I’m penning these words while the election in the US is underway. Both candidates seem to give absolute priority to ‘repairing the economy’, to creating jobs, install the necessary pipelines, wage the necessary wars and destroy the necessary wildlife sanctuaries to keep gas conveniently low at the pump.
This is insane and disgusting.
What are the ‘jobs’ they create other than ways of keeping people busy producing junk nobody needs in order to turn them into lame consumers glued on a tv screen and dreaming of the shopping aisle where they can consume that same junk.
What we need is safehouses against capitalism. Spell out that word, write it down. Mull over it. Put it on a banner for your local occupy movement. We need safehouses where the destructive abstraction that is our global money is kept outside.
A safehouse against the ecocidal culture of capitalism is an economic microclimate, perhaps the size of a village, small enough for everybody to care for the landbase and large enough to have some needed division of tasks, where ’the economy’ is a closed circuit, and does not depend on the exploitation of resources from outside. This means that it cannot depend on our global currency, which value depends on the very destructive practices our safehouse needs to protect from. It means local currency, sharing, bartering, whatever works. The main task of a safehouse is to be able to accommodate victims, and unlike many fancy ecovillages, they will not have to pay in dollars or euros to stay in the safehouse.
From the perspective of the lower class (in the idolatry freakshow that is the elections, that class is hardly ever mentioned), alternatives to capitalist exploitation have far too long been restricted to elitist $2,000 permaculture courses, $5,000 buy-ins at lush ecovillages, or supporting the communist party – with some cash. Not seeing what’s wrong here is the tragedy of our time. An alternative to capitalism should dismantle the value-system, or it will never surpass the status of an ugly parasite feeding off of the monetary machinery.
How?
I’ve just said it. We need safehouses against capitalism. Self-reliant nice communities, I’m not talking about gun-wielding hyperindividualist preppers. I’m talking real life that is organized locally and sustainably in all vital aspects (food, shelter, healthcare, education), and by that virtue places itself outside of capitalism and urban civilization (alluding to Jensen’s definition of civilization as a society with cities which require the importation of resources). When you don’t need to import resources, it means that everything you use has to come from your landbase, which in turn means that every generation will have to replenish what is used – a concept that happens to be very familiar to indigenous peoples on all continents.
Whichever puppet wins the US elections, capitalism and hence infinite growth consumer/producer culture are stronger than ever. It is the strongest religion, compared to which the three aggressive monotheisms are but a harmless surface phenomenon of our collective psyche. And it is nothing to laugh about. It is detroying the living habitat of human beings and much more deserving species.
These safehouses are necessary in the second stage of a successful resistance. First, we will be able to be ‘parasites’ of the very structures we are going to dismantle (use the grid, use a car, stockpile food), but very soon we need to become self-reliant. The only way to make people realize that there is an alternative is to live the alternative.