The global future as history

Hartford Web Publishing is not the author of the documents in World History Archives and does not presume to validate their accuracy or authenticity nor to release their copyright.

The “future” here refers to real potentials existing in the present. They define either the most probable outcome of the contemporary historic process as constrained by circumstances, or else the kind of struggle required to achieve some alternative and less probable outcome.

Technofix or Human Scale?
By Kirkpatrick Sale, 1980. A brief extract from Sale's Human Scale (London, Secker & Warburg, 1980). The alternative escapes from the present crisis based on modern technology or, its opposite, a decentralisation of institutions and devolution of power.
How we came to live under fascism ...
By Richard K. Moore, 5 December 2001. We've been in the throes of a full-fledged takeover by transnational capitalism by means of the neoliberal revolution, now in its final globalization phase. As regards the substance of democracy, this global reorganization brings no change—those at the bottom are still controlled by those at the top. If the middle classes were to be abandoned, then the democratic institutions would become a potential threat to elite power.
Written in the night: The pain of living in the present world
By John Berger, Le Monde diplomatique, February 2003. The present pain of living in the world is perhaps in some ways unprecedented. Shame is a species feeling which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity for hope and prevents us looking far ahead. We look down at our feet, thinking only of the next small step. Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future?
The Optimism of Uncertainty
By Howard Zinn, The Nation, 4 September 2004. Life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests.
A Better World Is Possible
Editorial, Radio Havana Cuba, 8 April 2005. The only species gifted by nature with exceptional talents for unlimited development, able to discover the mysteries of its environment and of the universe, with the capacity to transform the world and itself in positive terms, is quickly running out of time and is facing the real possibility of disappearing completely.