Recalling Zak Stein on anti-capitalism

Continuing from the last post, we had a FB discussion about Zak Stein's anti-capitalist manifesto for the ITC discussion. Here's what Zak said in that discussion:

June 28 @ 7:38 am:

Been asked to weigh in here by Lex. Honestly, there is little for me to say thanks to prior comments:
Bruce: indeed, I would not have written a piece like this (with this structure, brevity, and tone) were it not for the demands of the ITC panel. That said, it was a useful (and apparently attention grabbing) exercise.


Fractal: indeed, I find some of this naive and bourgeois, and in fitting with my story about Hegel, i.e., "Capitalism is as it should be; it's developmentally appropriate" is exactly the trap of conservative dialectic that the Young Hegelians dismantled...

Bonnitta: indeed, the developmental thinking is too simplistic. I agree with Bonnie on the complexity of moving from thinking about individual development to thinking about socio-cultural development. But I would also say that the views expressed in the letter on personal development, involving terms like 1st tier / 2nd tier; Orange, Green, etc, are a problem all on their own, even when not applied to social systems. Capitalism and capitalists are not "at" a single given level, exactly because no single person is ever "at" a single level. We have developmental ranges, as well as developmental profiles (psycographs), etc. etc. See any of my papers on development, and especially on the development of reasoning about integral theory itself, where I show these colors and cut and dried rankings are stereotypes and need to be, ironically enough, negated but preserved by higher-order ways of understanding development.

All that said, I lover Bernie Sanders smile emoticon … and were I to write a longer piece on this kind of thing it would lay out a much more complex set of constructs about the global transformation into a post-capisalist sociosphere. I see this as mainly an issues of interiors, which is to say I think that humanity’s inability to understand itself is cascading into a planetary phase shift; a species wide identity crisis is coinciding with the climax of the Anthropocene…. but that is a longer story you can read about in my forthcoming book…

Hope this clarifies and helps… not sure I'll have time in the coming days to engage further. But, thanks for your interest in my work!

June 28 @ 10:06 am:

I'm happy to participate, and sorry for your disappointment in the integral "visionaries" (whoever they are; i've not met any)… perhaps you should put less on us visionaries and step up to the plate yourself? BTW: i'm clearly no "integral visionary" (hell, I don't even believe in or use the ideas of 1st and 2nd tier)… so don't blame me… As Bonnitta, knows, I'm just a failed musician faking it as a philosopher wink emoticon See you at the conference!