The First Global Revolution Quotes

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that's struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many others in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization.

Competitive connectivity is the arms race of the twenty-first century.

It could be that our longing for Revolution is like our longing for perfect love, the impulse we all have for union that was for so long met by religion. However we assign these yearnings, it is difficult to ignore the obvious need for change. Some of us will ascribe it to romantic love, some to consumerism, some to utopianism. It doesn’t really matter. What is important is that for the first time in history we have the means to implement a truly representative system, the means to globally communicate it, and the conditions that require it.

It [Iranian Islamic Revolution] is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.

The late twentieth century has witnessed a remarkable growth in scientific interest in the subject of extinction. It is hardly a new subject—Baron Georges Cuvier had first demonstrated that species became extinct back in 1786, not long after the American Revolution. Thus the fact of extinction had been accepted by scientists for nearly three-quarters of a century before Darwin put forth his theory of evolution. And after Darwin, the many controversies that swirled around his theory did not often concern issues of extinction. On the contrary, extinction was generally considered as unremarkable as a car running out of gas. Extinction was simply proof of failure to adapt. How species adapted was intensely studied and fiercely debated. But the fact that some species failed was hardly given a second thought. What was there to say about it? However, beginning in the 1970s, two developments began to focus attention on extinction in a new way. The first was the recognition that human beings were now very numerous, and were altering the planet at a very rapid rate—eliminating traditional habitats, clearing the rain forest, polluting air and water, perhaps even changing global climate. In the process, many animal species were becoming extinct. Some scientists cried out in alarm; others were quietly uneasy. How fragile was the earth’s ecosystem? Was the human species engaged in behavior that would eventually lead to its own extinction?

Most revolutions start small and simmer under the surface gathering strength, adding to an ideology, gaining favourable opinion- first as a credible alternative and then as the majority view

No revolution can be successful without organization and money. "The downtrodden masses" usually provide little of the former and none of the latter. But Insiders at the top can arrange for both.   What did these people possibly have to gain in financing the Russian Revolution? What did they have to gain by keeping it alive and afloat, or, during the 1920's by pouring millions of dollars into what Lenin called his New Economic Program, thus saving the Soviets from collapse?   Why would these "capitalists" do all this? If your goal is global conquest, you have to start somewhere. It may or may not have been coincidental, but Russia was the one major European country without a central bank. In Russia, for the first time, the Communist conspiracy gained a geographical homeland from which to launch assaults against the other nations of the world. The West now had an enemy.   In the Bolshevik Revolution

Globalization and the technology revolution have allowed the 1 percent to prosper; but as the plutocrats have been getting richer and more powerful, the collapse of the Treaty of Detroit has meant we have taxed and regulated them less. It is a return to the first gilded age not only because we are living through an economic revolution, but also because the rules of the game again favor those who are winning it.

India is a land where contradictions will continue to abound, because there are many Indias that are being transformed, with different levels of intensity, by different forces of globalization. Each of these Indias is responding to them in different ways. Consider these coexisting examples of progress and status quo: India is a nuclear-capable state that still cannot build roads that will survive their first monsoon. It has eradicated smallpox through the length and breadth of the country, but cannot stop female foeticide and infanticide. It is a country that managed to bring about what it called the ‘green revolution’, which heralded food grain self-sufficiency for a nation that relied on external food aid and yet, it easily has the most archaic land and agricultural laws in the world, with no sign of anyone wanting to reform them any time soon. It has hundreds of millions of people who subsist on less that a dollar a day, but who vote astutely and punish political parties ruthlessly. It has an independent judiciary that once set aside even Indira Gandhi’s election to parliament and yet, many members of parliament have criminal records and still contest and win elections from prison. India is a significant exporter of intellectual capital to the rest of the world—that capital being spawned in a handful of world class institutions of engineering, science and management. Yet it is a country with primary schools of pathetic quality and where retaining children in school is a challenge. India truly is an equal opportunity employer of women leaders in politics, but it took over fifty years to recognize that domestic violence is a crime and almost as long to get tough with bride burning. It is the IT powerhouse of the world, the harbinger of the offshore services revolution that is changing the business paradigms of the developed world. But regrettably, it is also the place where there is a yawning digital divide.

Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence. The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.

Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield more results. “Less but better” does. Ferran Adrià, arguably the world’s greatest chef, who has led El Bulli to become the world’s most famous restaurant, epitomizes the principle of “less but better” in at least two ways. First, his specialty is reducing traditional dishes to their absolute essence and then re-imagining them in ways people have never thought of before. Second, while El Bulli has somewhere in the range of 2 million requests for dinner reservations each year, it serves only fifty people per night and closes for six months of the year. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferran had stopped serving food altogether and had instead turned El Bulli into a full-time food laboratory of sorts where he was continuing to pursue nothing but the essence of his craft.1 Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing more … and more and more. Yet at a certain point, more effort causes our progress to plateau and even stall. It’s true that the idea of a direct correlation between results and effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet research across many fields paints a very different picture. Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channeled toward improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3

So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum: how do you regulate the ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse. People are already sensing the coming cataclysm. Perhaps this is why citizens all over the world are losing faith in the liberal story, which just a decade ago seemed irresistible. How, then, do we go forward from here, and how do we cope with the immense challenges of the biotech and infotech revolutions? Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place could engineer some technological solution? For example, might networked algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his 2 billion friends to join forces and do something together?

What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to account for both observable phenomena and theoretical conundrums that can be explained only by quantum physics: A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In what Wheatley calls “this exquisitely connected world,” the real engine of change is never “critical mass”; dramatic and systemic change always begins with “critical connections.”14 So by now the crux of our preliminary needs should be apparent. We must open our hearts to new beacons of Hope. We must expand our minds to new modes of thought. We must equip our hands with new methods of organizing. And we must build on all of the humanity-stretching movements of the past half century: the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the civil rights movement; the Free Speech movement; the anti–Vietnam War movement; the Asian American, Native American, and Chicano movements; the women’s movement; the gay and lesbian movement; the disability rights/pride movement; and the ecological and environmental justice movements. We must find ourselves amid the fifty million people who as activists or as supporters have engaged in the many-sided struggles to create the new democratic and life-affirming values that are needed to civilize U.S. society.

In 2019, however, there is nothing left from that: the revolution- ary advent of social media has now reached its full swing, and 100 percent of all deeds, thoughts, deals, and acts in our lives are public. Social media’s almightiness has brought about many things, but the main one is transparency. Total transparency everywhere and for everyone. As a result, social media have shaken up the PR industry beyond recognition. In fact, social media have caused the first and only real PR revolution in the industry’s more than 100 years of history. Regardless of how the PR business may have developed over the years, we always used to be a transmission, a sort of bridge, between our clients and their clients.

There's a clear link between this cultural pattern and Germany's place in history as one of the first countries in the world to become heavily industrialized. Imagine being a factory worker in the German automative industry. If you arrive at work four minutes late, the machine for which you are responsible gets started late, which exacts a real, measurable financial cost. To this day, the perception of time in Germany is partially rooted in the early impact of the industrial revolution, where factory work required the labor force to be on hand and in place at a precisely appointed moment. In other societies -particularly in developing world- life centers around the fact of constant change. As political systems shift and financial systems alter, as traffic surges and wanes, as monsoons or water shortages raise unforeseeable challenges, the successful managers are those who have developed the ability to ride out the changes with ease and flexibility.

No revolution can be successful without organization and money. "The downtrodden masses" usually provide little of the former and none of the latter. But Insiders at the top can arrange for both.   What did these people possibly have to gain in financing the Russian Revolution? What did they have to gain by keeping it alive and afloat, or, during the 1920's by pouring millions of dollars into what Lenin called his New Economic Program, thus saving the Soviets from collapse?   Why would these "capitalists" do all this? If your goal is global conquest, you have to start somewhere. It may or may not have been coincidental, but Russia was the one major European country without a central bank. In Russia, for the first time, the Communist conspiracy gained a geographical homeland from which to launch assaults against the other nations of the world. The West now had an enemy.   In the Bolshevik Revolution we have some of the world's richest and most powerful men financing a movement which claims its very existence is based on the concept of stripping of their wealth men like the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Schiffs, Warburgs, Morgans, Harrimans, and Milners. But obviously these men have no fear of international Communism. It is only logical to assume that if they financed it and do not fear it, it must be because they control it. Can there be any other explanation that makes sense? Remember that for over 150 years it has been standard operating procedure of the Rothschilds and their allies to control both sides of every conflict. You must have an "enemy" if you are going to collect from the King. The East-West balance-of-power politics is used as one of the main excuses for the socialization of America. Although it was not their main purpose, by nationalization of Russia the Insiders bought themselves an enormous piece of real estate, complete with mineral rights, for somewhere between $30 and $40 million.   ----  

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

There are many reasons why the tech revolution will hit the emerging world much harder than it will hit Europe and the United States. In developed countries, children are more likely to grow up with digital technologies as toys and then to encounter them in school. Governments in these countries have money to invest in educational systems that prepare workers, both blue and white collar, for change. Their universities have much greater access to state-of-the-art technologies. Their companies produce the innovations that drive tech change in the first place. This creates a dynamic in which high-wage countries are more likely than low-wage ones to dominate the skill-intensive industries that will generate twenty-first-century growth, leaving behind large numbers of those billion-plus people who only recently emerged from age-old deprivation. The wealth in developed countries helps them maintain much stronger social safety nets than in poorer countries to help citizens who lose their jobs, fall ill, or need to care for sick children or aging parents. In short, wealthier countries are both more adaptable and more resilient than developing ones.

In North America, there is no nostalgia for the postwar period, quite simply because the Trente Glorieuses never existed there: per capita output grew at roughly the same rate of 1.5–2 percent per year throughout the period 1820–2012. To be sure, growth slowed a bit between 1930 and 1950 to just over 1.5 percent, then increased again to just over 2 percent between 1950 and 1970, and then slowed to less than 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012. In Western Europe, which suffered much more from the two world wars, the variations are considerably greater: per capita output stagnated between 1913 and 1950 (with a growth rate of just over 0.5 percent) and then leapt ahead to more than 4 percent from 1950 to 1970, before falling sharply to just slightly above US levels (a little more than 2 percent) in the period 1970–1990 and to barely 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012. Western Europe experienced a golden age of growth between 1950 and 1970, only to see its growth rate diminish to one-half or even one-third of its peak level during the decades that followed. [...] If we looked only at continental Europe, we would find an average per capita output growth rate of 5 percent between 1950 and 1970—a level well beyond that achieved in other advanced countries over the past two centuries. These very different collective experiences of growth in the twentieth century largely explain why public opinion in different countries varies so widely in regard to commercial and financial globalization and indeed to capitalism in general. In continental Europe and especially France, people quite naturally continue to look on the first three postwar decades—a period of strong state intervention in the economy—as a period blessed with rapid growth, and many regard the liberalization of the economy that began around 1980 as the cause of a slowdown. In Great Britain and the United States, postwar history is interpreted quite differently. Between 1950 and 1980, the gap between the English-speaking countries and the countries that had lost the war closed rapidly. By the late 1970s, US magazine covers often denounced the decline of the United States and the success of German and Japanese industry. In Britain, GDP per capita fell below the level of Germany, France, Japan, and even Italy. It may even be the case that this sense of being rivaled (or even overtaken in the case of Britain) played an important part in the “conservative revolution.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States promised to “roll back the welfare state” that had allegedly sapped the animal spirits of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs and thus to return to pure nineteenth-century capitalism, which would allow the United States and Britain to regain the upper hand. Even today, many people in both countries believe that the conservative revolution was remarkably successful, because their growth rates once again matched continental European and Japanese levels. In fact, neither the economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914–1945 regardless of what policies they had adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration). The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all of these wealthy countries more or less equalized [...] Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this simple reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it.

With Iran’s revolution, an Islamist movement dedicated to overthrowing the Westphalian system gained control over a modern state and asserted its “Westphalian” rights and privileges—taking up its seat at the United Nations, conducting its trade, and operating its diplomatic apparatus. Iran’s clerical regime thus placed itself at the intersection of two world orders, arrogating the formal protections of the Westphalian system even while repeatedly proclaiming that it did not believe in it, would not be bound by it, and intended ultimately to replace it. This duality has been ingrained in Iran’s governing doctrine. Iran styles itself as “the Islamic Republic,” implying an entity whose authority transcends territorial demarcations, and the Ayatollah heading the Iranian power structure (first Khomeini, then his successor, Ali Khamenei) is conceived of not simply as an Iranian political figure but as a global authority—“the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution” and “the Leader of the Islamic Ummah and Oppressed People.” The Iranian constitution proclaims the goal of the unification of all Muslims as a national obligation: In accordance with the sacred verse of the Qur’an (“This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me” [21:92]), all Muslims form a single nation, and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has the duty of formulating its general policies with a view to cultivating the friendship and unity of all Muslim peoples, and it must constantly strive to bring about the political, economic, and cultural unity of the Islamic world.

Back in 2015, a volunteer group called Bitnation set up something called the Blockchain Emergency ID. There’s not a lot of data on the project now, BE-ID - used public-key cryptography to generate unique IDs for people without their documents. People could verify their relations, that these people belonged to their family, and so on. It was a very modern way of maintaining an ID; secure, fast, and easy to use. Using the Bitcoin blockchain, the group published all these IDs on to a globally distributed public ledger, spread across the computers of every single Bitcoin user online - hundreds of thousands of users, in those times. Once published, no government could undo it; the identities would float around in the recesses of the Internet. As long as the network remained alive, every person's identity would remain intact, forever floating as bits and bytes between the nations: no single country, government or company could ever deny them this. “That was, and I don't say this often, the fucking bomb,” said Common, In one fell swoop, identities were taken outside government control. BE-ID, progressing in stages, became the refugees' gateway to social assistance and financial services. First it became compliant with UN guidelines. Then it was linked to a VISA card. And thus out of the Syrian war was something that looked like it could solve global identification forever. Experts wrote on its potential. No more passports. No more national IDs. Sounds familiar? Yes, that’s the United Nations Identity in a nutshell. Julius Common’s first hit - the global identity revolution that he sold first to the UN, and then to almost every government in the world - was conceived of when he was a teenager.

We have been thinking and doing a post jobs-system economy in Detroit for more than two decades. In fall 2011, several hundred people from Detroit and around the nation came together to share the lessons we have derived from our struggles to distinguish “work” from “jobs.” I noted that people moved from the farm to the city to take “jobs.” They went from making clothes and growing food to buying clothes and buying food. Humans changed from producers to consumers, and their models and ideals of work became factory oriented. Olga Bonfiglio, a professor at Kalamazoo College, wrote a thoughtful response to my presentation and the many others comprising our Reimagining Work conference. “Basically, work is about one’s calling in life and contributions to the community while jobs are more about the specific tasks people perform for an organization,” she remarked. “ ‘Jobs’ have a dehumanizing effect as people fill interchangeable slots in a big machine. In today’s global economy workers can be easily replaced with those willing to work for lower wages. So, transformation to any new system of ‘work’ must begin with one’s own personal discernment about identity and purpose in this life.” We know we have not been alone in Detroit. All over the planet more and more people are thinking beyond making a living to making a life—a life that respects Earth and one another. Just as we need to reinvent democracy, now is the time for us to reimagine work and reimagine life. The new paradigm we must establish is about creating systems that bring out the best in each of us, instead of trying to harness the greed and selfishness of which we are capable. It is about a new balance of individual, family, community, work, and play that makes us better humans.

He was in love with France before he even reached Paris. Jefferson’s work in Europe offered him a new battlefield in the war for American union and national authority that he had begun in the Congress. His sojourn in France is often seen as a revolutionary swoon during which he fell too hard for the foes of monarchy, growing overly attached to—and unhealthily admiring of—the French Revolution and its excesses. Some of his most enduring radical quotations, usually considered on their own with less appreciation of the larger context of Jefferson’s decades-long political, diplomatic, and philosophical careers, date from this era. His relationship to France and to the French, however, should be seen for what it was: a political undertaking in which Jefferson put the interests of America first. He was determined to create a balance of global power in which France would help the United States resist commercial and possible military threats from the British.5 From the ancien régime of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to the French Revolution to the Age of Napoleon, Jefferson viewed France in the context of how it could help America on the world stage.6 Much of Jefferson’s energy was spent striving to create international respect for the United States and to negotiate commercial treaties to build and expand American commerce and wealth. His mind wandered and roamed and soared, but in his main work—the advancement of America’s security and economic interests—he was focused and clear-headed. Countries earned respect by appearing strong and unified. Jefferson wanted America to be respected. He, therefore, took care to project strength and a sense of unity. The cause of national power required it, and he was as devoted to the marshaling of American power in Paris as he had been in Annapolis. E

One section of the socialists, the Mensheviks, deduced that the leadership in the coming revolution should belong to the liberal bourgeoisie. Lenin and his followers realized that the liberal bourgeoisie was unable and unwilling to cope with such a task, and that Russia's young working class, supported by a rebellious peasantry, was the only force capable of waging the revolutionary struggle to a conclusion. But Lenin remained convinced, and emphatically asserted, that Russia, acting alone, could not go beyond a bourgeois revolution; and that only after capitalism had been overthrown in Western Europe would she too be able to embark on socialist revolution. For a decade and a half, from 1903 till 1917, Lenin wrestled with this problem: how could a revolution led, against bourgeois opposition, by a socialist working class result in the establishment of a capitalist order? Trotsky cut through this dogmatic tangle with the conclusion that the dynamic of the revolution could not be contained within any particular stage, and that once released it would overflow all barriers and sweep away not only tsardom but also Russia's weak capitalism, so that what had begun as a bourgeois revolution would end as a socialist one. Here a fateful question posed itself. Socialism, as understood by Marxists, presupposed a highly developed modern economy and civilization, an abundance of material and cultural wealth, that alone could enable society to satisfy the needs of all its members and abolish class divisions. This was obviously beyond the reach of an underdeveloped and backward Russia. Trotsky, therefore argued that Russia could only begin the socialist revolution, but would find it extremely difficult to continue it, and impossible to complete it. The revolution would run into a dead end, unless it burst Russia's national boundaries and brought into motion the forces of revolution in the West. Trotsky assumed that just as the Russian Revolution could not be contained within the bourgeois stage, so it would not be brought to rest within its national boundaries: it would be the prelude, or the first act, of a global upheaval. Internationally as well as nationally, this would be permanent revolution.

As it happens, the term “white skin privilege” was first popularized in the 1970s by the SDS radicals of “Weatherman,” who were carrying on a terrorist war against “Amerikkka,” a spelling designed to stigmatize the United States as a nation of Klansmen. Led by presidential friends, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather terrorists called on other whites to renounce their privilege and join a global race war already in progress. Although their methods and style kept the Weather radicals on the political fringe, their views on race reflected those held by the broad ranks of the political left. In the following years, the concept of “white skin privilege” continued to spread until it became an article of faith among all progressives, a concept that accounted for everything that was racially wrong in America beginning with its constitutional founding. As Pax Christi USA, a Catholic organization, explained: “Law in the U.S. protects white skin privilege because white male landowners created the laws to protect their rights, their culture and their wealth.” This is the theme of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the most popular book ever written on the subject, and of university curricula across the nation. Eventually, the concept of white skin privilege was embraced even by liberals who had initially resisted it as slander against a nation that had just concluded a historically unprecedented civil rights revolution. This was because the concept of white skin privilege provided an explanation for the fact that the recent Civil Rights Acts had not led to an equality of results, and that racial disparities persisted even as overt racists and institutional barriers were vanishing from public life. The inconvenient triumph of American tolerance presented an existential problem for civil rights activists, whom it threatened to put out of work. “White skin privilege” offered a solution. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained: “white skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose,” but is rather an unavoidable consequence of the “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society.” In other words, even if white Americans were no longer racists, they were.

The modern-day ultra-Left ideology of “Cultural Marxism” takes yesterday’s Soviet Marxist-Leninist model and stands it on its head. Revolution on this alternative path no longer envisions a cataclysmic clash between workers and capitalists as the final act. Rather, contemporary revolutionary doctrine is far more dangerous: it is based on a nonviolent, persistent, and “quiet” transformation of American traditions, families, education, media, and support institutions day-by-day. The seizure of political and economic power remains a key objective, but this “final act” is really a first step in transforming the existing cultural order.

First of all, we've never had capitalism, so it can't end. We have some variety of state capitalism. If you fly on an airplane, you're basically flying in a modified bomber. If you buy drugs, the basic research was done under public funding and support. The high-tech system is permeated with internal controls, government subsidies. And if you look at what are supposed to be the growing alternatives, China is another form of state capitalism... The question is whether these systems, whatever they are, can be adapted to current problems and circumstances. For example, there's no justification, economic or other, for the enormous and growing role of financial institutions since the 1970s. Even some of the most respected economists pint out that they're just a drag on the economy. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times says straight out that the financial institutions shouldn't be allowed to have anything like the power they do. There's plenty of leeway for modification and change. Worker-owned industries can take over. There's interesting work on this topic by Gar Alperovitz, who has been right at the center of a lot of organizing around worker control. It's not a revolution, but it's the germ of another type of capitalism, capitalism in the sense that markets and profit are involved.

By the summer of 1920 Lenin felt confident enough to export the Revolution westwards, ordering the Red Army to march on Warsaw and confidently talking of the need to ‘sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too’. Only their decisive defeat by the Polish army on the banks of the River Vistula halted the spread of the Bolshevik epidemic.

The only way to ensure that peasants handed over their grain to feed the Red Army, he insisted, was to order exemplary executions of so-called kulaks, the supposedly rapacious capitalist peasants whom it suited the Bolsheviks to demonize. ‘How can you make a revolution without firing squads?’ Lenin asked. ‘If we can’t shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.

In the succeeding two centuries, however, some countries evolved in a very different direction. Prussia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, and other European countries followed France in the development of centralized bureaucracies organized along Weberian lines. The French Revolution had, moreover, unleashed not just demands for popular political participation but also a new form of identity by which a shared language and culture would be the central source of unity for the new democratic public. This phenomenon, known as nationalism, then prompted the redrawing of the political map of Europe as dynastic states linked by marriage and feudal obligations were replaced by ones based on a principle of ethnolinguistic solidarity. The levée en masse of the French Revolution represented the first coming together of all these trends: the revolutionary government in Paris was able to mobilize a significant part of the available able-bodied male population to defend France. Under Napoleon, this mobilized expression of state power went on to conquer much of the rest of Europe.

The same process is unfolding in the early twenty-first century with passage of the Dodd-Frank bill regulating the financial sector: Congress delegated to the regulators the responsibility of writing many of the detailed provisions, which will inevitably be challenged in the courts. Ironically, excessive delegation and vetocracy are intertwined.

The evidence is all around us. For instance, do you know what happens if you type the words “why am I” into Google? Before you can type the next word, Google’s autocomplete function—based on the most common searches—helpfully offers to finish your thought. The first suggestion: “why am I so tired?” The global zeitgeist perfectly captured in five words. The existential cry of the modern age. And

As is well-known among those who still remember Marxism, the ambiguous central point of its theoretical edifice concerns its premise that capitalism itself creates the conditions for its self-overcoming through proletarian revolution - how are we to read this? Is it to be read in a linear evolutionary way: revolution should take place when capitalism fully develops all its potentials and exhausts all its possibilities, the mythic point at which it confronts its central antagonism ("contradiction") at its purest, in its naked form? And is it enough to add the "subjective" aspect and to emphasize that the working class should not just sit and wait for the "ripe moment," but to "educate" itself through long struggle? As is also well-known, Lenin's theory of the "weakest link of the chain" is a kind of compromise-solution: although it accepts that the first revolution can take place not in the most developed country, but in a country in which antagonisms of the capitalist development are most aggravated, even if it is less developed (Russia, which combined concentrated modern capitalist-industrial islands with agrarian backwardness and pre-democratic authoritarian government), it still perceived October Revolution as a risky break-through which can only succeed if it will be soon accompanied by a large-scale Western European revolution (all eyes were focused on Germany in this respect). The radical abandonment of this model occurred only with Mao, for whom the proletarian revolution should take place in the less developed part of the world, among the large crowds of the Third World impoverished peasants, workers and even "patriotic bourgeoisie," who are exposed to the aftershocks of the capitalist globalization, organizing their rage and despair. In a total reversal (perversion even) of the Marx's model, the class struggle is thus reformulated as the struggle between the First World "bourgeois nations" and the Third World "proletarian nations.

He created, in the words of historian Hans Rosenberg, “a first-rate army which had to be supported by a country which was third-rate in terms of manpower, natural wealth, capital supply, and economic skills.

The labor arbitrage view of global trade, a model that goes back to the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution, assumes that manufacturing will always flow to low-cost countries. But the new automation view suggests that the advantages of cheap labor are shrinking while other factors—closeness to the ultimate consumer, transportation costs (including possible carbon taxes), flexibility, quality, and reliability—are rising.

April 21, 2002, the "No" vote on the European referendum, the riots in the suburbs and the social movement against the CPE (first employment contract). Confronted with their own objectives (when they exist), they are insignificant - the zero degree of an impossible revolution. But if we interpret them on a global level, in the framework of this global antagonism, then they become "micro rogue-events," an almost instinctive abreaction, no matter what their ideology, to the deregulatory machine of world power. In some ways, the "No" on the referendum, the illogical and unexplainable "No," or the revolts in the suburbs come from the same demand. It is not a demand to be "integrated." On the contrary, it is a demand not to be integrated at all, or tethered or annexed or taken hostage by any model (especially an ideal one!), because it always hides an absolutely deadly totalitarian arrangement, an unquestioned fundamentalism. And in this sense, maybe they are "less-dead-than-others." Wherever this global confrontation will lead, nothing is yet decided and the suspense remains total.

Daedalus Winter 2002. Vol. 131, pg. 89 The Biology of Race and the Concept of Equality. Ernst Mayr There is a widespread feeling that the word "race" indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as "there are no human races." Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Races are not something specifically human; races occur in a large percentage of species of animals. You can read in every textbook on evolution that geographic races of animals, when isolated from other races of their species, may in due time become new species. The terms "subspecies" and "geographic race" are used interchangeably in this taxonomic literature. … In a recent textbook of taxonomy, I defined a "geographic race" or subspecies as "an aggregate of phenotypically similar populations of a species inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of that species and differing taxonomically from other populations of that species." A subspecies is a geographic race that is sufficiently different taxonomically to be worthy of a separate name. What is characteristic of a geographic race is, first, that it is restricted to a geographic subdivision of the range of a species, and second, that in spite of certain diagnostic differences, it is part of a larger species. No matter what the cause of the racial difference might be, the fact that species of organisms may have geographic races has been demonstrated so frequently that it can no longer be denied. And the geographic races of the human races established before the voyages of European discovery and subsequent rise of a global economy - agree in most characteristics with the geographic races of animals. Recognizing races is only recognizing a biological fact. from Wikipedia: Ernst Mayr Ernst Walter Mayr was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, philosopher of biology, and historian of science. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.

Social media have shaken up the PR industry beyond recognition. In fact, social media have caused the first and only real PR revolution in the industry’s more than 100 years of history.

First of all, the word “newspaper” doesn’t really exist anymore, because the first part, “news,” is gone from it. What’s left is only “paper.

As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. “I love this country,” he used to say, “not only because my ancestors’ blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.” Shea Howell, Oakland University rhetoric professor and former director of Detroit Summer, has helped hundreds of students and community organizers appreciate what Jimmy meant: Love isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you do every day when you go out and pick up the papers and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they’re doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give ’em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than we are. In other words, Love isn’t about what we did yesterday; it’s about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after. Taking King seriously also requires a paradigm shift in how we address the three main questions of philosophy: What does it mean to be a human being? How do we know? How shall we live? It means rejecting scientific rationalism (based on the Cartesian body-mind dichotomy), which recognizes as real only that which can be measured and therefore excludes the knowledge that comes from the heart or from relationships between people. It means that we must be willing to see with our hearts and not only with our eyes. King was assassinated before he could begin to develop strategies and praxis to implement this revolutionary/evolutionary perspective for our young people, our cities, and our country. After his death many of his closest associates were too overwhelmed or too busy taking advantage of the new opportunities for advancement within the system to keep his vision and his practice alive. We will never know how King would have developed had he lived to see the twenty-first century. What we do know is that in the forty years since his assassination, our communities have been turned into wastelands by the Hi-Tech juggernaut and the export of, first, factory and, now, computer jobs overseas so that global corporations can make more of a profit with cheaper labor. We have witnessed and shared the suffering of countless numbers of young people in our inner cities,

On the political Right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political Left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the twenty-first century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state.

I am convinced that the fourth industrial revolution will be every bit as powerful, impactful and historically important as the previous three. However, I have two primary concerns about factors that may limit the potential of the fourth industrial revolution to be effectively and cohesively realized. First, I feel that the required levels of leadership and understanding of the changes under way, across all sectors, are low when contrasted with the need to rethink our economic, social and political systems to respond to the fourth industrial revolution. As a result, both at the national and global levels, the requisite institutional framework to govern the diffusion of innovation and mitigate the disruption is inadequate at best and, at worst, absent altogether. Second, the world lacks a consistent, positive and common narrative that outlines the opportunities and challenges of the fourth industrial revolution, a narrative that is essential if we are to empower a diverse set of individuals and communities and avoid a popular backlash against the fundamental changes under way.

According to the temperature records kept by the UK Met Office (and other series are much the same), over the past 150 years (that is, from the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution), mean global temperature has increased by a little under a degree centigrade—according to the Met Office, 0.8°C. This has happened in fits and starts, which are not fully understood. To begin with, to the extent that anyone noticed it, it was seen as a welcome and natural recovery from the rigours of the Little Ice Age. But the great bulk of it—0.5°C out of the 0.8°C—occurred during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was then that global warming alarmism was born. But since then, and wholly contrary to the expectations of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, who confidently predicted that global warming would not merely continue but would accelerate, given the unprecedented growth of global carbon dioxide emissions, as China’s coalbased economy has grown by leaps and bounds, there has been no further warming at all. To be precise, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a deeply flawed body whose nonscientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist, reckons that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of—wait for it—0.05°Cs per decade, plus or minus 0.1°C. Their figures, not mine. In other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error. And that margin of error, it must be said, is implausibly small. After all, calculating mean global temperature from the records of weather stations and maritime observations around the world, of varying quality, is a pretty heroic task in the first place. Not to mention the fact that there is a considerable difference between daytime and night-time temperatures. In any event, to produce a figure accurate to hundredths of a degree is palpably absurd.

Historians estimate that the average annual income in Italy around the year 1300 was roughly $1,600. Some 600 years later – after Columbus, Galileo, Newton, the Scientific Revolution, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the invention of gunpowder, printing, and the steam engine – it was … still $1,600.3 Six hundred years of civilization, and the average Italian was pretty much where he’d always been. It was not until about 1880, right around the time Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Thomas Edison patented his lightbulb, Carl Benz was tinkering with his first car, and Josephine Cochrane was ruminating on what may just be the most brilliant idea ever – the dishwasher – that our Italian peasant got swept up in the march of progress. And what a wild ride it has been. The past two centuries have seen explosive growth in both population and prosperity worldwide. Per capita income is now ten times what it was in 1850. The average Italian is fifteen times as wealthy as in 1880. And the global economy? It is now 250 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution – when nearly everyone, everywhere was still poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly.

The age of territory was driven by acquisition. Leaders of nations sought to increase their nation’s power by gaining territory—mostly through force. Accumulated military prowess by one drove would-be victims to arm. War was thus inevitable. Lost lives and wasted resources were its currency. And always, one side’s gain was the other’s loss. Today, the importance of land as the primary source of human livelihood has diminished, giving way to science instead. Unlike territory, science has no borders or flags. Science can’t be conquered by tanks or defended by fighter jets. It has no limitations. A nation can increase its scientific achievement without taking anything from somebody else. In fact, great scientific achievement by one nation lifts the fortunes of all nations. It is the first time in history that we can win, without making anyone lose. In the age of science, the traditional power of states and leaders is declining. Rather than politicians, it is innovators that drive the global economy and wield the most influence. The young leaders who created Facebook and Google have sparked a revolution without killing one person. The globalized economy affects every state, yet no single state is powerful enough to determine outcomes. We are participating in the birth of a new world.

Indeed, post-colonial theory first emerged in the wake of the failure of the Third World nations to go it alone. It marked the end of the era of Third World revolutions and the first glimmerings of what we now know as globalization.

The astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell said of his experience of viewing Earth from the moon: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’ ” I love this quote for many reasons. One, because it illustrates that all the well-meaning talk of oneness, such as you have found in this book, is built upon an empirical reality. We’re all one, the human family; when you pull back to outer space or dive within to inner space, that becomes clear. I like that traveling to the moon was such an emotional and spiritual experience for Edgar, as I have always thought that astronauts would be tough military types that wouldn’t be given to such profound pronouncements. Mostly, though, I love his violent conclusion that he’d like to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and take him to the moon. Firstly because to grab anyone by the scruff of the neck is an animal and implausible thing to do. I just felt the back of my neck and there’s barely any scruff to grab. Unless this politician had a particularly fat neck, Edgar would have to be content with an inch of skin between his thumb and forefinger, like he was holding a teacup; he might as well have his pinkie finger extended. Then he’d have to kidnap the bloke, presumably from Washington, drag him all the way to Cape Canaveral, Florida, into the NASA HQ, presumably give him some basic space training, put him in a suit, a rocket, strap him in, spend a few days getting to the moon, then finally march him out and admonish him for his lack of perspective. I don’t think he could sustain his indignation for that long. I reckon he’d start to feel a connection to the terrified politician at some point during that journey, possibly in the training section, where they’d have to acclimatize to zero gravity in a swimming pool. Also, surely once Edgar got back to the moon and he looked back to Earth, his love of all the members of the human family would kick back in and he might feel too guilty to lay into the sobbing and vertiginous, undisclosed politician. Among the small number of people who have seen our planet from space this sense of enlightenment is seemingly common. There are loads of comparable quotes that illustrate this strong sense of connection and fraternity. I chose Edgar D. Mitchell’s one because he’s the only astronaut who saw his epiphany as an impetus to snatch a senator and beat him up on the moon like an intergalactic Vito Corleone.

clearly too many in the military have forgotten that their most important mission is to prevent wars from starting in the first place, not  to follow the Americans into elective wars for the banks.

At every step, we must demand not only more than they are willing to concede us, but more than they are capable of conceding us, such that the limitations of the present society are exposed and pushed towards their breaking point. After all, at the moment, it is the ruling class which demands of us more than we can give - what is "reasonable" to it is the sacrifice of thousands upon thousands to a global pandemic and impending climate catastrophe. In such a case, being unreasonably ambitious is the bare minimum. One may doubt whether a global revolutionary movement is still possible, but one cannot doubt that it is necessary.

We live in an era that involves an extraordinary amount of change. To see this, consider the rate of global economic growth, which in recent decades averaged around 3 percent per year.51 This is historically unprecedented. For the first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence, global growth was close to 0 percent per year; in the agricultural era that increased to around 0.1 percent, and it accelerated from there after the Industrial Revolution. It’s only in the last hundred years that the world economy has grown at a rate above 2 percent per year. Putting this another way: from 10,000 BC onwards, it took many hundreds of years for the world economy to double in size. The most recent doubling took just

A Moment of Joy" The ruling global elites are holding their breath in anticipation of who may be the first to start a nuclear war! The wealthy and the stock market traders are fearfully watching the fluctuation in the stock prices… Writers, media pundits, and academics on the payroll of power and authority are worried about a potential revolution that may put an end to the powers in place, and consequently to their existence! Doctors, engineers, and other professionals are all alarmed and watching the job market in fear of losing their cushy jobs! Only the waitress at the nearby restaurant is experiencing a moment of joy for the generous tip she just received from the last customer tonight! [Original poem published in Arabic on October 30,2023 at ahewar.org]

The scope and magnitude of the changes in the late Middle Ages rivaled those of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century or of today’s era of high technology and globalization. The twelfth century saw the development of manufactured paper, the invention of the magnetic compass, and the construction of the first known windmill.

Gutenberg just wanted to make money printing Bibles. Yet his press catalyzed the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation, and so became the greatest threat to the Catholic Church since its establishment. Fridge makers didn’t aim to create a hole in the ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), just as the creators of the internal combustion and jet engines had no thought of melting the ice caps. In fact early enthusiasts for automobiles argued for their environmental benefits: engines would rid the streets of mountains of horse dung that spread dirt and disease across urban areas. They had no conception of global warming.

rising income inequality. not for nothing did Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ become a New York Times bestseller. Piketty made the strong claim that the rate of return on capital was, in the absence of wars and revolutions, always likely to be higher than the rate of economic growth. the implication was simply that the already well-off, basically those with no shortage of capital, would steadily get richer

Europe’s 2003 heat wave, which killed 70,000 people, was the first individual event statistically attributed to global warming. In 2014, heat waves were already ten times as likely as they were just ten years earlier, and this frequency is increasing.

One person’s reduction is a tiny drop in a vast ocean of human greenhouse gas emissions. If directly reducing global emissions were my main motivation, I’d find it depressing, like trying to save the world all by myself. Instead, I reduce for three much better reasons. First, I enjoy living with less fossil fuel. I love biking, I love growing food, and I love being at home with my family instead of away at conferences. Less fossil fuel has meant more connection with the land, with food, with family and friends, and with community. If through some magic spell, global warming were to suddenly and completely vanish, I’d continue living with far less fossil fuel.2 Second, by moving away from fossil fuel, I’m aligning my actions with my principles. Burning fossil fuel with the knowledge of the harm it causes creates cognitive dissonance, which can lead to feelings of guilt, panic, or depression. Others might respond to this cognitive dissonance with cynicism, or perhaps by denying that fossil fuels are harmful. But I find that a better option is simply to align action to principle. Finally, I believe personal reduction does help, indirectly, by shifting the culture. I’ve had countless discussions about the changes I’ve made, and I’ve seen many people around me begin to make similar changes in their own lives. By changing ourselves, we help others envision change. We gradually shift cultural norms.

To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended. Let me give you two lists. First: the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, the Great Depression, the Nazi regime, the Second World War, the Chinese Revolution, the 2008 financial crisis: every single one was the result of top–down decision-making by relatively small numbers of people trying to implement deliberate plans – politicians, central bankers, revolutionaries and so on. Second: the growth of global income; the disappearance of infectious diseases; the feeding of seven billion; the clean-up of rivers and air; the reforestation of much of the rich world; the internet; the use of mobile-phone credits as banking; the use of genetic fingerprinting to convict criminals and acquit the innocent. Every single one of these was a serendipitous, unexpected phenomenon supplied by millions of people who did not intend to cause these big changes.

Revolution means literally a complete reversal of the old power relationships, with its embedded institutions. So yes, we need a total revolution. It is time for the sacred to come forward, for we are indeed sacred beings. That much is clear from history. For too long we have been told: "That's the way things have always been done." Not true. Our earth and humanity has been around a long time, and there is a peaceful instinct inherent in human beings. There have been harmonious times in the past, and there is no reason for not working to achieve a greater humanity today. I strive to be part of that humanity. In The Women of La Raza, we learn of how much "today's values" have been forced upon us as "traditions" by colonizers who want us to behave within a certain mindset, conforming to the status quo. They consider profits first, despite the global conflicts and suffering it has caused throughout the centuries. It is past time for us to ask the kind of questions that gives us, not only answers, but places us in a quest for solutions to the spiritual and social problems facing the world today.

Many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before.

The last time humanity struggled with changing factors that necessitated new economic models, the causes were the Industrial Revolution paired with the first globalization wave. We argued—vigorously—over which system might be best. We had fights. We had wars. We had big wars. Most were not Cold. Living through history is messy.

The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a “Third World” in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870–1900). At the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result (in Latin America as well) was rural “semi-proletarianization,” the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the twentieth century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.

In the period immediately following ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the national public service at its upper levels has been described as a “Government by Gentlemen” and it did not look too different in certain respects from the one that existed in early-nineteenth-century Britain.8 One might also label it government by the friends of George Washington, since the republic’s first president chose men like himself who he felt had good qualifications and a dedication to public service.9 Under John Adams, 70 percent, and under Jefferson, 60 percent of high-ranking officials had fathers who came from the landed gentry, merchant, or professional classes.10 Many people today marvel at the quality of political leadership at the time of America’s founding, the sophistication of the discourse revealed in the Federalist Papers, and the ability to think about institutions in a long-term perspective. At least part of the reason for this strong leadership was that America at the time was not a full democracy but rather a highly elitist society, many of whose leaders were graduates of Harvard and Yale. Like the British elite, many of them knew each other personally from school and from their common participation in the revolution and drafting of the Constitution.

Homo sapiens evolved to think of people as divided into us and them. ‘Us’ was the group immediately around you, whoever you were, and ‘them’ was everyone else. In fact, no social animal is ever guided by the interests of the entire species to which it belongs. No chimpanzee cares about the interests of the chimpanzee species, no snail will lift a tentacle for the global snail community, no lion alpha male makes a bid for becoming the king of all lions, and at the entrance of no beehive can one find the slogan: ‘Worker bees of the world – unite!’ But beginning with the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens became more and more exceptional in this respect. People began to cooperate on a regular basis with complete strangers, whom they imagined as ‘brothers’ or ‘friends’. Yet this brotherhood was not universal. Somewhere in the next valley, or beyond the mountain range, one could still sense ‘them’. When the first pharaoh, Menes, united Egypt around 3000 BC, it was clear to the Egyptians that Egypt had a border, and beyond the border lurked ‘barbarians’. The barbarians were alien, threatening, and interesting only to the extent that they had land or natural resources that the Egyptians wanted. All the imagined orders people created tended to ignore a substantial part of humankind. The first millennium BC witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal orders, whose devotees could for the first time imagine the entire world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of

her imperative to “think dialectically”—a maxim drawn from her study of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And if reality is changing around us, we cannot expect good ideas to hatch within an ivory tower. They instead emerge and develop through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts. Grace often attributes her “having been born female and Chinese” to her sense of being an outsider to mainstream society. Over the past decade she has sharpened this analysis considerably. Reflecting on the limits of her prior encounters with radicalism, Grace fully embraces the feminist critique not only of gender discrimination and inequality but also of the masculinist tendencies that too often come to define a certain brand of movement organizing—one driven by militant posturing, a charismatic form of hierarchical leadership, and a static notion of power seen as a scarce commodity to be acquired and possessed. Grace has struck up a whole new dialogue and built relationships with Asian American activists and intellectuals since the 1998 release of her autobiography, Living for Change. Her reflections on these encounters have reinforced her repeated observation that marginalization serves as a form of liberation. Thus, she has come away impressed with the particular ability of movement-oriented Asian Americans to dissect U.S. society in new ways that transcend the mind-sets of blacks and whites, to draw on their transnational experiences to rethink the nature of the global order, and to enact new propositions free of the constraints and baggage weighing down those embedded in the status quo. Still, Grace’s practical connection to a constantly changing reality for most of her adult life has stemmed from an intimate relationship with the African American community—so much so that informants from the Cointelpro days surmised she was probably Afro-Chinese.3 This connection to black America (and to a lesser degree the pan-African world) has made her a source of intrigue for younger generations grappling with the rising complexities of race and diversity. It has been sustained through both political commitments and personal relationships. Living in Detroit for more than a half century, Grace has developed a stature as one of Motown’s most cherished citizens: penning a weekly column for the city’s largest-circulation black community newspaper; regularly profiled in the mainstream and independent media; frequently receiving awards and honors through no solicitation of her own; constantly visited by students, intellectuals, and activists from around the world; and even speaking on behalf of her friend Rosa Parks after the civil rights icon became too frail for public appearances.

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

These deals were part of a strategy that Koch had been formulating for over a year. Koch saw something in Eagle Ford. It was something that others also saw, but that Koch was the first to exploit. While production was flat until early 2010, the number of drilling rigs had more than tripled in just over a year, from thirty to 104. This number was a leading indicator. The wells would start pumping, and new oil would start to flow. Koch Industries was poised for the change. The wells being drilled into southern Texas were the face of an energy revolution that would redefine global oil markets and the American economy. They were part of a once-in-a-generation transformation that crept up quietly and then changed everything. In one short decade—from 2005 to 2015—America went from being the largest importer of refined petroleum products to the largest exporter of refined petroleum products. A country that was once the poster child for peak oil discovered that it was home to oil and natural gas deposits that were likely larger than those found in Saudi Arabia. The entire story about fossil fuels was reversed before many people even realized what was happening. These changes were every bit as cataclysmic for oil markets as the OPEC embargo had been in the 1970s. But this time, the changes accrued to America’s benefit. The cost of oil plummeted, OPEC was defanged, and America became essentially self-sufficient as an oil consumer.

Far more than Polish nationalism, however, Zionism has been and continues to be a global project with multiple goals. These goals are as disparate as enduring peace and security for the state of Israel, the advent of the messiah, strengthening Jewish ethnic consciousness and warding off assimilation in the diaspora, and the transformation of Jews into authentic, harmonious, and productive beings imbued with military prowess and civic virtue. Not only do these goals remain unattained despite the achievement of Jewish statehood, there is also no foreseeable point at which they could be attained. Zionism remains, therefore, a permanent revolution and as salient in the twenty-first century as it was at the end of the nineteenth. Greater than the sum of Israeli or diaspora Jewish institutional structures, Zionism is part of the emotional substrate of Jews throughout the world.