Social Transformations and Revolutions: Reflections and Analyses

0464417 - FLÚ 2017 RIV GB eng M - Část monografie knihy
Suša, Oleg
From Civilizational Crisis to Revolutionary Transformation?
Social Transformations and Revolutions: Reflections and Analyses. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016 - (Arnason, J.; Hrubec, M.), s. 76-98. ISBN 978-1-4744-1534-7
Institucionální podpora: RVO:67985955
Klíčová slova: civilization * crisis * transformation * global capitalism * revolution
Kód oboru RIV: AA - Filosofie a náboženství

In this article the author is explaining that profound analysis of structural and historical process of macrosocial change as well as global planetary environmental change can be supported by focusing on important transformations. The author’s concept offers new dynamic perspective showing here that the deformed societal adaptation had destructive consequences in societal life, including economic stagnation, growing social exclusion and inequality. Another false adaptive reaction was limits to growth reductive image of nature as reservoire of resources. Initial shock from future of natural resources depletion was leading to greater amount and tempo of the systematic plundering with concomitant devastations of planetary ecosystems. Economic system based on international inequality and debt make possible exploitation of wide areas making resources available, so that business as usual is sure about resourceful earth. The article deals with the fact that globality began to have the effect of subjective consciousness of the time-space compression and a “diminishing world”. It was also in the 1970s that the syndrome of “encountering limits to exponential growth” started coming to the fore, and the energy and environmental crises gave rise to adaptive transformations. Another significant factor was the process of the protracted crisis striking political structures and the ideologies of industrial civilisation. In recent decades, there has been an enormous increase in the impact of multilateral social inequalities, which have been the source of many crises. The repercussions of the new global and local redistribution and distribution of resources and opportunities are politically salient. Numerous indigenous movements seeking to combat poverty and champion fairer distributive opportunities and sustainable development, including the right to a healthy environment and socio-economic reproduction, have emerged. A certain role has also been paid by the influence of social movements, which grasped the crisis of modern social structures and institutions, with its socio-economic and socio-environmental consequences, primarily as a cultural crisis, as a challenge and opportunity for “grassroots cultural politics”. In conclusion the author stresses that in the politics of civilisational transformation, the humanity cannot continue along a technocratic course of trial and error or the treatment of the disease of one technology with another technology. Rather, there needs to be a discussion on the relationship between resources and objectives versus the risk of complexly integrating consequences in an environment of the globalised and socially conflictual interdependence and interaction of contemporary societies. Another alternative transformation policy is, immanently, criticism of domination in relations of control and the use of knowledge – and as such this constitutes a new axis of conflict surrounding the structural conditions in place for the democratisation of public participation in key decisions of industrial, energy, trade, cultural, etc., innovation concerning the global contexts of our way of life. So far, this decision-making has been subordinate to the interests and objectives of profit and power, and has been regarded as a private area of social action, despite its public, global repercussions.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0263293