The fantasy of a revolution
is that it will make everything di=erent—and regime-changing revolutions generally
make a di=erence, sometimes
a signi>cantly positive one—
but the making of di=erences
in everyday practices is a more
protracted and incremental and
ultimately more revolutionary
process. Last month, I was
asked in public about where
the antiglobalization movement
now stood. I gulped a little. I’m
a slow thinker—I like to have
a month to a year to mull
something over, which is why
I’m a writer. My >rst thought
was that there wasn’t anything
so dramatic and dynamic and
visible as those ten thousand
blockaders in the streets of
Seattle on November 30 and
December 1, 1999. Fortunately,
I made the other person go
>rst, and by the time her
answer was complete, mine
had grown to encompass
how the very ideas around corporate
globalization had spread, so that what
was wild new thinking by radicals or
revolutionaries in the streets in 1999
had become a reasonable position for
many governments to take by 2003 or
so—and even some of the Democratic
presidential candidates by 2008.
In recent years, most Latin American
nations have turned against the ideology
of unfettered markets and trade pacts, and
even in countries whose governments
have not, most of the citizens have.
Immanuel Wallerstein, the left-wing sociologist with a talent for prophecy, wrote
an essay earlier this year headed “2008:
The Demise of Neoliberal Globalization.”
In it he said, “The political balance is
swinging back. Neoliberal globalization
will be written about ten years from now
as a cyclical swing in the history of
the capitalist world-economy. The real
question is not whether this phase is
over but whether the swing back will be
able, as in the past, to restore a state of
relative equilibrium in the world-system.
Or has too much damage been done?”
Such critiques of globalization have
ceased to be in?ammatory or extraordinary as the global public has grown
increasingly educated in economics and
the sinister underside of all those free-trade treaties. Those of us who fought
against them won some practical victories
and a lot more in the realm of public
imagination, but the position ceased to
belong exclusively to us as it became a
reasonable position for many to take. This
is why we need training in slowness, and
the long attention span that makes it
possible to see the remarkable changes of our time.
There’s also the widespread greening of the public
imagination, with climate
change having >nally arrived
on center stage. Cities and
states across the country are
now pushing to regulate
emissions (and having to
>ght the Bush administration’s EPA in order to do so).
My own state is even looking
at regulating commercial
airplane emissions. The revolution is here, but it doesn’t
look like what people expected, and it isn’t even visible
to those who aren’t practiced
in the long view.
If the term revolution can
be used to describe the
Industrial Revolution, then
perhaps we are launched
upon something as profound—a backlash against
the industrial revolution
that brought us the accelera-
tion of everyday life, the industrialization
of time and space, the shrinkage of the
contemplative time and space in which to
understand ourselves and our lives. That
is to say, the revolution is in part against
the very speedup that has made us all
busy, distracted, anxious, and unable
even to perceive the tenor of our own
times. So it is a revolution in perception
and daily practice, as well as against the
concrete institutions that spell the
misery of everyday life for too many and
the destruction of the Earth for us all.
It may never be >nished, but the time
to join it is now. a
Rebecca Solnit was born the same summer
that the Berlin wall went up and the Freedom
Rides began in Mississippi. She is a year older
than Silent Spring. Things change.
