How Relocalization Worked. One of the points that I’ve tried to make repeatedly in these essays is the place of history as a guide to what works.
It’s a point that deserves repetition. A good many worldsaving plans now in circulation, however new the rhetoric that surrounds them, simply rehash proposals that were tried in the past and failed repeatedly; trying them yet again may thus not be the best use of our limited resources and time. Beyond the market/state dichotomy (2): Andreas Exner on the new Zeitgeist. Reproduced from Andreas Exner, on the emerging ‘gift economy’ and ‘communization’ mentalities: “A new thought lingers through society like a viral mem.
It pops up at unfamiliar places and is transmitted fast via different social milieus – the time, it seems, is ripe for it. Who wants a society beyond capitalism has to look for it beyond money, market and state. This thought is no longer confined to marginal magazines such as the Streifzüge (www.streifzuege.org) but is watched a million times and more – in the movie Zeitgeist: Moving Forward.
This phenomenon most strikingly shows that ever more people reject the dictatorship of competition, management and state. Life at the End of Empire, documentary. This excellent documentary from 2007, on the confluence of Peak Oil, Climate Change and the end of industrial civilisation, has only been posted on Youtube in January 2011: Tia Carr Williams has the following comments: “Deprived of hope for a future filled with family, fun and an opportunity to personally or professionally thrive, we find ourselves reduced more and more to survival at the most critical edge of societal disarray and precarious climate conditions.
