Pluto is Well into Capricorn and the Revolution is in Full Swing
You probably didn’t pay much attention when Pluto slipped into Capricorn on January 27th, 2008, but now, here we are, halfway through revolutionary Pluto’s passage through Capricorn (the sign of social order) and is it just me, or did the mainstream social reality just totally fall to shit? Pluto’s message for us in times like these: when the social reality goes to shit, you also get compost—which is great just so long as you give it time to break down before you go dumping it on your vegetable patch. But really, having Pluto in Capricorn is all about having the entire social reality rewritten at every level.
Last time Pluto was in Capricorn was the period leading up to and following the First American Revolution in 1776. This was a period when colonists didn’t just ditch their incompetent king, but they ditched the entire category of “king” all together, and invented a new society based on the Greek myth of Democracy, or rule by demos (anc. gr. “the people”).
Likely, since 2008, you’ve encountered radically new ways of doing things: consensus process, cooperative living, direct democracy, liquid voting, the open source movement, creative commons, worker-ownership, permaculture, biodynamic farming, syndicalism, the commons, collectives, consent culture, emotional boundary setting, and the active work of dismantling structural privileges rooted in race, gender, and class.
Looking back at the last time Pluto was in Capricorn, maybe it’s obvious that Pluto was in retrograde on July 4th , 1776. So the First American Revolution led to something less than the level of liberation desired—perhaps (for starters) because those “revolutionaries” failed to take into account the personhood of anyone who wasn’t a white cis- het- property-owning male. Also, they took all that revolutionary energy and what did they do with it? They centralized power and formed a state. #notmyrevolution.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen the rise of social movements to set right a lot of that retrograde bullshit of the so-called “Founding Fathers”—we’ve seen the rise of anti-austerity occupations (Tuition Hike Protests, the Davis Bank Blockade, Occupy Wall Street), a reinvigorated Civil Rights Movement (#BlackLivesMatter, Idle No More and
Standing Rock), an epic push towards visibility and equal rights for transfolk, and a massive pushy for recognition and safety of women.
During this first leg of Pluto’s transit, those who have traditionally been in power in this society (i.e. the patriarchal, ecocidal, colonial capitalist racists) have failed to allow their financial assets to leave them, so instead
they’ve abandoned their human assets—which is to say those 1% fuckers have thrown the rest of the world under the bus—and now they don’t understand why less and less people are listening to them, and more and more people are aiming to burn down the big banks.
Pluto will leave Capricorn in January of 2024, and until then, the simultaneous collapse and rebirth of every level of society will continue to manifest. As those in power tighten their grip, the more star systems will slip
through their fingers. For those of us already steeped in the richness of the coming culture, our work will be cut out for us in helping newcomers find their feet as the spaces we think of as revolutionary become more and more normalized. Our work will be in making space for new voices, new approaches, and becoming better at listening
to each other and ourselves.
Sylvia Miranda Jackson pours drinks in Sacramento, California. She has two corgis, Jasper and Lucifer. She is astrology editor for Subversas.com.
