What is to be emancipated from? Strange culture of ours, awash with claims of wondrous freedom and individuality, but when it comes to actually expressing these things, one finds there is really sort of a limited range of activities and expressions to select from, lest one is to become impoverished or in trouble with the law.
There are plenty of reasons to desire emancipation from an unraveling financial/industrial system such as the one described in previous posts. Environmental concern, moral outrage at the relentless imperial violence inflicted on the peripheral countries, moral outrage at the treatment of lower classes and minority groups within the core countries, a failure in imagination and problem solving capacity, daily drudgery, increasing material constraints, etc.
An important thing to recognize is that we are within a contractionary phase of a very large historical cycle, and any attempts to stave off our fate within the old logic (the logic that proceeds from capitalist ideas) is doomed to futility. During expansion and even some time past its zenith, such pragmatism proved useful. However our task now this late in the cycle is to identify with the negation of the old positive order that is currently in contraction, and attempt to bring that negation into material fruition so that it may become itself a positive order and the process can begin anew. If anything, gaining power within an expanding alternative could alleviate some of the pain of living within this contracting system, a system that contracts on the basis of declining energy returns, environmental degradation, social entropy and the decay in vitality of a driving idea. But how to do so?
It could be that this damned empire of ours lasts another 100 years. There's no telling how much its got left. It takes a lot for a population to revolt, though we have some of these ingredients already: a frustrated youth population with free time (more and more students are burdened with debt and having difficulty finding good jobs), a perception of total institutional corruption, an insulated and out of touch ruling class...though one thing we are missing is a difficulty obtaining staple food products. However food prices have been steadily ticking up and there are set to be cuts in food assistance programs. Then there are increasing occurrences of drought, putting strains on the food supply, and rising oil prices affects just about everything in the industrial system. Shale gas, tar sands, deep sea drilling, arctic drilling...an energy revolution? Hah! Signs of industry desperation if anything.
But revolutionary violence should no longer be an option. I'm not speaking for populations that are already under assault, but populations that are at least nominally democratic and not already in an uproar. The problem with violence is that it necessitates the logic of domination. If you are turning a gun on another, you aren't going to be able to reason with that person, much less incorporate them into your new society. One of the ironies of the violent variety of anarchists is that the very acts of violence that they advocate necessarily contain the seeds of a new state. Much of what a state is can be seen as a collective monopoly on violence, compartmentalized to be used in accordance with a set of agreed-upon laws to stabilize those elemental forces unleashed by chaotic violence.
The next model society we need (as the anarchists see it anyways, which I currently agree with) is a stateless society that need not be backed by the threat of violence. Hard to say at this point whether that is possible, but it is an ideal that should be attempted.
Religious awakening is a necessary response to material fragmentation, but as an institution it is also not the best solution. Such a solution might have been necessary a thousand years ago, but now that also seems to be a mistake at this time. Cloistering away in a monastery to study spiritual truths sounds nice really, and if only such an ideology can be spread to pacify, but then such an ideology itself becomes insular; its impossible to convert all of the population and holing up and denying material reality doesn't do much for the rest of the suffering. The dogmatic rejection of material reality also tends to produce pretty shitty results later on down the road.
No, what most people respond to is a relatively rewarding life without material fear, and to be accepted into a greater community and loved, which probably needs to be achieved with a combination of religious/revolutionary pragmatism. As I scribble away there are people around the world establishing communities such as this. Intentional communities are springing up everywhere in which people pool their resources, mind ecologies, engage in collective decision making and allow creative activities to flourish. In effect there is a quiet, gradual revolution happening that dispenses of dogma and violence, and hopefully spreads and becomes effective enough to produce a robust alternative life system in time.
Such an exodus has the dual benefit of draining energy from the old capitalist system, further destabilizing it and encouraging many more participants to leave. Such is the road to material emancipation, outer emancipation, but there is another dimension to consider: inner emancipation.
Part of the immense difficulty in constructing a new system consists of not just the material inertia of the old idea, but a psychological inertia. Growing up and living within a culture, one eventually internalizes much of the everyday behavioral traits and social relations that permeates the culture. Normative ideals are communicated and subconsciously assented to and desired, and we absorb the market morality that is so ubiquitous because its lessons are repeated again and again in the workplace, the marketplace and then in the home.
An entire system of thought is inherited: the way we think about causation, class, justice, human nature and much more. Becoming politically, anthropologically and cosmically conscious (among forms of wider consciousness) is enough to override much of the conscious thought, but there are still subconscious and emotional principles that hang tight.
Cultivating a new culture both socially and economically takes not only material power, but a psychological power; one has to actively oppose both physical and psychological constraints. It requires doing extra work to identify more basic behaviors that we engage in that might not be conducive to revolutionary activity and seek to override it. This is much easier said than done.
Consider for example our culture's tendency to isolate in our attention great figures that we in turn worship. This emotional identification gives a rise to a logic that prizes individual action and sees history as a progression of great individuals, which establishes a very clear avenue for universal love and power, which of course is going to be pursued by anyone who cares to have such things.
Now it is true that there are individuals that do happen to have special traits, minds and talents and it should be that these things are respected. Anyone who has these features is probably quite ambitious, which acts as a potent motor for action, and such individuals shouldn't be suppressed by any means. A complete collapse into collectivist ideology is just as bad as a collapse into individualist ideology, an altogether undesirable state of affairs. The ideal society should respect the collective and the individual equally.
No, the real problem is hero worship. This produces weak points in our social fabric: for subsequent generations the highest values and traits to be desired become artificially contracted which necessarily alienates whole swathes of the population that don't share those skills. There are special individuals, but then these individuals are in turn actualized by the many personalities surrounding them. To ignore the rest of the population is to carve out shapes for future ruts cut into the earth by those seeking power and admiration.
Ultimately I'm not sure how possible it is to escape from or at least mold such behavior. But habits of thought like this are very easily carried over from generation to generation and we should be investigating this thought and its long term effects.
One also has to consider comforts and discomforts associated with group sharing, loss of personal space, loss of daily comforts, change in quality of life and etc, all comforts and discomforts that take shape through our subconscious and our emotions as a carryover from living in a capitalist society.
Inner emancipation means changing the way we think, the way we relate to each other, the way we work and live on a psychological level. Such an endeavor is indispensable alongside the physical process of becoming self-sufficient. Lots to do, no doubt.
