Hope and moving beyond

I1

I have tremendous amounts of hope. I don't know what folks who don't have that do….I think in the course of human existence the current system, capitalism…[has had an] incredibly short lifespan. Longer than my life, so there's a sense of perspective, but really in terms of the way that humans have organized, it’s one form amongst many that we've gone through and I think that we can move beyond that.

Apocalyptic futures

I17

[The future] could go either way. It could be so good or it could be so awful and there seems to be this almost masochistic yearning for an apocalyptic future. Almost self-destructive, you know, it's all bad...it's all going to fall down. People seem to almost anticipate that [but] I don't think they get the implications of it.

Vision

I24

I think that the communist movement in the early part of the twentieth century did have a vision, I'm not sure that it was the right vision, but they had a vision. They did believe that somehow or other they were going to take over the state and institute a social society. I think that was the wrong vision but it was a vision, and one of the things that you find from reading some of the historical stuff is that they saw themselves as separate from the system, they saw themselves as outside the system, they saw themselves as creating a new society. The history and practice of state control as it got exercised in the Soviet Union and [elsewhere] shows that at least [that] way of achieving that vision proved to be wrong, but at least they had a vision. The problem today is that we don't have a vision outside of the system.

Grassroots organizing

I14

I don't think you can be a socialist on your own. You can hold all the theories, you can believe everything that I agree with, but you're not going to be a socialist until you're actually working and also meeting folks in the labour movement, or childcare workers who make $10 an hour, or the crosswalk guards who just got organized, it really just changes your perspective about what the left needs to do to reach the mass of people because way too often I feel we're stuck in universities and academic settings.

Thinking anew

I22

I think one of the problems with the Left is the idea that they can return to the past….if you take Canada, for example, people believe they can return to the social contract of the post-Second World War era. Coming out of this era there was a sort of agreement between the labor unions and capital for the social welfare state, pensions, and so forth and that it's possible with this latest onslaught against workers right here...people think they can go back. I think that social contract is dead, it's a corpse. People need to come up with new arrangements, new ways of organizing society. So they need to think anew.

The future, darkly

I18

I'm cynical and pessimistic so I'm just going to tell you my science fiction dystopia. Everything will be privatized, more than fifty per cent of the people will live in total poverty, those who don't will be eking by except for a much smaller top of the pile, [the] twenty-first century aristocracy, who have access to the latest technology to spy on us and control our behaviours. They can censor whatever, they can use this media...to message us in any way they want repetitively to the point where we believe whatever [they] want [us] to believe….[A]ny opponents will be disappeared, concentration camps, the whole nine yards.

Violence and social change

I10

I think that there is a time and place for violence and it's different in different countries. I want to say that it isn't justified but, at the same time, if that is the only way that you will get your message across and that is the only way that you can change something and make the people in power listen [then you can’t dismiss it]... but it's definitely less accepted in our society then it is in other countries like in South America or even in Europe. But I think that it's a short lived activism. It's kind of like you light a fuse and then the fuse burns down, and down, and down and finally you have an explosion but after that explosion what is there? There's ash and bits of charred ground and I don't think that, in and of itself, can make lasting change. But there is a time and place for that explosion.

Precarity and inertia

I9

I think...one of the most present problems right now is...how precarious everything is around us in terms of our living spaces, we have no control over [them], we...pay all this rent [and] it's just burned off….The places we work, we have no control over the vast majority of them so that we're just thrust around here and there. We're fired with no notice, we have to deal with all kinds of unfair working conditions depending on the whim of the employers and this creates a lot of problems for everyone. We're stressed out, we're just left with no energy and time at the end of the day other than to watch TV or zone out or whatever.

Reaching people

I7

There's lots of people who, if you tap into their values in the right way, will be able to get onside with you in a way that at least will keep us going, that at least will keep us on a more positive track. I think it's just a matter of bringing out those values and framing them in such a way that they enable us to make more intelligent political decisions.

No return

I22

I think the world is pregnant with dangers, to use an unfortunate metaphor, it's pregnant, it's full. War,...[w]e haven't even spoken about...the environmental crisis. People operate in sort of a linear epistemology and what we see with the environmental crisis, it's exponential. So in our lifetimes, ten, fifteen years down the road, it's not short, we could see even greater calamities because who knows how these complex systems interact? So there's all of these issues and so to solve all of these people need to realize that none of these can be solved by believing that...we can go back to the past and that these people [in power] can be pressured into going back into the past because history doesn't work that way.