I've taken a very circumnavigational web route to arrive at this article! As a result I am running short of time this morning. Although this violates my rule to post articles posted originally on the web within a month, I am featuring this because it so neatly fits with my current postings and with my blog/website's central focus on the dysfunction of capitalism.
I think that the author comes from a rather fresh perspective to offer more insights about the dysfunction of capitalism and its ruling class's use of money to gain ever more wealth and power at the expense and suffering of ordinary people. Capitalism is now in the process of destroying societies via austerity policies for the poor and neoliberal policies for the rich. It is well on its way to destabilizing our biosphere by polluting the land and air around us and exhausting resources. This will lead to one disaster after another until our planet can no longer support human and other life forms.
The only criticism I have of this essay is that the author seems to focus our attention more on money than the system in which it functions. Money, as a medium of exchange, is only a tool. It is the way the system of capitalism uses it that poses so many dangerous problems. Look at this concluding paragraph:
As long as we exist within the confines of the capitalist paradigm, we will owe our lives to the controllers of capital. We will buy our survival day by day via the bending of our backs. Capital will accumulate, poverty will grow, and the natural world will be converted into an arid waste dump as we watch powerless to help. .... When we understand that money came into being as a direct accounting of social debts community members had to one and other and to the whole, and has now morphed into the relation itself between people, it becomes clear that money is power over others, and that the accumulation of money establishes non-negotiable power dynamics in which those with large sums of wealth can subjugate those without. If we seek to interact with one and other horizontally and to destabilize the current pyramid of power, we must take the power out of money. .... We need to abolish money altogether, and we need to abolish monoculture and industrialism along with it.And, look at the final sentence in this paragraph. The author seems to understand how the capitalist system has transformed money into a tool to exploit both fellow humans and nature, but then makes an astounding claim that the remedy is to "abolish money altogether, and we need to abolish monoculture and industrialism along with it"!
More background on the author's views and a theory
(Note: The reason I am posting the following material about another blogger is not to denigrate him/her, but to raise awareness of a growing trend that I believe is affecting both ordinary and even, as is the case here, the most educated people. Symptoms regarding the former are a refusal to look at alternative information or evidence or to even question information from corporate sponsored mainstream sources. The latter people are so disaffected by the existing social system that they want to totally drop out of society and civilization, and go to extreme lengths to argue that all our problems are due to civilization while using their extensive education, itself a product of an advanced civilization, to argue for some kind of return to pre-civilization or, at least, to a pre-industrial era. Some keen observers have noticed this phenomenon and are starting to explain it as a form of "learned helplessness". I think this theory could explain a lot about many of my fellow Americans.)
In my meanderings on the web this morning, I also read some of his other articles, particularly the recent series of three entitled "The Twilight of Our Tale". The author, "tdOs" appears to be a part of a growing group of nihilists (he describes himself as a "deep green anarchist") on the web who seems so overwhelmed by the current capitalist-made present and awaiting disasters, and he/she seems to be "Pray[ing] for Calamity" so that we can return to pre-industialism and even pre-civilization.
In this series the author advises people to essentially drop out of society--and to do like tdOs has done: go live in a cabin, gather mushrooms in the forest, chop timber for heating and cooking. tdOs reveals more of his/her nihilism with this advice:
Further, you need to stop looking for a plan. Stop trying to figure out how to make the workable work or the unsustainable sustain. Society is the demon. Civilization is the leviathan. The wise of Middle Earth knew that no good purpose could be achieved with the dark lord’s ring, it had to be destroyed in the fires where it came into being. Society is not redeemable. It cannot be made good.The author then applauds anti-social acts because, after all, "society is the demon" and "civilization is the leviathan". But, he/she warns us not to let this reality destroy us. The antidote to save us is a return to primitive living as he/she has done.
But may I humbly suggest, that we need to touch the Earth. We need to sit in circles with our tribes. We need to experience the world subjectively through our many senses, and to know that our subjective experience of the land around us contains more truth and validity than all of the photographs and recordings humming away on spinning hard drives in an office tower somewhere. We have to value the direct experience of our individual lives and try however we might to cross the divides of time to remember that which the demon and his acolytes have beaten, and raped, and killed to make us forget.In Part One, he makes frequent reference to "the system" as being an overwhelming problem for people today. Later he makes only passing reference to various abstractions, one of which includes "capitalism", which appears to be only a demonic force that functions as a "eater of our souls". Thus, this is not the capitalist system he frequently refers to earlier, but only another hopeful delusion that will eat our souls. Again, the solution is to drop out of this malignant society and return to a more primitive style of living.
But, of course, this is not totally a hunting and gathering style of living because tdOs still uses a wood stove which is likely made out of steel or iron forged in a foundry using more advanced technology, the cabin must have been made using tools and technology devised under civilized societies, and there are probably other such deviations from a primitive life style.
