Friday, July 23, 2021
Our World Is Dying Because We Don’t Value Un-Making Things
Listen to a reading of this article:
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I talk a lot about how we’re destroying our environment with a global system where human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, how the power structure which dominates that system does so by violence, exploitation, oppression, and the threat of nuclear war, and how we’re all going to die if we don’t change this system.
Whenever I say this I get a bunch of capitalism cultists bleating “You just don’t understand economics bruh,” which is the line they’ve been trained to say to anyone they see criticizing capitalism. It’s silly for a number of reasons, among them the fact that nobody who regurgitates that line understands economics themselves, and the fact that one’s understanding of economics has nothing to do with the death of the ecosystem our species relies on for survival.
The claim that anyone who opposes capitalism “just doesn’t understand economics” is premised on the notion that unfettered capitalism is the best way for a civilization to attain economic growth, which is arguably true; governments like China saw their economies explode when they started implementing elements of capitalism for pragmatic reasons. If you want to create a bunch of stuff and generate a tremendous amount of wealth, a good way to do that is by giving the capitalist class the protection of the state so they can rake in billions of dollars exploiting the global proletariat without being guillotined.
Problem is, that only looks like a valid point if economic growth is the only value by which you judge a system’s success. If you value quality of life, overall happiness, health, average lifespan, education, eliminating poverty, homelessness and hunger, and many other possible metrics, nations like the United States are far from ideal. If you value avoiding climate collapse, then the only way to think capitalism is the answer is to espouse on blind faith the belief that the world will be saved by greedy union-busting tech oligarchs who just want to make more stuff and send us all to space.
The Unspoken Premise Of Modern Capitalism Is That The World Will Be Saved By Greedy Tech Oligarchs
"The plutocratic class are not good custodians of our world. They are not good people. They are not wise. They are not even particularly intelligent."https://t.co/df8gxTjwHy
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 29, 2020
That’s not to say that socialism in and of itself has all the answers on this front either. Nations which have attempted socialism have not historically had the best environmental records, and even a hypothetical ideal socialist society where workers own all the means of production would not be inherently dissuaded from destroying the environment for profit.
What we need, if we are to turn away from the path of extinction and begin working in collaboration with our ecosystem, is a society which values the un-making of things.
Since the dawn of civilization humanity has valued achievement, conquest, invention, creation; it has valued doing things, and it has not valued the undoing of things. Creating a new kind of machine will bring you fame and fortune and put your name in the history books, while figuring out how to clean up all the pollution caused by the manufacturing and operation of that machine will not. Discovering a new way to kill thousands of people at a time will make you rich, while choosing to sit on that invention instead of unleashing that horror upon the world will not. Cutting down a tree to make toothpicks will make you money, while leaving it to grow for future generations will not.
Interestingly this disparity parallels with the inequality in traditional gender roles throughout the ages. While hunter-gatherer societies were largely egalitarian, after the invention of agriculture some twelve thousand years ago women came to be generally regarded as second-class citizens because they were unable to do fieldwork or conquer other tribes for their land. Since that time women have had very little say in the construction of our society and its values systems, and for that reason the work they traditionally do — cleaning, caring, conserving, resolving conflicts and building community — has gone unrewarded by money or esteem compared to traditional men’s work. Doing and making are valued, undoing and unmaking are not. The rise of capitalism poured rocket fuel on this dynamic.
Most mothers will tell you it’s a pretty thankless job compared to how much labor you pour into it from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you lay your head down at night. Because so much of her work goes into disappearing things — dirty diapers, laundry, messy floors, dishes in the sink, owwies, tears, tantrums — people who are conditioned by a society that has for millennia only valued making and doing tend to only notice when her work doesn’t get done. Their attention scans right over all the undoing she spent all day working on; it’s not paid, it’s not rewarded, and for the most part it’s not even appreciated.
In the same way, and for the same reason, people’s attention tends to scan right over the obvious solutions to the ecocidal trajectory our species has been on. Because thousands of years of conditioning have trained us to value doing things and making things and turning over a profit, our attention skips right over the simple solution right under our noses to do less and unmake things and stop pursuing profit at the expense of future generations.
This is why people who are awake to what’s going on in our world so often feel hopeless and despondent, and why the quote “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” resonates with so many. Because we live in a society that has no framework or conceptual infrastructure for valuing the disappearing of things, and because making things and turning a profit has no answer for our situation, solutions look impossible.
But solutions are not impossible. They just won’t involve turning millionaires into billionaires and billionaires into trillionaires.
Cleaning up this mess will take a lot of work and cost a lot, and the reward for that investment won’t be anyone getting rich or any power structure securing a geostrategic advantage, it will be a future for our children and grandchildren. The oceans for example are one of our planet’s biggest carbon sinks, and their ability to function as such is being choked off by plastics in the water. Getting that plastic out of there in an environment-friendly way won’t turn a profit like clearing a forest or drilling an oil field will, so if we leave it to the Captains of Industry nothing will be done about it. Capitalism offers no incentive to do it.
Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021
Ending growth for its own sake, producing less, consuming less, paying people to stay home instead of commuting to pointless jobs; all of these would help the ecosystem far more than producing some new battery made of strip-mined materials. But there’s no profit, so they’re overlooked as viable solutions. You’re only ever going to look for solutions to problems through the reality tunnel you’ve been conditioned to look through. For thousands of years human civilization has been valuing the making of more things and devaluing the unmaking of things, when the latter is what we need right now.
A hidden cost is mental illness. In order to manipulate people to buy things that they don’t need with money they don’t have to keep capitalism from collapsing, you need to keep up a non-stop barrage of trauma-inducing consumerist propaganda. We are all suffering from various mental disorders, from the subtle to the extreme, as a result of this relentless onslaught of brainwashing. Some of these disorders are so prevalent that people assume they are normal. Everything from eating disorders and obesity, to hoarding and shopping addictions, can be traced back to advertising constantly and repetitively ringing our pavlovian bells, while also constantly reminding us that we are not perfect or whole or worthy of love (but maybe if you buy this you will be).
Many readers will attest that you don’t have to be that far along in your waking up journey to start becoming really sensitive to the psychological violence of TV advertising. A TV ad break suddenly becomes physically repellant. In the future we will look back on how coercive and non-consensual mass-scale advertising is and shake our heads in wonder that it was ever allowed to be a thing. Of course, by then, advertising will barely work because too many people will be too awake to manipulate in mass numbers.
'Finding Meaning Under A Meaningless System: How many of people's mental health diagnoses are really just them struggling to function in a capitalist system that is amoral, destructive, overwhelming, overbearing, unsatisfying, and bereft of meaning?' https://t.co/J2KiMhEhnz
— R. Eric Swanepoel (@rericswan) March 12, 2021
But for now, we are manipulated by the millions into consuming massive amounts of products that aren’t good for us, don’t serve us, or are just another thing that we won’t hardly use but we need to find some cupboard space for. Ending advertising would allow so much health to rebuild in our minds and reduce consumption of materials dramatically; but ending advertising would mean ending capitalism. They are inseparable. We have the tools now to find everything we need via word-of-mouth, but capitalism requires infinite growth. Even your mom-and-pop shop owner feel the pressure to grow in order to keep up cash flow and cover increasing overheads.
Growth is baked in to capitalism, and right now we need more than anything just to chill. Do less, be less, compete less, expect less of ourselves and each other, produce less, consume less, commute less; but take more naps, be more kind, be more gentle with ourselves and each other, laugh more, cry more, feel more, and regenerate all the energy stolen from us from a rat race that we were never gonna win anyway.
Only when we have systems in place that make this possible will we find the energy to start cleaning up our world and begin living in harmony and integrity with the very ecosystem that we are intrinsically a part of.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
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source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/23/our-world-is-dying-because-we-dont-value-un-making-things/
Cuban Anarchists On Context and Importance of the Recent Wave of Protests
On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with an anarchist from Cuba and a Cuban-American anarchist living in Miami about the recent wave of protests which have swept the island over the last few weeks. While the demonstrations took everyone by surprise, our guests argue that they are historic in that... Read Full Article
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Humboldt County, CA: Forest Defenders Halt Logging Work North of Strawberry Rock
Report on recent actions against logging in so-called Humboldt County in Northern California. For two consecutive days this week a large group of forest defenders shut down logging operations northeast of Tsurai (Trinidad). Monday and Tuesday morning, protestors walked into an active clearcut, forcing machinery to shut off. After a long standoff with Green Diamond... Read Full Article
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Thursday, July 22, 2021
Facing Down White Supremacy at Ada’itsx
Report from Fairy Creek anti-logging blockade. In a disturbing development, at least one of the vehicles that has been harassing the Fairy Creek front gate (July 4th) has been confirmed to be the same vehicle that participated in an attack on a solidarity picket for Wet’suwet’en on February 10th, 2020 near Cumberland, BC. In this... Read Full Article
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From Embers: A Year At 1492 Land Back Lane
After a hiatus, the anarchist podcast From Embers has re-launched this month. This episode focuses on the successful Six Nations land reclamation known as 1492 Land Back Lane. The latest episode features an interview with Skyler Williams of 1492 Land Back Lane, a land reclamation on the edge of the Six Nations of the Grand... Read Full Article
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The Story Of Rocket Man
I made a mixed media piece about Jeff Bezos and his little rocket:
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
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source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/22/the-story-of-rocket-man/
This Week In Fascism #116: Proud Boys Confronted in Salem; Injured Protesters to Sue LAPD; Neo-Nazi Proud Boy Running for School Board Outed
Welcome fellow antifascists! Have we got an action packed week for you! From clashes in Los Angeles against anti-trans groups like the Proud Boys, to the people of Salem coming together to run the filth out of town, to the Torch Network dumping lots of new ‘White Lives Matter” chat logs, to a variety of... Read Full Article
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Wednesday, July 21, 2021
Government of Oaxaca Prepares Repression Against Indigenous Zapotecos
Indigenous Zapateco communities belonging to San Pablo Cuatro Venados, Oaxaca, denounce ongoing threats and harassment seeking to dispossess them of their territories in pursuit of mining interests By: Nañi Pinto Indigenous Zapatecos pertaining to the municipality of San Pablo Cuatro Venados denounce that the State Government of Oaxaca is preparing repression, and the dispossession of... Read Full Article
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The US Is The Absolute Worst: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article:
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America has the single worst government in the world. Shut the fuck up about Cuba.
Hands off Cuba and regime change America.
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“Stop saying the US is the worst government on earth! Others are way worse!”
Name one. Name one that’s currently doing anything that rises to the level of murdering millions and displacing tens of millions in imperialist wars and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it.
You can’t. You can’t name a single government that’s anywhere near as destructive and tyrannical as Washington today. All you can do is talk about what other governments have done generations in the past or pretend domestic oppression is as bad as killing millions in unjust wars.
The US is the most tyrannical regime on earth. Indisputably. Yet because it has such an effective propaganda machine, few people let this indisputable fact inform their worldview and foreign policy perspectives to the extent that they should.
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People only believe the US military can be used to solve problems because they’ve spent their lives watching Hollywood movies glorifying the troops and showing happy endings being reached by Good Guys shooting Bad Guys. That’s why they fall for the bullshit over and over again.
The US military is the One Ring. Everyone thinks they can use its power for good, but it can only ever unleash evil.
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Israel bombed Syria again. The fact that bombings are routinely ignored by news media when they don’t target the US or its allies is yet another item in the mountain of evidence that western media is pure propaganda.
You're reading about this on antiwar dot com instead of the mainstream news because the mainstream news isn't news, it's an indoctrination program disguised as news. https://t.co/N0a6krOCAQ
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) July 20, 2021
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Hahaha why no I cannot pay you a fair wage you lowly Amazon worker, I need that money for a five billion-dollar carnival ride!
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Blaming unvaccinated people and conspiracy theorists for your country’s problems is the shitlib version of blaming poor people and immigrants for your country’s problems. It’s false, it’s dumb, and it’s very convenient for those who are actually causing your country’s problems.
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“We’ve got to do something about all this disinformation,” said the empire that is made entirely of disinformation.
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Better ways for the US government to fight disinformation:
- Spread accurate information
- Stop being an evil, opaque and inherently untrustworthy institution
- Stop actively sowing disinformation
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Every day the western media spend manipulating people into accepting the murderous and exploitative oligarchic imperialist status quo as normal, they are engaging in disinformation that kills an immense number of people. But you’ll never see the president working to silence them.
The oligarchic empire has no problem with disinformation. It couldn’t exist without disinformation. Its real objection is to people having the ability to share information which it does not control.
Just in America untold thousands of people die every single year as a result of an exploitative status quo which makes them sick and impoverished, and this is made possible solely because of a highly advanced propaganda campaign by the plutocratic class. Once you get out of America’s borders the death toll is far higher, where people are slaughtered by the millions in imperialist wars, proxy conflicts and sanctions regimes the consent for which is manufactured by aggressive disinformation ops.
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A fondness for ice cream is neither a political achievement nor an interesting personality trait.
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It’s creepy how manipulative Jen Psaki is anytime she’s challenged on something gross the administration is doing. It’s always “Well Ted as you’re well aware it’s perfectly normal and good that we’re doing that thing, and you’re kind of crazy and weird for suggesting otherwise.”
The ugliness isn’t that she’s bad at her job, it’s that she’s very, very good at her job. All US press secretaries are professional liars, but the way she’s able to skillfully perception manage any oppositional question to make the questioner look like a weirdo is something rare.
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Pentagon: Let's invade a country.
Conservatives: Yeah!
Liberals: Okay!
Progressives: It's not just about the what but also about the how because the how can become the what and then it's a what how what how what https://t.co/jQLgSoonjP— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) July 18, 2021
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“Ugh, why must you attack even the US politicians who are furthest to the left??”
Wrong question. The correct question is, why are all US politicians who are operating on the national stage a bunch of shitty imperialist swamp creatures without a single actual leftist among them?
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Telling anti-imperialist socialists not to fight with progressive Democrats who are neither anti-imperialist nor socialist is just telling them to shut up and let Democrats control the American left.
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Mainstream pundits are like “The far left wants to end wars and income inequality, but that’s just unrealistic fairy unicorn talk because people like me are paid by billionaires to prevent that from ever happening.”
“I understand that you want peace and healthcare and a living wage, but you need to be pragmatic and realistic about the fact that we’re going to pour vast fortunes into sabotaging all your attempts to get those things.”
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There’s a focus on profit-driven solutions to climate collapse because our profit-driven global model always values making more things (“men’s work”) and never values cleaning things up (“women’s work”). That’s also why most of the work traditionally done by women is unpaid.
You’re only ever going to look for solutions to problems through the reality tunnel you’ve been conditioned to look through. For thousands of years human civilization has been valuing the making of more things and devaluing the unmaking of things, when the latter is what we need right now. The oceans are our planet’s best carbon sink, for example, and their ability to do that is being choked to death by plastic. Removing plastic from the oceans will not be profitable; it will cost a lot. So there’s no big push to do this. It’s being ignored.
Ending growth for its own sake, producing less, consuming less, paying people to stay home instead of commuting to pointless jobs; all of these would help the ecosystem far more than producing some new battery made of strip-mined materials. But there’s no profit, so they’re overlooked as viable solutions.
Because we’ve got millennia of conditioning toward the worldview of “Men’s work valuable, women’s work free,” even the most awake among us can scan right over the obvious solutions to ecological collapse without seeing them, because it would mean a wildly different way of being. That’s why people so often succumb to hopelessness on this front, and why the quote “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” rings so true for us: because from the point of view we’ve been conditioned to look through, there is no solution. We cannot consume our way out of this.
When in reality there is a solution right here under our noses, it’s just not good for billionaires. It’s going to cost a lot, and it’s going to entail doing a lot less. But it will work, and, if we can pry the fingers of the bastards off the wheel, it can be put into action.
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False spirituality gives you beliefs. True spirituality destroys them.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/21/the-us-is-the-absolute-worst-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/
Brooklyn, NY: Local Residents Reclaim Empty Commercial Space
Report on the reclamation of an empty commercial space in Brooklyn, New York. For more information and updates, follow The Gym. BROOKLYN, July 20, 2021 – Today, an affinity group of local residents chose to access the ground floor commercial space at 1083-5 Broadway in Brooklyn, New York. The space has sat empty since August... Read Full Article
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