This is appealing to the liberal mind — it provides an apparent middle ground and removes the need to question the logic of the global economy. We can continue on our current trajectory if we make the “right” reforms and get the “right” kind of technology.

The hope of green growth is embedded everywhere, from the majority of domestic economic plans to major international policy schemes like the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. By uncritically supporting these policies, we are unwittingly perpetuating the neoliberal fantasy of infinite growth on a finite planet.

The Logic of “Green Growth”

In some ways, the math is quite simple. We know that the Earth can only safely sustain our consumption at or below 50 billion tons of stuff each year. This includes everything from raw materials to livestock, minerals to metals: everything humans consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year — roughly 60 percent more than the safe limit. In order for growth to be “green,” or at least not life-destroying, we need to get back down to 50 billion tons while continuing to grow GDP.

A team of scientists ran a model showing that, under the current business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. That’s more than three times the safe limit. This type of economic growth threatens all life on this planet.

In the hopes of finding more optimistic results, the UN Environment Program conducted its own research last year. The team introduced various optimistic assumptions, including a carbon price of $573 per ton and a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation. They found that even with these policies, we will still hit 132 billion tons of consumption per a year by 2050.

In a recent article in Fast Company, Jason Hickel, a leading economic anthropologist, argues that there is no evidence to support green growth hopes. He concludes that although we will need all the strong policies we can get — carbon taxes, resources extraction taxes, more efficient technology, etc. — the only way to bring our economy back in line with our planet’s ecology is to reduce our consumption and production.

This is the core problem that no one wants to address. This is the taboo of Western civilization — the ground zero of values. It is the reason we make up fictions like green growth.

In order to start imagining and achieving real alternatives, we first have to dispose of the false solutions and distractions that pervade the discourse on social change. Right now, it is incumbent on the progressive movement to challenge green growth or any other prophylactic logic that keeps us bound within the ideological concrete of growth as our only option.

Growth as Distributed Fascism

Our global economy is a Ponzi scheme. We have a debt-based economic system that requires growth to exceed interest rates in order for money to be valuable. The World Bank and others tell us that we have to grow the global economy at a minimum of 3 percent per year in order to avoid recession. That means we will double the size of the global economy every 20 years.

For capital holders — rich countries and the rich within countries — this makes complete sense. They disproportionately benefit from the growth system. Growth is the source of their power. It is what keeps them not just rich, but ever-richer — which means ever-more powerful. They are where they are in this system because their interests align with the “Prime Directive” of the system: more capital for its own sake. The reason the people currently in power are in power is because they believe in growth, and because they are good at delivering it. That is the sole qualification for their jobs. Of course, they are not going to be able to see the problems growth causes; they are, by job-definition and personal identity, growth-fanatics.

As for the rest of us, we are tied into this system because growth is the basis for our livelihood, it is the source of our jobs, and our jobs are what allow us to survive in the debt regime.

It’s a tightly woven system that requires our collective complicity. Although we may know that every dollar of wealth created heats up the planet and creates more inequality, we are tied into the system through necessity and a set of values that tells us that selfishness is rational, and indeed, the innately and rightly dominant human behavior we must orient around. We’re coerced into a form of distributed fascism where we as individuals extract more, consume more, destroy more and accumulate more, without ever being able to step back to see the totality of a more holistic worldview.

Post-Growth as Localism

So, what must be done? The first place to start is to challenge the growth dependency of the current operating system. Then we start looking for the antidote logic. Capitalism is characterized by its imposition of monolithic values — the final outcome of the “American Dream” is for everyone to live as consumers in pre-fabricated houses; leveraged by Wells Fargo mortgages; living off Citibank credit cards; wearing Nike shoes; distracted by Facebook, Google and Apple products; drinking Nestle bottled water; and eating Monsanto laboratory foods, while bobbing our heads to Miley Cyrus or Jay-Z.

The antigen to monoculture is polyculture — many ways of being and living. This requires a transition to localism, which is another way of saying ways of life in which we are connected to our environment, so we see and understand the impacts of our consumption. Localism creates contexts in which we can look into the eyes of the people who make our clothes and grow our food, so that our choices can be informed by their impact on human relationships and well-being, not just convenience and a price tag.

This means working to strengthen local communities and create far more self-sufficient economies. Luckily, we have on hand ready guides and knowledge in the Indigenous cultures that have survived longest on this planet, and whose way of organizing and being are in greatest harmony with the biosphere. It means actively opting out of globalized industrialism as much as we can, by creating interdependence through sharing and cooperation, rather than dependence on economic trade and extraction.

At a national level, we could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of more holistic measures, like the Genuine Progress Indicator or a Bhutanese style Gross National Happiness, which are built around life-centric, intrinsic values and take account of negative externalities like pollution and resource degradation. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t necessitate endless growth and debt. And we could put caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the planet can regenerate.

This type of post-growth thinking must become the central organizing principle of society the way “self-determination” was the operating principle of post-World War I society (at least in rhetoric). Localization should be the rallying cry of both nation-states and communities alike who are nimble and brave enough to transcend the shadows of scarcity and self-interest. Localism requires a sensitivity and attunement to local contexts, geographies, histories and cultures. It requires us to contract new types of relationships with each other, with ourselves, with the state, and with Nature itself.

There is no traditional blueprint for these types of economic models. This may seem daunting. But our current trajectory is even more daunting. Unless a politically significant mass of people actively rejects the false god of growth and chooses a different path, our current economic system will crash under its own weight and take most life as we know it with it. As the late British economist David Fleming reminds us, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.”

Alnoor Ladha is a co-founder and executive director of The Rules, a global collective of activists, writers, researchers, coders and others focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty and climate change.

Photo by Aimée Wheaton

The post From “Green Growth” to Post-Growth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

AL: Firstly, I want to express my deep gratitude for Tamera, for the pioneering research you are doing here, and for doing this work for so long, in the face of a slow-moving, defensive culture. This is my third time here and every time I’m back, I feel more immersed in the field that you’ve co-created. There are two related questions that I want to start with: (1) how do we expand this field of healing and solidarity, both vertically and horizontally (2) and what do you think needs to happen globally in order for these ideas to become widely accepted?

Dieter Duhm during an interview.

DD: Thank you for being here. What has to be done to spread the ideas for an intact Earth are two things: first, the proper utilization of our global information system – the Internet and other media – for spreading basic information in service of human liberation from the existing systems of political power. That is one global track we need to establish everywhere, in a language that can be understood everywhere. At the same time, there is another level where certain groups on Earth transform their inner system of life, where the inner issues of sex, love, partnership, community, authority, power are being solved. These are groups that find this place of truth within themselves and between each other, where all those interpersonal struggles are being worked on. We need both, the two levels – the new groups for this inner anchor and a global information field for the anchor in the world.

AL: Is it possible that this can happen in the next twenty years? Are you hopeful?

DD: I only know that this is absolutely necessary. I personally am hopeful but I realize how long this kind of change takes. Building the global field for the new information has so far always failed due to the conflicts within the groups. I have for many years been active in the Marxist movement, in the German student movement. I realized we can never establish the Marxist struggle against the imperialist economy so long as people in the movement fight each other. It’s been the same for fifty years.

Sculpture shows the sign for Tamera and the Healing Biotopes Plan at the shore of Tamera’s big lake.

I believe that we, as humanity, are at a place in our evolution where the shift can happen really quickly. We are in the midst of a transformational process that is accelerating exponentially. Many people are already experiencing this transformation. We are reaching the point where we can start to communicate about this and share wisdom among these new nodal points of change. In that sense, I am hopeful.

AL: Yes, hope seems to be the only path. Despair is a luxury for the privileged. There’s the old Buckminster Fuller line: we have a choice between utopia or oblivion. Do you think our option set is this binary?

DD: Buckminster Fuller was totally right in this place. Either we come to utopia or we will perish. There is no third way. A large part of our intellectual culture tries to find a third path, like the Social Democratic parties. They neither want concrete utopia nor to perish, but there is no other way. We are globally at the place of total decision. Humanity is unequivocally at this decision-making point.

AL: In some ways, the reformists and the liberals are more the problem than the Rightwing reactionaries. I’m sure you’re familiar with Oscar Wilde’s line from The Soul of Man Under Socialism where he said that the worst slave owners were the ones who treated their slaves well because they actually removed their conditions for emancipation.

DD: Intelligent, violent rule uses sugar, and only afterwards the whip. First, they feed you sugar so you will obey; however, if you don’t obey, you will be eliminated. In that regard, the statement is true but only partially so. I am still glad that slaves aren’t treated as brutally. Sometimes I’m happy that there is still a liberal system in Germany. It’s difficult to accept, but in some ways, those are the buffers that still save us from the worst at the moment. It doesn’t matter how hypocritical they are. This is still a buffer for the existing society so that not everything falls into catastrophe right away.

AL: What were the key moments that allowed you to arrive at your personal philosophy? How did you become free – intellectually, spiritually, etc.?

DD: My childhood was difficult. After the Second World War, my family had to flee from Berlin to Southern Germany, and when we got there, near Lake Constance, the parents told their children, “Drive out those refugee children.” The parents had nothing to eat and the neighbors vented their anger against us. And the neighbor’s children persecuted us. They treated us in an incredibly terrible way. They undressed us and threw us into the nettles and put tar on us. They tied us to a pole and threw shit at us, and such things. There wasn’t the possibility for a refugee child to get out of this situation. And at the same time, I kept going back to these strawberries, and the flowers in the fields. And the little Viola flowers at the side of the cereal fields. This was my home, in Nature, and this is where I encountered God. And through these experiences I knew, in addition to the cruelty of this world, there is healing, there is this higher power, and I followed it.

I always wanted to go back to Nature, to the places where there were no people so I could find this connection with God again. Until God told me, “Now you need to go to the people”. And so, I learned to do that too.

AL: This connection between struggle and liberation and politics and spirituality, how do you see this playing out in the global political field? What needs to happen?

DD: We need to enter into the universal field of healing, of life, in which all living beings are interconnected. We call this field the “sacred matrix.” We need to know that. We need to know that, for example, the peace community of San José de Apartadó [based in Colombia], are connected with this healing field. And then we need a group of people here that comes together in that knowledge and sends them a message. A message that reminds the people over there, telling them, “You are part of this healing field.”

Healing also consists of connecting with this healing field itself. That is the miracle of Life. What we need to do is to globalize the miracle of Life. Yes, we need to globalize the miracle of life. The original power field of Life has to be opened to the whole planet. It is of course there anyway, but we need to connect with it consciously. We need to activate it by manifesting it in real communities. That’s a political task of a new kind. If a small but critical mass does this, then the global healing field will be activated. It’s very simple and very possible, and of course, we have no other choice but to make this happen.

AL: In some ways, this is the message for the ones who want to listen, but what would you say to the power elites, the one percenters?

DD:  We don’t need to tell them anything special. We want to create a global morphogenetic field based on the sacred matrix that’s capable of overcoming the existing system. The other thing is – the members of the “one percent” are also just humans. Some of them will realize early enough that it’s good to change sides and support the new system. In the gatherings we are hosting in Portugal, Colombia and the United States, we often have high-ranking representatives of the existing system who know very well that global capitalism has become untenable. We have to build a public lobby that can be heard, a lobby that’s a bit stronger than the NGO complex and is focused on supporting Life.

We need to set an example in the public conscience for an efficient political power which is no longer an opposition, neither inside nor outside of parliament. This belongs to the past. Le Corbusier, the famous architect, said, “We make the revolution by offering the solution.” So, lets find a group of influential people that collaborate in the solution.

AL: I’d like to pivot to a more controversial question: what do you think the role of psychedelics are in the revolution?

DD: Humanity has had a culture of sacraments, medicines and drugs throughout history. We need a sensible continuation of the global traditions of medicine that we’ve had all over the Earth. The question is: which plants, and under which circumstances?

I think that groups that want to reconnect with the universal consciousness should work with the helping agents in a very conscious and ritualistic way. This is how it’s always been. In most cultures, a symbiotic relationship with medical plants is normal. What is abnormal is the life we are leading in the West, the mental sickness of our times, and the collective abuse of the sacred plants.

We now need to translate the experiential content of the medicine work and shamanic practices into real social structures and continuous Life practices, into genuine spirituality.

AL: Let’s transition to what might seem a more banal question in a place like Tamera. I know you spend a lot of time exploring the role of Eros here. Why do you think that the Left resists it so much?

DD: This may sound like I’m avoiding the question but bear with me. It could be related to the biography of certain key characters in the historical trajectory of the Left. For example, Karl Marx had a housekeeper, a woman, where he lived in Trier, that he desired for years.  As he was walking up and down his carpet, developing his thoughts, he was probably deeply repressed [laughter]. He couldn’t deal with his own sexuality. And he’s just one of many unembodied men who transposed their pathologies into their writings, in the cannon of Leftist thought.

Leftist dogma has been so limited by Dialectical Materialism. The theory didn’t leave any space for the woman, for the body, for Eros. They really believed that with their concept of political economy, they would be able to change the world. But it was written by a sexually repressed young Marx in Trier, to the foibles and limitations of human experience. It’s incredible how much global movements or ideas can be bound to a single person.

AL: I can only imagine what it must have been like in post-World War II Germany, being as liberated as you were, to hold these types of ideas. Now, forty years later, do you feel like the world is catching up or do you feel a mounting sense of frustration?

DD: I didn’t know that it would take so much time. I was totally frustrated for many years, yes.I couldn’t relate to most of my comrades in Germany, and I don’t think they understood my ideas. When I wrote the book Fear in Capitalism in 1972, it became a best-seller, and was widely read among Leftist circles in Germany. I thought that was an opening to a broader discourse. But all of the books that followed were just rejected. It was a collective rejection. It was a defense against specific insights in the realm of sexuality and our inner driving powers. They were based on a different emphasis than simply rational economics.

My thoughts didn’t fit with the thoughts of consensus culture. I felt like a singularity. I was a lone rider, a crazy. Year after year, I needed to see how I could stay faithful to my path, how I could continue. And Sabine helped me [Sabine Lichtenfelds is Dieter’s life partner and the co-founder of Tamera].

I was never just simply frustrated though. It was more complex than that. I knew at some point there would be a change and now the shift is happening, there is a lot of work to be done. And it’s exciting. There are many co-workers here who look forward to this work. Tamera and I are in a new situation. The next generation is taking the reins – they understand the critique of the existing system and they are embodying the solutions.

AL: Do you have any sense of regret, or lessons, in the way you’ve lived your political life?

DD: No, I don’t have regrets in a linear sense. Perhaps I wasn’t courageous enough in some ways. I regret that I had such a thin skin, that I didn’t have enough power to accelerate the process. I made so many mistakes that I don’t regret [laughter]. You know, if you’ve been misunderstood and harvest negative projections all the time, you get angry. You condemn other people, you go in this hostility state. I wish I didn’t treat anyone unjustly on this path. And if I did, well sometimes, there was no other way and I am sorry.

AL: For me and many activists of this next generation, we see what you’ve done as the hugely courageous and radical, especially in the context and era that you did it in.

DD: It’s hard to say.

At some point, I realized, my life is guided. I no longer needed to do the exercise of courage, but I needed to agree to what was required of me, the decisions that were required of me. The decision to step out of my profession, to give away my possessions, to let go of my marriage, and to do all these things at once was a decision I had to make. But I didn’t need courage. It was just like it was.

AL: So the courage to be carried and the courage to choose Life is the ultimate courage?

DD: Yes, if you want to say that. We do need that kind of courage, yes.

International peace pilgrimage in Israel-Palestine in 2007, initiated by Tamera.

DD: To help establish the new infrastructure, the new systems. To help establish the network according to where your talents are and your joys. To help build communities around the world. The new system consists of these two tracks: the upper and the lower, the spiritual and the political. We must help create communication between these two tracks. We must create a new language that brings these two tracks together. And we must show our solidarity for the various resistances that are actively protecting the sacred. When communities in places like Standing Rock start to see that we are standing with them, they will see that they are embedded in an international community. Together we can reconnect with the original power field of Life. If we can start to believe again in this planetary community then a global field will arise in which Indigenous knowledge can come together with a futurological perspective. And that is a great vision to serve.

AL: Deep gratitude to you and Sabine, and thank you for blazing the trail for all of us.

Cross-posted from Kosmos Online

All images courtesy Tamera

About the Author

Alnoor Ladha, Co-founder, Executive Director – The Rules (www.therules.org)

Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, storytelling and technology. He is a founding member and the Executive Director of /The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world.

Photo by RAM DAIRY

The post The Deschooling Dialogues: An Interview with Dr. Dieter Duhm appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally published on localfutures.org. Chat transcript available for download as PDF here.

A 500-year-old economic and political system is dying. ‘Trump trauma’ is affecting people around the world, but the current climate (in every sense of the word) is not the result of one man alone. While we come to grips with that bigger picture, it’s worth asking: What gives us hope? What keeps our hearts beating, and gives us the spirit to keep the struggle for justice alive?

Moving from the personal, to the communal, to the political, this webinar explores the concept of ‘sacred activism’. Combining resistance with renewal, and structural critique with a celebration of life, sacred activism rejects the corporate message that we are greedy and aggressive by nature. It integrates politics, spirituality, and a deep-rooted sense of place into a holistic practice capable of bringing together indigenous peoples, traditional environmentalists, union organizers, New Age spiritualists, and ordinary citizens alike – as it did at Standing Rock, and as it continues to do in people’s movements around the world.

Delve into this exciting field with our speakers, Alnoor Ladha from The Rules and Helena Norberg-Hodge from Local Futures.

Resources to complement the webinar

Memory, Fire and Hope: Five Lessons from Standing Rock, by Alnoor Ladha. March 8th, 2017
Big Picture Activism, by Helena Norberg-Hodge. October 26th, 2014

PRESENTERS

Alnoor Ladha’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, storytelling, technology and the decentralization of power. He is a founding member and the Executive Director of The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world. Alnoor is a writer and speaker on new forms of activism, the structural causes of inequality, the link between climate change and capitalism, and the rise of the Global South as a powerful organizing force in the transition to a post-capitalist world. He is also writing a book about the intersection of mysticism and anarchism.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is a pioneer of the new economy movement and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and the Goi Peace Prize. She is author of Ancient Futures, co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up, and producer of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness. She is the director of Local Futures and the International Alliance for Localization, and a founding member of the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.

The post Sacred Activism in a Post-Trump World appeared first on P2P Foundation.

San José de Apartadó, Colombia — This is a significant feat, given that it is the leading peace community in Colombia, born in the heart of a civil war between the Colombian government, right-wing paramilitaries and the guerrilla army of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-Ep). Dignitaries from around the country and the globe have gathered in San José de Apartadó, including high-level officials from the United Nations, European ambassadors and heads of international non-governmental organizations like Peace Brigades International. Despite the international awareness of this community among certain circles in the human rights movement, most notably Noam Chomsky’s deep admiration for the community’s work, most people have never heard of San José de Apartadó. A little history might help us better understand why this is the case.

A Peace Community in the Heart of a Civil War

Founded by 1,350 displaced farmers in March 1997, after paramilitaries roamed the region pillaging and massacring, the community came together to protect themselves and their land, declaring themselves neutral in the war. The armed groups made them pay a huge price for this decision, killing more than 200 of their members, including most of their leaders. Almost all victims died by the hands of paramilitary and national armed forces, largely trained by the US government, working in the service of local landowners and multinational corporations.

Despite the horrors they have faced, the members of this community have stood their ground and continue working together bound by a commitment to nonviolence and reconciliation. Eduar Lanchero, one of their late leaders, once said, “The power of the community consists of its ability to transform pain into hope …” With their community, the people of San José have shown other communities in the region and country how to break the vicious victim-perpetrator cycle and to create a self-sufficient community outside the dominant resource extraction economic model that surrounds them. This level of economic autonomy and independence from state influence has been seen as a grave threat to the interests of multinational corporations looking for development opportunities in the region.

Conscious of the larger systemic effects of their resistance, Lanchero further elucidated,

The armed groups aren’t the only ones who kill. It’s the logic behind the whole system. The way people live generates this kind of death. This is why we decided to live in a way that our life generates life. One basic condition, which kept us alive was to not play the game of fear, which was imposed upon us by the murders of the armed forces. We have made our choice. We chose life. Life corrects us and guides us.”

Peace vs. “Development”

Despite international accompaniment through various non-governmental organizations, the persecution of the community has actually increased since the peace deal was signed. According to the February 24, 2017, newsletter of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, the community has faced paramilitary invasion, with their remote hamlets continually occupied, threats that the community remain silent about the atrocities they have been afflicted by or face further retaliation.

As Todd Howland, Colombia representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights told Truthout, “Many claim that now there’s peace, there’s no longer any need for a peace community” and according to sources who wish to remain anonymous for their safety, the state has offered community members money to lure them out of the community. Gloria Cuartas, the former mayor of Apartadó, the municipality governing the region, says, “Parts of the government and multinationals use the cover of apparent peace to manage what they so far haven’t — ending the peace community.”

Why is the Colombian state so worried about a community of peaceful farmers? And is the answer to this question the same reason the story of San José de Apartadó has been so hidden from international media? The Colombian army has been clear on this answer, often stating that the community is in the way of”development.” What do they mean by development? Clearly, they are not referring to peace and human well-being, but rather the standard narrow definition of extractive-based GDP growth.

Edward Goldsmith, one of the fathers of the British environmental movement, reminds us, “Development is just a new word for what Marxists called imperialism and what we can loosely refer to as colonialism — a more familiar and less loaded term.”

For 20 years, the community of San José de Apartadó has been living a working alternative of nonviolent resistance to the brutal agenda of displacement and oppression. It seems to be the imperative of the state to dismantle it so it won’t be replicated or emulated by other communities living through the same struggles across the country.

Ati Quigua, leader of the Arhuaco people, who served as a spokesperson for Colombia’s Indigenous nations in the Havana peace negotiations, mirrors those worries. “They are making ‘peace’ in order to get rid of the guerrillas, so that paramilitaries can take over the countryside, drive out farmers and Indigenous Peoples and carry on with what they call ‘economic development’,” Quigua told Truthout. “This isn’t our peace. We want peace with the Earth. If things don’t change, Colombia is going to face a cultural and ecological genocide.”

The Possibility of Genuine Peace in Colombia

Colombia is a country at the tipping point, at a fragile moment of uncertainty, pregnant with both the prospect of a genuine humane transformation and the imminent danger of a violent backlash that could be even more brutal than the violence of its recent past.

One thing is clear: Peace will only be possible by addressing the root causes of the war. In other words, peace cannot be achieved without changing the rules of the global system that require perpetual exploitation of natural resources for maximum private profit, and therefore, necessitates the displacement of people from their lands.

Communities like San José de Apartadó can serve as living laboratories for the necessary next phase in the Colombian peace process: initiating a process of reconciliation and social peace-building in the country. They can also provide an alternative to traditional Western-led economic development. This is why knowing about this community and its peace work is an important part of creating a post-capitalist future. What better place to start than communities that have fostered reconciliation and resilience in the heart of violence and oppression?

Photo by Fellowship of Reconciliation

The post Peace vs. Development: The Untold Story of the Colombian Civil War appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Alnoor Ladha: Last week, on February 22, 2017, water protectors at the Oceti Sakowin camp, the primary camp of Standing Rock, were evicted by the Army Corps of Engineers in a military style takeover. A peaceful resistance that began with a sacred fire lit on April 1, 2016, ended in a blaze as some of the protectors, in a final act of defiance, set some of the camp’s structures on fire.

The millions of people around the world who have stood in solidarity and empathy with Standing Rock now stand in disbelief and grief, but the forced closure of the encampment is simply the latest chapter in a violent, 500-year-old history of colonization against the First Nations. It is also the latest chapter in the battle between an extractive capitalist model and the possibility of a post-capitalist world.

Of course, the ongoing struggle will not go down in the flames at Oceti Sakowin. We should take this opportunity to remember the enduring lessons of this movement, and prepare ourselves for what is to come next.

1. There is a global convergence of movements

When I visited Standing Rock in October 2016, it struck me that this was the most diverse political gathering I’d ever seen. Over 300 North American tribes had came together for the first time in history. Standing alongside them were over 100 Indigenous communities from all over the globe. A contingent from the Sami people, the Indigenous peoples of Scandinavia, had traversed the Atlantic to show their support the day I arrived. They were joined by black bloc anarchists, New Age spiritualists, traditional environmentalists, union organizers and ordinary Americans who have never attended a protest.

The media has characterized Standing Rock as a one-off protest against a pipeline in North Dakota. But the reality is that the various movements from around the world including the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the Pink Tide in Latin America, the landless people’s movement from India, the anti-austerity movement in Europe, the global Occupy movement, and the countless “awakenings” spreading across the African continent are uniting as expressions of the same impulse: a belief that the neoliberal capitalist system has failed the majority of humanity and a new world is emerging.

2. A more holistic activism is emerging

With its sacred fire, daily prayers and water ceremonies, Standing Rock has helped to reanimate the sacred aspect of activism. We are seeing a shift from resistance to resistance and renewal simultaneously. Progressive movements which once internalized the Neitzchean dictum that “God is dead” are now evolving their positions. As the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey states: “As Capital triumphs over the Social as against all spiritualities, spirituality itself finds itself realigned with revolution^.”There is a shift to embracing a more holistic activism that transcends traditional Cartesian duality and calls upon greater forces. Cedric Goodhouse, an elder at Standing Rock put it simply, saying: “We are governed by prayer.”

The particular ways in which Standing Rock embodied non-violent direct action has given many activists a new faith in the possibility of a more sacred activism. I stood with dozens of water protectors when they prayed on water in front of Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) engineers while they were laying down oil pipeline. The very act of seeing Indigenous elders praying on water said more about the implications of an extractive pipeline than any linear argument. They dropped their tools not only because they wanted to avoid confrontation, but because somehow they understood they were on the wrong side of the moral calculus.

The author Charles Eisenstein reminds us of a powerful insight about sacred activism that has been embodied in Standing Rock: “We need to confront an unjust, ecocidal system. Each time we do we will receive an invitation to give in to the dark side and hate ‘the deplorables.’ We must not shy away from those confrontations. Instead, we can engage them empowered by the inner mantra that my friend Pancho Ramos-Stierle uses in confrontations with his jailers: ‘Brother, your soul is too beautiful to be doing this work.’ If we can stare hate in the face and never waver from that knowledge, we will access inexhaustible tools of creative engagement, and hold a compelling invitation to the haters to fulfill their beauty.”

3. Occupation of space is a critical tactic

Even before Occupy there has been a renaissance in the political understanding of the value of place and space. The battlegrounds between the corporate/state nexus and people’s movements are physical realms: the places where resources are being extracted, water is being polluted and capitalist interests are expanding through what Marxist geographer, David Harvey, calls “accumulation by dispossession.”

The occupation of space creates a physical spectacle that forces the corporate media to tell the stories it would otherwise like to ignore. It creates networks of solidarity and deep relationships that span beyond the time and space of the occupation. It creates inter-generational transfers-of-knowledge, both politically and spiritually. It weaves the connective tissue for the continued resistance against corporate (and other imperialist) power.

Standing Rock will be remembered by the thousands of activists who braved blizzards to sleep in tipis, who cooked food together in the communal kitchens, and celebrated in song and ceremony with tribal elders around the sacred fire. As the activist Reverend Billy Talen recently stated: “Zuccotti Park and the stretch of sidewalk in front of the Ferguson police department and the meadow near the Sacred Stone… these three places are lived in. Here is where activists cared for each other and shared food, clothing and medicine. The force that upsets entrenched power the most is this compassionate living, this community in plain sight.”

4. We are Nature protecting itself

Part of the on-going colonial legacy of North America is a battle between the mute materialism of capitalism that seeks to dominate nature and the symbiotic approach of Indigenous thought that sees Nature as alive, and sees human beings as playing a central role in the evolution and stewardship of the broader whole. It is this very worldview that rationalists derisively call “animist” and that continues to confound the utility maximization ideals of modern thought.

Indigenous lands are increasingly going to be a battleground not only for resource extraction, but ideology itself. Although Indigenous peoples represent about 4% of the world’s population they live on and protect 22% of the Earth’s surface. Critically, the land inhabited by Indigenous peoples holds the remaining 80% of the planet’s biodiversity.

It is no coincidence that ETP moved away from its early proposal to have the DAPL project cross the Missouri river just north of Bismarck, a primarily white city, to the Standing Rock area inhabited by the Sioux tribe.

During COP 21 in Paris, Indigenous youth groups carried banners that read: “We are Nature protecting itself.” The idea that we are not protestors, but protectors of the sacred is a central theme that resonates throughout the world.

In a powerful article on the Sacred Stone blog, the camp’s founder Ladonna Bravebull Allard said: “This movement is not just about a pipeline. We are not fighting for a reroute, or a better process in the white man’s courts. We are fighting for our rights as the Indigenous peoples of this land; we are fighting for our liberation, and the liberation of Unci Maka, Mother Earth. We want every last oil and gas pipe removed from her body. We want healing. We want clean water. We want to determine our own future.”

These ideals are not just Indigenous ideals; they are ideals linked with our very survival as a species. In a world of catastrophic climate change, protecting the sacred must be the mantra of all activists and concerned citizens.

5. There is a common antagonist

Although the various social movements around the world are portrayed as separate incidents that are particular to their local context, there is a growing awareness among movements themselves that we are uniting against the same antagonist: the deadly logic of late-stage capitalism.

Whether one is fighting for land rights in India or tax justice in Kenya or to stop a pipeline in the US, the ‘enemy’ is the same: a cannibalistic global economy that requires perpetual extraction, violence, oppression, in the service of GDP growth, which in turn, benefits a tiny elite at the expense of the world’s majority.

There is a Algonquin word, wetiko, that refers to a cannibalistic spirit that consumes the heart of man. It was a common term used when the First Nations of North America initially interacted with the Western European colonialists. The spirit of wetiko, like many memetic thought-forms, has mutated and evolved, and has now become the animating force of the global capitalist system. We are not just fighting a pipeline; we are fighting the wetiko spirit that has taken hold of our planet like invisible architecture.

What Standing Rock achieved so beautifully was to provide this broader context, to ladder up a local struggle for clean water to the struggle against the forces of wetiko itself. Wetikois inherently anti-life. And what we are all fighting for is a new system that recognizes our interdependence with the Earth and with each other, and that allows our highest selves to flourish.

The sacred fire at Standing Rock may now be smoldering but it’s reverberations are only beginning to be felt. As Julian Brave NoiseCat poignantly states in his reflections on the impact of this historical movement: “They have lit a fire on the prairie in the heart of America as a symbol of their resistance, a movement that stands for something that is undoubtedly right: water that sustains life, and land that gave birth to people.”

This is the enduring power of Standing Rock. It has created inextinguishable hope, activated our historical memory and created new forms of power by the profound act of starting a global movement from a single sacred fire. The fires of Standing Rock are illuminating the transition that lies ahead and the new society that is emerging from its ashes.

Alnoor Ladha is the Executive Director of The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, writers, and researchers dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and climate change. He is also a board member of Greenpeace International USA.

Cross-posted from Common Dreams

Photo by Dark Sevier

The post Memory, Fire and Hope: Five Lessons from Standing Rock appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which the government “intrudes.” In this view, whatever inequality or insecurity the market generates is assumed to be natural and the inevitable consequences of impersonal “market forces.” … If you aren’t paid enough to live on, so be it. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of people are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they’ll have to work two or three jobs and have no idea what they’ll be earning next month or even next week, that’s unfortunate but it’s the outcome of “market forces.”

Reich’s point is that market forces aren’t the result of a free market, which doesn’t exist, never has existed, and probably never will exist. What we do have is a highly engineered marketplace with hundreds of thousands of rules — rules most often created behind closed doors by people who will benefit from every word and comma they put into place. These rules take endless form — the tax code, appropriations bills, new laws, court rulings, executive orders, and administrative guidance to name just a few.

Democrats and Republicans alike — at all levels of government and in all three branches—design these market forces. They grant favors to local businesses, friends, and favored industries, as well as emerging and dying technologies. While these rules are more likely to limit the liability from the disastrous effects of mountain top coal removal than they are to provide tax benefits to solar energy, most industries have figured out how to play the game. They hire lobbyists, donate to politicians — and they find the benefits exponentially greater than the cost. Journalist Nicholas Kristof noted that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries alone spent $121,000 per member of Congress on lobbying last year. Research from Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics shows that corporations in general get up to $220 return for every dollar they “invest” in lobbying Congress.

The governing classes and elected officials have always created the rules of the economic game. These legal frameworks and the systems they support affect our nation’s economy and daily life more than the most visible government programs, including social security, food stamps, or health care.

Reich goes on to say:

The rules are the economy. … As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized [in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation], those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for different government — often one that favors them or their patrons. “Deregulation” of the financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as “reregulation.” It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules.

In the book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang writes:

The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How “free” a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined “free market” is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

Our “Unfree Market”

Many opposed environmental regulations, which first appeared a few decades ago on things like cars and factory emissions, as serious infringements on our freedom to choose. Opponents asked: If people want to drive in more-polluting cars, or if factories find that more-polluting production methods are more profitable, why should government stop them? Today, most people accept these regulations, but they’re a sign of an unfree market. So some limitations on freedom (i.e. protective legislation) can be helpful. But most ‘unfreedoms’ can be devastating. In essence, we have to choose which unfreedoms we want to live with.

Most would consider monopolies a sign of an unfree, and even an immoral market. Monsanto, through the licensing of technology with its GMO seeds, controls 90 percent of the soybeans and 80 percent of the corn planted and grown in America. According to the Center for Food Safety, this drove up the average cost of planting a single acre of soybeans 325 percent and for corn it has been 2,659 percent between 1994 and 2011. So through their monopolized control of seeds, they are driving the price of food through the roof, ensuring the starvation of millions of people around the world.

Powdered cocaine is a drug generally preferred by rich, white Americans, while the poor tend to use crack cocaine. While both are illegal, crack carries a legal penalty 100 times longer than the same substance in powdered form. It seems that there’s also no free market when it comes to jail terms. Not surprisingly, with wealth, power, and influence come lighter criminal penalties.

Higher education has also never been part of the free market — admissions spots at universities are “sold” more often that we we’d like to believe, whether through the influence of legal donations, or powerful friends or family.

The free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.

Social Inequity by Design

“We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”—Louis Brandeis

An undeniable result of this unfree market is the continued consolidation of wealth and influence. On average, CEO pay has increased 937 percent between 1978 and 2013. The average worker’s pay increased just 10.2 percent over the same period. This increase has little to do with the increasing value of these CEOs, and everything to do with the power and influence they have over the rules of the system that allow them to enrich themselves.

The real earnings of the median male have declined 19 percent since 1970, and the median male with only a high school diploma saw his real earnings fall 41 percent from 1970 to 2010. Among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people live in what is considered “deep poverty,” meaning their incomes are 50 percent below the official poverty line. One quarter of the nation’s Hispanics and 27 percent of African Americans live in poverty.

Reich writes, “There is no longer any significant countervailing force (like powerful labor unions), no force to constrain or balance the growing political strength of large corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.” He also describes research conducted by Princeton professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which analyzed 1,799 policy issues to determine the influence of economic elites and business groups on public policy issues compared to average citizens. It found that, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.”

The notion that we live in a democracy turns out to be just another illusion. The deteriorated state of our democracy more easily enables the wealthy and powerful to write the rules and give themselves the greatest benefits. Activists Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha argue that the current set of rules that articulate the values of our economic operating system can be best characterized as extractive, exploitative, greedy, selfish, elitist, hierarchical, patriarchal, life-denying, and indeed, psychotic. They invoke the Cree Indian term, wetiko, which is a cannibalistic spirit with an insatiable desire for consumption, that eventually even subsumes its host. They are essentially saying that the animating force of late-stage capitalism is the mind-virus of Wetiko.

In sum, we have a system that has already chosen winners and losers. A system that elaborately ensures who gets into Ivy League colleges, gets the best jobs, makes the most money, and enjoys the most privileged lives. This is the same system that decides which businesses receive the most corporate welfare, benefit most from regulations, receive the best protection from foreign competitors, and are most likely to get the best returns on their lobbying dollars. We have, at the end of the day, the freest marketplace that money can buy. A system created by Wetikos to perpetuate Wetiko.

Thirteen Ways to Start Fixing the Problem

The solution lies not in a freer marketplace with less government intervention, but in a marketplace that expresses the wishes and best interests of the majority — in one that fairly protects the rights of minorities with what we might call a “democratic marketplace,” driven by a commitment to justice, equity, interdependence, ecological regeneration, and the well-being of all life.

How do we move toward this goal? Here are thirteen ways to start fixing the deep psychosis of our system.

1.  Get money out of politics. We must overturn Citizens United v. FEC, support organizations like Free Speech For People (which has led an attack on the ruling), and ultimately transition to 100 percent publicly financed elections.

2.  Require disclosure on the source of funding for any and all documents published academically or in the public domain.

3.  Create new anti-trust laws that prevent and eliminate monopolies.

4.  End all corporate financial subsidies.

5.  End insider trading.

6. Initiate an immediate living wage and transition to a basic minimum income for all citizens.

7.  Expand the definition of unionized labor to increase the number of workers that unions represent.

8.  Set a corporate minimum tax rate of 25 percent.

9.  Eliminate the second home mortgage deduction.

10.  Increase funding available to fund Employee Stock Ownership Plans and build greater tax incentives for co-operatives and other forms of employee ownership.

11.  Stop transferring the cost of product externalities from business to society. The American Sustainable Business Council has a working group developing policy recommendations that would begin to move us toward full-cost accounting.

12.  Permanently eliminate payroll taxes.

13.  Mandate that women make up 50 percent of the directors of all public and private companies over the next three years.

This is not an exhaustive list, but rather an example of what is possible that highlights how many existing solutions already exist. We have been taught that politics and economics are separate fields. But that is an artificial distinction that serves the power elites and their agents of exploitation. We must reign in the corporate take-over of society so that we can reimagine commerce, community and government itself, and usher in a just transition to a post-capitalist, post-wetiko world.

*An earlier version of this article appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on March 30, 2016.

Originally published at FastCompany. 

Part of the Seeing Wetiko series. See all articles here.

Photo by angermann

The post Seeing Wetiko: The Freest Marketplace Money Can Buy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Image by Larry Pollack

Those were my thoughts when I saw “Seeing Wetiko,” an “online gallery” of artworks, music and videos just released by the global arts collective The Rules.  “Artists and activists from around the world have come together in a burst of creative energy to popularize the Algonquin concept of wetiko, a cannibalistic mind virus they claim is causing the destruction of the planet,” the group announced.

Wetiko is an indigenous term used to describe “a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul which deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others is logical and moral.”  The dozens of artworks on the website convey this idea in vivid, compelling ways.  The term wetiko was chosen for the project as a framework for understanding our global crisis, from ecological destruction and homelessness, to poverty and inequality.  To illustrate the scope of wetiko today, the website features a wonderful four-minute video, graffiti murals from Nairobi, carved marks from the US, a film about plastic bottle waste in Trinidad and Tobago, and a theater performance about patriarchy in India.

The Rules is a global network of “activists, artists, writers, farmers, peasants, students, workers, designers, hackers and dreamers” who focus on five key areas needing radical change – money, power, secrecy, ideas and the commons.

In an essay in Kosmos Journal describing the wetiko project, Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha, co-founders of The Rules, write:  “What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected?”

The project organizers cite Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, who explains that “according to strands of Native American philosophy, wetiko is only possible when you commit the fundamental mistake of seeing yourself as an individual separate from the whole, separate from other humans and other non-human forms of being, not just animals and plants but also rivers and forests. It’s only once you presuppose this way of being of separation and disunity, when it’s written into the DNA of your culture, that it becomes possible to instrumentalize other forms of being for your own gain – to consume them for your own enrichment.”

The Rules goes on:  “All over the world, there is a feeling that something is deeply wrong.  It is often felt more than seen, an unnamed darkness that keeps millions (even billions) of people disconnected from the reality of authentic life-affirming experience.  Too many of our so-called leaders are asleep at the wheel — they talk about economic growth-at-all-costs as the only viable solution to mass poverty, wealth inequality, the climate crisis and other planetary-crises humanity must confront in the 21st Century.

“Those with a spiritual bent might say that a shadowy presence has shrouded much of the Earth. People are sleeping through the same nightmare, unable to awaken within the dream.”

By giving a fresh adaptation to the word wetiko, The Rules clearly hope to foster deeper reflection on the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism as a system based on wetiko.  “A key lesson from meme theory and the healing arts,” the curators write, “is that when we are conscious of the beliefs that shape our lives we are less likely to replicate them blindly. Conscious awareness is the beginning of an antidote, like green shoots through concrete.”

Lead image by Sara & Vicki Garrett

The post Seeing Wetiko appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Last month, I spoke over Skype to The Rules founder Alnoor Ladha. Ladha filled me in on how The Rules operates on the ground, and on his own journey from reformer to revolutionary. We also spoke about the role of the city in neoliberalism, the part the sharing economy can play in rewriting “the rules,” and why Donald Trump is emblematic of the challenges faced by anti-capitalist activists.

ABM: Tell me about The Rules. What is it?

AL: The Rules is a network of activists, writers, researchers, journalists, coders, hackers, and artists focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty, and climate change. We don’t focus on the traditional development model, which is based on aid, charity, and sympathy. We focus [instead] on the drivers of these injustices, which are things like the tax justice system, the global economic operating system—essentially the rules that ensure that the current state of pillage and destruction is the logical outcome.

We do that in two ways. We have a campaigning arm, that supports and works with social movements from around the world—peasant movements, farmer movements, women’s rights groups, indigenous groups—as well as a think-tank arm, that tries to get more progressive and radical ideas into the mainstream media.

What are your objectives, both short- and long-term?

On the campaigning side, a lot of it is about helping groups articulate how all oppression is connected. So we’re not fighting a lands-rights struggle in India, and a tax-justice struggle in Kenya, and a climate struggle in Venezuela. These are all linked to the same driver—the same nemesis, if you will. Which is the logic of the neoliberal capitalist system.

When we connect the dots like that, from a media perspective, a storytelling perspective, and a campaigning perspective, it helps expose the bigger picture at work. That’s a lot of what the campaigning work is about. And also linking these civil-society groups with each other. We’re trying to build that organizing infrastructure.

What brought you to this work? Did you have an epiphany moment, or was it more of an evolution in your thinking?

You know, it’s funny. I think part of the journey for me has been like a removal of veils.

I was socialized by the Canadian education system. Things are pretty good in Canada for the average person. And no one looks at the historical reasons why that is the case. So I think when you start going on the journey of understanding privilege, you start having these veils systematically removed.

My dad was exiled from Uganda in the early 1970s by Idi Amin. So I was sensitive to power, and interested in understanding political power. But I was never an activist in that traditional sense from a young age. I wasn’t some kind of child prodigy. I was just curious and interested.

As I became more curious, I started to question the structures behind the system. Once you start to understand, for example, that Canada’s wealth is dependent on resource extraction and, historically, is a byproduct of the British colonial system, then you start understanding [why you were] taught this certain version of history.

Going to university in Canada, this idea [existed] that somehow we should be grateful for the jobs we’re given. But [there was] no real explanation of the debt-based financial system that requires us to work these bullshit jobs.

I started as a reformist in many ways, because I believed the Western myth of progress, which is: everything’s getting better, and if we could just make slight tweaks in this current system, things would be better.

I was really interested in the idea of social enterprise for a couple of years. Then when you start to ask, “Who are things getting better for, and in what way are they getting better?” you realize that that Western myth of progress is total bullshit.

Of every dollar of wealth created, 93 cents goes to the top one percent since 1998. You can see why we’re told that the only model for any social change is more economic growth, more foreign direct investment, more GDP increase. Very few people benefit from that, but those are the same people who dictate what economic policy and theory is.

Understanding that every dollar of wealth creates inequality, and every dollar of wealth heats up our planet—because we have a fossil fuels extractive-based system—you realize that there’s no way that reforming this current system is going to change the quality of life for the majority of humanity. Quite the opposite. The more we improve the system, the more we’re keeping in a vampiric system whose logical outcome will be the destruction of the planet.

Let’s go back to The Rules itself. How does it operate on the ground?

On the campaigning side, we’ll do everything from research and policy work [to working with] media. For example, the landless people’s movement in India, Ekta Parishad, asked us to support them at a key moment when they were fighting the Land Rights Act. [Likewise], Kenyans for Tax Justice, a coalition based in Kenya trying to fight a regressive VAT tax.

In situations like that, we will help them convene other groups in this space, we’ll do the research and policy work for them as needed, we’ll do the media work and try to get their stories in the global media. We’ll do some social media and digital organizing.

We’ve created tools for groups. We’ve created a tool called /Crowdring, which is a missed-call tool. Anybody with a first-generation handset can dial a local number, instead of having to go online to sign a petition. Local posters would have this number, you ring once and it automatically hangs up, and your mobile number’s registered as a petition. Then we can text you back, with no charge. It’s a more democratic version of the online petition, a more tech-accessible version.

So we’ll build tools as well. Then we’ll help with some of the political strategy, and even trainings, workshops, capacity-building as needed.

That’s more of the nuts and bolts of the capacity-building work. How people find out about the organization, is really a mix. It’s almost like politics of association. [We attract groups that] are interested in connecting the dots between how student debt in the US is related to the World Bank’s land-rights policy and systematic displacement of hundreds of thousands of people around the planet, with the Goldman Sachs speculation, growth-based investment model.

It’s people who think in terms of structures and systems and do that kind of organizing. We call it the constellational world view. It sounds theoretical and abstract, but at the end of the day it’s a local community is being displaced by the World Bank’s land-rights policy.

Unless you can tell the broader story of why the World Bank believes that displacing poor people and smallholder farmers to support big agricultural businesses is a good idea, you’re missing the major motivation. We try to fill in that part of it and tell that global story. Which is: these things aren’t happening because the World Bank cares about poor people, or is actually interested in the work of development.

These things happen because there’s an ideology, which is the background condition. And this ideology is called neoliberalism. The ideology is that we need to grow the economy at all costs. We need to prejudice corporations because they’re job creators. And the market is the ultimate arbitrator, and arbiter, of morality, and our definition of the good life.

This model has been discredited for over thirty years. But because a small group of people benefit from this model—and that’s the same group of people who are writing our economic textbooks and deciding on central bank and federal bank policy around the world—there are people who actually work in these institutions who still believe this. And they come from a Western-centered perspective.

And people like [at] the Gates Foundation who believe that because there’s more microwaves in people’s houses, that’s somehow an indicator of increase in quality of life. Even though there are more people living in poverty with higher levels of inequality and injustice than there’s ever been.

I think this is why this type of work, this sort of systemic structural work, is important in connecting the dots between various forms of injustice that are happening.

On the think-tank side, a lot of this is: Well, how do you popularize this type of thinking? Not just this type of thinking, but the alternatives. One of the things that keeps us in place is this belief—you know, Margaret Thatcher’s famous line, “There is no alternative.” And that’s, of course, ridiculous.

The global capitalist monoculture wants us to believe that there is no alternative, and everyone has to have Microsoft Office and eat Monsanto GMO foods and listen to Miley Cyrus. That’s a ridiculous model in every sense.

The more this model of globalization takes hold, the more other alternatives are actually sprouting up and fighting against [it]. This is essentially a battle between life and death, the battle between corporate centralized power and decentralized power of people.

So part of what we’re trying to do in the think-tank arm is document these struggles, and these wins, and these alternatives and show not just that another world is possible, [but that] many worlds are possible.

What particular obstacles to change do you find in cities, in particular?

That’s an interesting question. I know Shareable is doing a lot of work in the cityscape, and thinking about urban environments. I’m really torn on the city-based model.

As we all know, we’re increasingly becoming a more urban species. Seventy percent of the world’s population’s going to be in cities by 2050. But I think we have to look at the motivation of why people move to cities. The main reason people move to cities is access to capital, and access to jobs.

If we step back for a second and we look at the broader economic system, we are stuck in this growth-based, debt-based capitalist system. We have to grow the global GDP at three percent a year, according to the World Bank, or we’re essentially in a recession.

The major driver for this is [that] in a debt-based system your growth has to exceed your interest rate in order for that money to be valuable, in order to pay that money back. So you basically have private federal reserves that are run by banks, that are printing money at debt from [the] beginning. Then we’re all forced to grow our businesses, our countries, the global GDP at three percent a year. And we’re told that this is a good thing.

But just in 2015, a three percent growth on a GDP of around $70, 80 trillion is about $2.5 trillion. That’s roughly 1970s GDP. It took us from the beginning of civilization to 1970 to get to about a $2.5 trillion GDP. And now we need that just in the delta, so the house of cards doesn’t collapse.

So I think we actually have to step back from the city awhile and be like, “You know, we’re driven to cities in order to increase GDP and have our access to capital because the only way we can buy goods and services now, through the globalized model, is debt.” But we used to have many ways to access goods and services: we used to fish, and barter, and trade, and have a gift economy, and have strong resilient communities and self-sufficient farming. But that’s all been destroyed by the global monoculture in order to make us dependent on a global supply chain that’s easier to fulfill when you’re living in cities.

Most people are moving to cities and living in slum urban environments. I live in Cape Town, South Africa. There are maybe 4.5 million people in this city. And only half a million people live in the city proper, and four million are living in the outskirts slums, [and] are essentially servicing the people in the city. They’re taking two-hour commutes into the city, and two-hour commutes out of the city, in order to have access to some capital as cleaners, as retail workers, as servers in restaurants.

The latest inequality stats that show that the top one percent now has more wealth—not income, wealth—than the bottom 99 percent of humanity. So for the first time they have over 50 percent share of global wealth. And 62 billionaires have as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent.

This is no accident. These things don’t happen because somehow these people are smarter. These things happen because the game is rigged. What globalization resulted [in] is the corporate exploitation of labor in the cheapest places.

That was the first thing. That’s what the big globalization trend of the ’60s and ’70s was about. The second is tax havens. Corporations have opted out of the social contract. They don’t pay tax. Corporations like Google and Facebook pay like two percent effective tax price outside the United States. They do this through transfer pricing, mispricing, and all sorts of financial black magic.

Of course, the people who are benefiting from this—besides the corporate executives—are the ranks of the apparatchiks, the bankers, the lawyers, the accounting firms. These are the people who are getting really wealthy, who live in these cities, and who dangle the financial carrot to all the rest of humanity, which comes into these cities in exploitive, low-paying, low-quality service jobs. And nobody can compete with them, because they’re exploiting human labor, and they’re not paying tax.

Of course they coopted the third in the troika—they have bought our democracy. In the US, research by Larry Lessig at Harvard has shown that every dollar invested in lobbying Congress has about a $220 return on investment. Why would they put their money anywhere else, except to subvert and hijack the political process? [That money] has a 220,000 percent ROI.

So nobody can compete with them, and [there is] this flywheel effect. They just get richer and richer, and more powerful and more powerful, and as they do their advertising propaganda machine becomes ever more powerful, and we all buy into this illusion that if somehow we move to cities there’s going to be this social mobility, and we’ll all become the exploitative Goldman Sachs banker, or KPMG accountant. Or, in [Silicon Valley], the startup billionaire or the Google exec. The reality is that that social mobility is an illusion. It’s nonexistent. You have the occasional black swans, and you have an educated one percent who have access to these things, and the rest of us are screwed.

I think we somehow need to figure out how we create self-sufficient communities that grow our own food, and have distributed energy, and opt out of the debt-based capitalist system en masse. This is a long-winded answer to get to this place. But you’re asking my perspective on cities, and I think, actually, this massive migration into cities is playing into the capitalists’ ability to exploit the majority of humanity.

What cities are providing us—the infrastructure they’re providing us, the jobs they’re providing us—are all not necessary. And actually, they’re making us deeply, deeply unhappy, and exposing us to all sorts of risks: crime risks, health risks, psychological Even the people that are doing well within this structure are deeply unhappy. This is what all the happiness economics data shows, that in places where [GDP is] increasing, especially in the West, depression levels are spiking, antisocial behavior is spiking, use of antidepressants and other forms of drugs is spiking. I think that the entire model, the global capitalist model, especially cities as a core hub of exploitation, needs to be totally rethought.

Do you have a conception of how the sharing economy fits into your own work?

Sharing and the gift economy is going to be a central pillar of the post-capitalist world. Let’s face it: the Western way of living has maybe a 20-year expiry date on it. Thirty at most. All the climate science points to the fact that we cannot continue as we are. People are celebrating what happened in Paris, and there’s this naive belief that reducing global emissions by a couple of percentage [points] a year is a decent strategy.

The reality is that, as we said in the beginning, the global economy by definition congeals capital, destroys the planet, and creates this monoculture and all sort of dependencies. Those dependencies are totally going to unravel. And as they unravel, a secondary economy based on gift, based on barter, based on generosity is going to take its place as the dominant way of exchanging goods and services.

Now the question of how this transition happens—that is the $100 trillion question. Because if we leave it to tech companies—we’ve seen where that leads. Silicon Valley culture is parasitic, right? It’s based on the debt-based venture capital system.

You have people like Paul Graham. He’s one of the Y Combinator founders. He wrote this atrocious, quite pathetic essay seemingly trying to get a pat on the back from other psychotic one percenters in Silicon Valley. With this argument that somehow inequality serves this Social Darwinian purpose. It’s essentially like economic eugenics. And it doesn’t look at any historical factors, the fact that this country—the United States—was built on black slave labor, that there was this 500-year head start or 400-year head start given to people like Paul Graham.

Even the fact that most of the technology that’s being created, whether it’s something that has some social function like Facebook, or something that has no social function like the People app, because it’s dictated by the market, [it is assumed] that it’s somehow useful.

I think that this is what has happened to the sharing economy. Because it’s been folded under the aegis of the market, it’s essentially an extension of that psychopathic, parasitical logic of the market. We have to disintermediate the logic of the market from sharing—that’s the only way sharing’s going to be useful.

The only way that we’re going to do that is by having strong, resilient communities. And the only way we’re going to have strong, resilient communities is by localizing power. That should be the role of government: to decentralize and localize power. When we decentralize and localize our economies, then all of a sudden we’ve created the environmental conditions that will allow a sharing economy to thrive.

But if we think that we can stay in our high-rises, mediated by technology, and the occasional sharing of a luxury apartment, or a BMW Mini, constitutes the sharing economy, we’re as deluded as Paul Graham.

In addition to conducting independent research, The Rules provides assistance to anti-inequality campaigns including Ekta Parishad. (Image via Ekta Parishad)

How about “mystical anarchism”? I’d like to hear more about the concept, which you explored in a provocative essay in Kosmos.

The idea came from examining the failure of the traditional leftist movement. If you look at Marxist movements as the archetypal anticapitalist reaction, they’re highly atheistic.  Of course, Marx believed that religion was the opiate of the masses. What ends up happening is that there’s no sense of spirit, there’s no metaphysical worldview in the Marxist ideology.

It’s based on historical materialism, and a highly materialist, reductionist understanding of human relations, interrelations, community, what we aspire to, etc. You can see the remnants of this in many of the social justice movements, including the climate movement. The climate movement is highly rationalistic, fighting for the most falsifiable facts against an irrational denier contingent.

That game’s a fool’s game, because rationalism is part of the problem. The limited, Cartesian worldview is why we’re in this mess in the first place. This is why you have crazy things like the World Wildlife [Fund], valuing the oceans at [$24 trillion]. It’s ridiculous on so many levels, from the fact that you’re commodifying the ocean, to the fact that you’re putting a price on it, which essentially just incentivizes the continued pillage of the ocean.

These people call themselves conservationists, but they don’t understand what they’re doing, because they’re stuck in the materialist, rationalist argument. It’s been this huge failure of imagination on the part of the left. But what it’s also done is it’s alienated the majority of people from wanting to interact.

Because these movements, how can they talk about the post-capitalist world when they don’t really have a point of view on what our spiritual lives will be like, what our community life will be like, what our relationship with nature will be like?

Then you look at the New Age movement on the other side, and there’s this huge swell of interest in Eastern practices and traditions like yoga and ayurveda and Buddhism. But as Slavoj Žižec points out, all it’s done is make them better capitalists. They can do their yoga in the morning, and then they can go do high-velocity training in the afternoon and feel slightly more flexible and balanced.

And the New Age movement—even those people who have rejected the logic of neoliberalism, who have opted out of the system, they essentially are engaging in a form of spiritual narcissism. I’m talking about the Burning Man set. They have the financial means to go to their vipassana meditations and take ten days off, and go to Esalen, and fly to Bali. They’re doing the inner work. But that inner work has not translated into the shift of material reality for the majority of humanity.

So the left suffers from a failure of imagination, and the New Age community suffers from a failure of altruism and generosity of heart, and understanding that none of us are free until all of us are free—as the old abolitionist saying goes.

“Mystical Anarchism” was an essay we wrote for Kosmos journal. It [tries] to bridge both of these understandings—to say, “Look, the mystical impulse is the same as the anarchist impulse.” And that’s an impulse about disintermediation.”No gods, no masters” is the famous tagline of the anarchists. But even mystical traditions, like Sufism and Islam, Gnosticism and Cabalistic thinking, and Zen Buddhism, and all forms of esoteric Buddhism—even the Western alchemical tradition—have been based on this gnosis, this direct relation with source, creator, with the transcendent.

That impulse is the same impulse as the anarchist impulse of “No gods, no masters.” When you start seeing the world from that perspective, you start to recognize that that impulse is necessary to bring about the coming post-capitalist age. Capitalism is a social arrangement. Debt-based currency is a social arrangement. As soon as we say we’re no longer going to pay back the debt that we owe, for example, the entire capitalist house of cards would collapse. Because there’s a 12 to 20 times leverage of every dollar. And at a certain point that leverage stops, and people say, this dollar isn’t going to translate into $20, because people aren’t going to pay the debt on it. [Then] this arrangement deconstructs.

What we’ve always been told is that we needed the sun god, or we needed the emperor, or we needed our feudal lords. And now [we’re told that] we need the capitalist one percent, or, as Paul Graham says, “Who’s going to create the jobs?” When we tap into the mystical-anarchist impulse to realize that we are our own creators, and our own sources of wealth, and the community is where these social arrangements should be created, and should be negotiated, then we don’t necessarily have to fight the system. [It’s] the old Buckminster Fuller tradition that we create a new system by contracting new social relationships and make that other destructive cannibalistic capitalist system obsolete by that very act.

So part of “Mystical Anarchism” was trying to unite leftist thought and the New Age impulse, but also to say that both mysticism and anarchism are sort of necessary preconditions, if you will, for the revolution.

The revolution doesn’t have to be a violent, historical, dialectical, traditional revolution [as] blueprinted by white academics. It can be multifaceted, and multilayered, and exist in simultaneous realities.

Protesting UN-REDD. (Image via The Rules)

Where do you feel like you’ve made the most progress?

That’s a tough question. I try not to think of progress in a linear [way]. I come from a place of quantum ethics—that all there is is entanglement. Within this entanglement, the question is: How do we behave as individuals? How do we form relationships amongst our community, and how do we contribute at a societal level to affect the rules that are governing the outcomes?

I think, from an individual level, that that work is never done. I think the spiritual is the political, and that flow keeps on going, and the more we understand about indigenous wisdom, and the original wisdom, and go to plant medicine, and work on our historical-ancestral physical healing, I think that has an impact, on the community level and on the societal level. Of course, unlike New Age thought, I don’t believe that is useful in and of itself.

At the community level, what we’ve seen is this huge shift of people that we work with who are seeing that capitalism is just a story. That debt-based currency is just a story. That hierarchy is just a story, patriarchy is just a story. That we can reconstruct and reconstitute new sets of relationships. I think that hope, at least amongst the immediate community we work with, is one of the things that I’m most proud of.

Then, at a societal level—I wouldn’t want to claim in linear, Newtonian fashion that x caused y—but I think that there’s been this major shift since we’ve been doing this work even in the discourse of inequality, that five years ago was nowhere to be seen. In the US, Occupy contributed to that, and, globally, the popular dissent that’s come from the global justice movement, and the Indignados in Spain, and Idle No More in Canada, the fare-hike protests in Rio, the anti-corruption movements in Russia and India. All of these have contributed to this growing swell that the status quo is no longer acceptable, and that the existing set of relations are rigged.

I think that understanding is probably the most exciting thing. Because until we understand that there is no point in playing the game on the terms of the power elites—once that happens, that is the precondition to all sorts of major shifts.

The Western media—obviously it’s not in their interest, given who owns them—they’re essentially perpetuators of the status quo. But what’s happening is there have been dozens of African awakenings, various African cities where there’s been popular social uprising. You’re seeing it in the US with Black Lives Matter, and you’re seeing it all across Latin America. What happens is they get billed as these one-off things: these are anti-austerity movements, and anti-rac[ism] movements. But the reality is, all oppression is connected. And the global operating system of late-stage capitalism—these are the logical outcome of that set of rules.

People are starting to understand that. All of these movements, all of these popular uprisings, all of this dissent, all of this unrest is totally connected. It’s totally connected with the fact that inequality is rising, that the police state is rising, that military spending and the war machine that is necessitated by capitalism is destroying life, that our global economy is destroying life.

From a global perspective, from a societal-shift perspective, the fact that people are connecting the dots is the most exciting thing that can possibly happen. It’s where we spend a lot of time in our work: How do we start getting these types of ideas into the mainstream?

I think what will come from that is a suite of beautiful alternatives. The fear progressive movements have always had is that they had to present the alternative with all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed. The reality is: no blueprint exists. There is no perfect alternative crafted by the best minds. What’s going to happen is that as this system crumbles—as it is crumbling around us, faster boom-and-bust cycles, and 2008 was the equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down for late-stage capitalism—as that happens, these beautiful alternatives are going to spring up all around us. The faster that we realize that all of our problems, whether it’s race, whether it’s patriarchy, whether it’s climate change, are the logical outcome of the current set of rules— when that clicks, the speed at which these alternatives, the speed at which opting out of this current system is going to happen, is going to be tremendous.

That’s the thing that we’re most excited about, and the thing that we’re most proud to be contributing to.

What challenges do you face?

I think when you get to a place like where we’re getting to know, where the very edifice of the system is crumbling around us, we’re going to see elites get even more desperate, and even more psychotic. A lot of the research points to this. The fact that we have, anecdotally, the comedic modern Mussolini in Donald Trump is testament to that.

The fear that comes with disruption can also bring out a negative embodiment of the human spirit, and that risk exists. From the perspective of the elites—they’re becoming even more acquisitional, they’re dispossessing even more people.

If you look at what is happening from a global policy perspective, you’re having these massive global trade deals. Like TTP—these are unprecedented deals, these are the global versions of NAFTA, essentially, that lock us into a corporate state. They’re brazen acts, they’re acts of desperation. They’re trying to carve up the world before it collapses.

There’re record private submarine sales. These people aren’t stupid; they know what’s happening. They’re becoming increasingly more desperate, and increasingly more callus.

The UN-REDD Programme is an example of this. It’s essentially a carbon-trading scheme. It’s allowing corporations like Shell to buy up major swaths of the African continent, of Asia, of the Latin American continent. REDD-like deals will increasingly do this so they can continue to pollute, and get tax breaks in perpetuity.

These types of big, global, binding, trans-government—it doesn’t matter who’s in power, these deals are long-term structural deals—we’re just going to see more and more of this type of behavior. We’re going to see increases in CEO pay, we’re going to see an increase in private militia, we’re going to see an increase in the police acting as private body guards for the elite one-percenters, you know, assassinating poor people in the streets, as is happening in the US. We’re going to see the prison pipeline be used as a way to remove the obstacle of human beings as they would see it—so they’re going to privatize the prison complex.

Of course, the rules are created in such a way that if you’re a poor person of color, you’ll be thrown in jail. But if you’re a white banker who gets caught with cocaine, you will not be thrown in jail. These types of policies are not subtle. And they’re going to increasingly become less subtle, and more blatant, and more brazen, until we don’t accept it any more.

As Marx said, the capitalists are their own best gravediggers. So the risk is, on the side of the majority of the multitudes, it’s going to be fear and fear-based reactions. On the side of the elites, it’s going to be to pander to that fear, and to manipulate us and create these structures that carve up the world before collapse and increasingly bring on a more dystopian version of neoliberalism.

What lessons have you, personally, learned since inaugurating The Rules?

One is: Linearity does not exist. The idea of cause and effect, or how we’re forced to tell stories in the Western media or in milestone reports for philanthropists, is a cartoon version of reality. All there is is actually entanglement. And if there is only entanglement, we have to be as conscious of as many layers of that entanglement as possible.

At a very basic level, I’m always trying to think at the level of me as an individual; at the level of community; and at the level of the superstructure. That’s been a key lesson.

The second is the fact is that when we start recovering the root causes—we keep on going back, and we say, “The root causes of inequality and poverty and climate change is this brand of capitalism called neoliberalism.” Well, what’s the root of neoliberalism? The root of neoliberalism is this idea of debt-based currency, and the market determining all aspects of our life. Where does that come from? That comes from our separation from nature, when we became sedentary during the neolithic revolution and stopped trusting the earth to provide for us.

It also comes from Enlightenment rationalism, the idea that the human mind is the pinnacle of all of evolution, and that we can, using a certain type of Western axiomatic logic, understand everything. The entire world is reduced to the atom, the atom is reduced to the proton, neutron, and electron, and we’ve figured it all out. What’s interesting, when you start looking, is: the root causes are always psychological and spiritual and psychosocial. They’re not just economic—of course they’re not.

Economic problems, political problems have roots in a deep-seated humanity. In order to change the world we have to understand where that separation comes from. We also have to find that within ourselves, which is why the anarchist path is essentially the same as the mystical path, whether we want to believe that or not.

To me, that’s the second major lesson in the work. It’s related to the third, which is: There’s a one percenter in all of us.As the left, as an anarchist, as a revolutionary, as soon as we think that we are somehow holier than our “enemies,” I think what happens is we become hubristic, we become moralistic.

That is a huge blinder for the social justice movement. The benefit of seeing that there’s a one percenter in all of us is we understand the primacy of context, we know that in any context we can reproduce this behavior. All the social science points to this, that we’re highly contextual beings, whether that’s the Good Samaritan studies, or the famous Stanley Milgram experiment where people in a white lab coat tell us to shock someone to death and we will, simply because they appear as an authority figure.

When we understand the primacy of context, we can organize better. We know what kind of context to argue for, to create, to build, and we can empathize. If we don’t empathize, and understand that even the one percent are not happy under this current configuration—they’re becoming more desperate, they’re becoming more psychotic, they think that if they don’t maintain their power and privilege that the world will be a terrible place—that delusion of theirs could actually be the thing that destroys the planet. We have to find a way of understanding that, because if we don’t understand that, the very act of fighting the system could contribute to the further destruction of the system.

I have a friend, a great writer/thinker named Bayo Akomolate. He always says, “Maybe the way we’re responding to the crisis is part of the crisis.” I think that’s something we have to take seriously. And then, related to that, but sthe last thing I would say on this is, there’s a great W.H. Auden line from “Age of Anxiety,” where he says—it’s the motto of the one percent—”We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

I think it’s important to understand that there’s a one percenter in all of us, to also understand our own nihilistic, self-destructive, consumptive, acquisitional habits. Because that lays at the root of our collective crisis.

The Rules provided campaign support to Kenyans for Tax Justice. (Kenyans for Tax Justice via Facebook)

Cross-posted from Shareable.org and written by Anna Bergren Miller

The post The Rules’ Alnoor Ladha on the Promises and Perils of Global Economic Activism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

You know it’s true. Otherwise, why does everyone cringe when you say the word? Why has attendance at your discussion group meetings fallen to an all-time low? Why has the oppressed masses not come to its senses and joined you in your fight for world liberation?

Perhaps, after years of struggling to educate them about their victimhood, you have come to blame them for their condition. They must want to be ground under the heel of capitalist imperialism; otherwise, why do they show no interest in your political causes?

Why haven’t they joined you yet in chaining yourself to mahogany furniture, chanting slogans at carefully planned and orchestrated protests, and frequenting radical bookshops and websites? Why haven’t they sat down and learned all the terminology necessary for a genuine understanding of the complexities of our global economic system?

The truth is, your politics are boring to them because they really are irrelevant. They know that your antiquated styles of protest—your marches, hand held signs, and gatherings—are now powerless to effect real change because they have become such a predictable part of the status quo. They know that your political jargon is off-putting because it really is a language of mere academic dispute, not a weapon capable of undermining systems of control.

They know that your infighting, your splinter groups and endless quarrels over ephemeral theories can never effect any real change in the world they experience from day to day. They know that no matter who is in office, what laws are on the books, what “ism”s the intellectuals march under, the content of their lives will remain the same. They—we—know that our boredom is proof that these “politics” are not the key to any real transformation of life. For our lives are boring enough already!

And you know it too. For how many of you is politics a responsibility? Something you engage in because you feel you should, when in your heart of hearts there are a million things you would rather be doing? Your volunteer work—is it your most favorite pastime, or do you do it out of a sense of obligation? Why do you think it is so hard to motivate others to volunteer as you do? Could it be that it is, above all, a feeling of guilt that drives you to fulfill your “duty” to be politically active?

Perhaps you spice up your “work” by trying (consciously or not) to get in trouble with the authorities, to get arrested: not because it will practically serve your cause, but to make things more exciting, to recapture a little of the romance of turbulent times now long past. Have you ever felt that you were participating in a ritual, a long-established tradition of fringe protest, that really serves only to strengthen the position of the mainstream? Have you ever secretly longed to escape from the stagnation and boredom of your political “responsibilities”?

It’s no wonder that no one has joined you in your political endeavors. Perhaps you tell yourself that it’s tough, thankless work, but somebody’s got to do it. The answer is, well, NO.

You actually do us all a real disservice with your tiresome, tedious politics. For in fact, there is nothing more important than politics. NOT the politics of American “democracy” and law, of who is elected state legislator to sign the same bills and perpetuate the same system. Not the politics of the “I got involved because I enjoy quibbling over trivial details and writing rhetorically about an unreachable utopia” activist. Not the politics of any leader or ideology that demands that you make sacrifices for “the cause.” But the politics of our everyday lives.

When you separate politics from the immediate, everyday experiences of individual men and women, it becomes completely irrelevant. Indeed, it becomes the private domain of wealthy, comfortable intellectuals, who can trouble themselves with such dreary, theoretical things. When you involve yourself in politics out of a sense of obligation, and make political action into a dull responsibility rather than an exciting game that is worthwhile for its own sake, you scare away people whose lives are already far too dull for any more tedium.

When you make politics into a lifeless thing, a joyless thing, a dreadful responsibility, it becomes just another weight upon people, rather than a means to lift weight from people. And thus you ruin the idea of politics for the people to whom it should be most important. For everyone has a stake in considering their lives, in asking themselves what they want out of life and how they can get it. But you make politics look to them like a miserable, self-referential, pointless middle class/bohemian game, a game with no relevance to the real lives they are living out.

What should be political? Whether we enjoy what we do to get food and shelter. Whether we feel like our daily interactions with our friends, neighbors, and coworkers are fulfilling. Whether we have the opportunity to live each day the way we desire to. And “politics” should consist not of merely discussing these questions, but of acting directly to improve our lives in the immediate present. Acting in a way that is itself entertaining, exciting, joyous—because political action that is tedious, tiresome, and oppressive can only perpetuate tedium, fatigue, and oppression in our lives.

No more time should be wasted debating over issues that will be irrelevant when we must go to work again the next day. No more predictable ritual protests that the authorities know all too well how to deal with; no more boring ritual protests which will not sound like a thrilling way to spend a Saturday afternoon to potential volunteers—clearly, those won’t get us anywhere. Never again shall we “sacrifice ourselves for the cause.” For we ourselves, happiness in our own lives and the lives of our fellows, must be our cause!

After we make politics relevant and exciting, the rest will follow. But from a dreary, merely theoretical and/or ritualized politics, nothing valuable can follow. This is not to say that we should show no interest in the welfare of humans, animals, or ecosystems that do not contact us directly in our day to day existence. But the foundation of our politics must be concrete: it must be immediate, it must be obvious to everyone why it is worth the effort, it must be fun in itself. How can we do positive things for others if we ourselves do not enjoy our own lives?

To make this concrete for a moment: an afternoon of collecting food from businesses that would have thrown it away and serving it to hungry people and people who are tired of working to pay for food—that is good political action, but only if you enjoy it. If you do it with your friends, if you meet new friends while you’re doing it, if you fall in love or trade funny stories or just feel proud to have helped a woman by easing her financial needs, that’s good political action.

Perhaps it is time for a new word for “politics,” since you have made such a swear word out of the old one. For no one should be put off when we talk about acting together to improve our lives. And so we present to you our demands, which are non-negotiable, and must be met as soon as possible—because we’re not going to live forever, are we?

1. Make politics relevant to our everyday experience of life again. The farther away the object of our political concern, the less it will mean to us, the less real and pressing it will seem to us, and the more wearisome politics will be.

2. All political activity must be joyous and exciting in itself. You cannot escape from dreariness with more dreariness.

3. To accomplish those first two steps, entirely new political approaches and methods must be created. The old ones are outdated, outmoded. Perhaps they were NEVER any good, and that’s why our world is the way it is now.

4. Enjoy yourselves! There is never any excuse for being bored . . . or boring!

Join us in making the “revolution” a game; a game played for the highest stakes of all, but a joyous, carefree game nonetheless!

Note: this article has been adapted from its original

Photo by shelmac

The post Face It, Your Politics Are Boring As F-ck appeared first on P2P Foundation.