgeoise).
     
     On the other hand, I don't think that "the" countercultrure's aspirations of the past 60 years have been about "survival" (in all the facets you mention) but about "liberation" (in the broadest sense). So I think you may retrospectively ascribe a theme onto them that hasn't been part of their motifs and topics. (Even ecology and small scale organic farming wasn't pursued "to save the planet", but to "heal" some land or end some local exploitation). Thus I don't think that the "planetary vision" was ever more than a catchphrase, and when it became more than that, it turned into urgency and despair.