Sam Alexander - “The pain we feel is capitalism dying”
I was drifting through cyberspace recently,
not really absorbing the words in front of me, when I came across a sentence
that tripped me up, so to speak, and forced me to pay attention. That sentence read: “The pain you feel is
capitalism dying.” The writer went on to explain that it hurts because we are
inside this dying system, we are inside this unsustainable form of civilization
while it is undermining the life support system we call Earth, and what is perhaps
most unsettling about this is that it’s not yet clear what comes next; nor is
it obvious that the global problems we face even have smooth, painless
solutions. The hour is dark and a bright new dawn is not guaranteed.
The words left an impression on me I think
because they describe that strange, existential ache that we probably have all
felt at some time or another, when contemplating how we should live our lives
in a world that seems so tragically off track. I am referring here to the
emotional or what one might even call the spiritual challenge of living in an
age of crisis; of living in an age when the myths and stories that have shaped
and grounded our cultures and even our identities have begun to breakdown,
unsettling our sense of purpose and place in a fast-changing world.
But this crisis of meaning in our culture, if
I can put it that way, presents itself to us, I think, as a heavily disguised
but tantalizing opportunity. One of the most promising aspects of the
biological world we live in is that the cycles of nature embrace death and
decay as a necessary part of rebirth – as anyone who composts knows very well –
and if we understand this, then we can see that as the existing form of life
deteriorates in the face of environmental limits, new ways to live will
inevitably evolve, and are evolving, like green shoots peeking out of the
widening concrete cracks in capitalism.
Our challenge is to face this
inevitable breakdown with defiant positivity and set about turning today’s
crises into opportunities to reinvent ourselves, our cultures, and our
economies in more localized, more resilient, more humane ways. We are, it
seems, like tiny microbes inside this massive, decomposing system, being
challenged to work creatively in our own small ways, building the soil from
which a diversity of new worlds can emerge. In short, I would say that we are
being challenged at this moment in history to compost capitalism, and in the
rich soil of resistance bring renewal to our task, our collective task, to seed
a new Earth story.
http://www.adbusters.org/article/the-pain-you-feel/also from adbusters
Through Facebook we
begin to make ourselves in the image of the commodity.
Capitalist forces want
us to pretend like our discourse in isolated spaces is enough to create change.
Call for submissions:
The end of capitalism