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This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth QUOTES

This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth QUOTES

1 " Demokratische Politik kann sich nicht in Moraldebatten erschöpfen, lebensfähig ist sie immer nur als Projekt. "

― Jedediah Purdy , This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

2 " Wir haben nicht bloß unser Land, wir haben unsere Welt verloren - und damit die Möglichkeit, an die Unschlud jener Welt zu glauben, die wir geschaffen haben, einer Welt, der wir nicht entkommen können, für die wir nur Verantwortung übernehmen können und deren Wiederherstellung wir versuchen müssen. "

― Jedediah Purdy , This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

3 " This is a season of denialism. In my circles, the word tends to mean denial that climate change is real or human-caused. But denialism can stand for something broader: a refusal to see the things that tie us inconveniently together. These include the unequal history that the land remembers, the perennial presence in American life of migration and foreign labor, the decline of relative American power. You could distill it by saying that denialism is the ethos that refuses to see how the world is deeply plural at every scale and that we are in it together. The denial comes not because the denialist cannot see this but because he does see it, not because he doesn’t believe others are there but because he feels their presence so acutely, suspects they will make claims on him, fears they will get power over him and take what he has. When I was in high school in Calhoun County, West Virginia, my classmates told me that Michael Dukakis (the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee) would take everyone’s guns and Jesse Jackson (who ran for the nomination that year) had a plan to put all white people in camps. Today we hear that climate change is an internationalist stalking horse for global government. Interdependence is incipient war and conquest. Climate denial is really less about science than it is about who has claims on you, and who rules you. "

― Jedediah Purdy , This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

4 " Ocasio-Cortez calls herself a democratic socialist. What she seems to mean by the name is that we have in common the things we choose to share together, and these common things—good schools, good transport, public parks, good housing, and medical care for everyone—make a shared world. We should make them everyone’s. The name is also a way of claiming a long tradition of politics that asks not whether the world is good enough or getting better, but instead what is the gap between the world we have now and the better world that is within our power to make. It is a tradition that recognizes that economies do not just produce wealth: they produce human lives and relationships, which can be dignified or humiliating, mutual or exploitative, solidaristic or fragmenting, more frightening or safer. And economies, in turn, do not arise naturally, whether from the self-interest of “rational man” or from the disruptive imagination of entrepreneurs and the benignity of philanthropists. Political decisions give economies their shape, from labor laws and tax rates and public investments to questions of almost metaphysical significance. The journalist Kate Aronoff has observed that climate politics addresses the question of who will survive the twenty-first century. Environmental politics, like the politics of work and health care, answers in very concrete terms the ultimate question: What is the value of life? And whose life, which lives, will be valued? As I write, a hopeful, even heroic response to these questions is gathering under the heading of the Green New Deal. Maybe it will find another banner soon, or maybe it will succeed in transforming the meaning of the New Deal from the industrial, racially exclusionary, male-centered program of solidarity that it was to a truly universal reworking of its potential into a commonwealth of shared dignity and mutual care. "

― Jedediah Purdy , This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

5 " Wealth comes from Middle English roots meaning “well-being” or “wellness,” a condition of happiness and good fortune closely aligned with health. It was not until the late Middle Ages that it took on its definite sense of financial or material riches. Common derives from French origins meaning “shared by all.” Because it is egalitarian, it has often been on the receiving end of aristocratic scorn: “common” is also low, unrefined, undistinguished, earthy. So Walter Raleigh, the courtier and double-fisted colonizer who planted migrants in Ulster and Virginia, defined commonwealth scornfully as a “depravation … the Government of the whole Multitude of the base and poorer Sort, without respect of the other Orders.” John Locke, by contrast, defined it as “any independent Community,” a self-governing polity that might be a monarchy, a democracy, or anything else. But there is an older sense of commonwealth that means “the general good” or the well-being of the whole community—the flourishing that is shared and open to all. "

― Jedediah Purdy , This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

6 " The question is not whether the world’s problems will become everyone’s problems, but on what terms they will. Militarized borders, resource wars, and inequality that grows as its ecological and economic faces interact: These are the features of a re-barbarized world, in which people and peoples do not even try to live in reciprocity or aim at any shared horizon beyond the ecological scarcity that presses down inequitably on everyone. The ways the world’s respectable powers have been pretending to build a global commonwealth, by growth and trade, have brought us here. Although the polite official response to global inequality is still to regret it and seek ways to mitigate it, the rising political tide is a cruder and more candid call to maintain your own relatively and (temporarily) secure place in it against whoever would take it away. There is neither time enough nor world enough—we would need several worlds with comparable resources—to grow and trade our way to a global capitalist version of commonwealth. But the notorious fact that in the long run we are all dead, and so is the world, has become a perverse source of comfort to those who think they can ride out disaster long enough for their own purposes, until their own lights go out. "

― Jedediah Purdy , This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth