OUR
LIVES ARE NOT NEGOTIABLE!
We
are at the beginning of a great shift. We are in motion, all of us,
experiencing new ideas, trying out new ways of living, organizing and
relating to each other. The old ways of doing things, which have had
the feeling of going through the motions for some time now, are
finally fading away. Soon they will all be gone.
The
truth is we have been tired of this world for some time. It isn't
organized for our benefit, which makes sense because it isn't
organized by us. It's organized by capitalists and
bureaucrats, politicians and technicians. So-called “experts”.
The institutions, all of them, have revealed themselves as servants
of power, not broken but functioning normally as part of a giant
profit- and power-driven machine. It hasn't changed, it's just
easier to see it now.
American
democracy isn't broken, we are witnessing the logical conclusions of
its internal nature. Likewise with American capitalism. We don't
need to “fix” it because it isn't broken. Neither was it ever
meant to respond to us. In capitalism we produce and consume, but
the profits go elsewhere. In democracy we validate capitalist
domination over our lives. This is the normal functioning of the
system.
This
crisis goes beyond “corporate greed” or “getting corporate
money out of politics”. It wasn't some character flaw that led to
this calamity. And it isn't any particular mechanism by which elite
power influences politics that is the problem. It's that elite power
controls politics regardless. This is because we live in a
dictatorship of money, of capital. Just like you can't get money out
of capitalism, you can't get capitalist power out of government
because government exists to perpetuate capitalist power.
This
crisis goes deep. It's not just foreclosures, it's also the vacuous
suburbs themselves. It's not just unemployment, it's the
meaninglessness of our jobs. It's also being worked to death in an
era of massive technological advancement. It's a system that moves
so fast that we never get any time to slow down. We exist for the
system, not the other way around. Meanwhile the system throws so
many of us away, locking us in prisons, poverty or powerlessness. It
eats up the Earth with an insatiable appetite, foisting the costs
unto us.
It's
a system determined to eat up everything in sight, invading and
colonizing everywhere, including our minds and relationships to each
other. Always accumulating at our expense, and backed up by the army
and the police, it's a system that doles out petty privileges to some
while it systematically attacks others, all the while keeping the
lion's share for those at the top. And, as we have seen, if it wants
to it can take those privileges away. The laws do not protect us so
why should we respect them? In this system we have very little
control over the fundamental questions of our lives. Picking between
brands of ketchup isn't freedom. And neither is working in the
ketchup factory. Nor studying at ketchup university.
At
such an important point in our history, now is not the time to seek
to restore normality. Now is no time to be conservative. Do not
hold back! We must resist the temptation to try to return to the way
the system functioned in the past. Not only isn't it possible, but
it would be a betrayal of this amazing moment. And things weren't so
great back then anyhow. Don't beg for reforms. Insist on your
dreams. Think big. Look around you for inspiration of how things
could be. Now is the moment to ask yourself how you would
like the world to be, not what you would settle for. It can
be different. It can be totally different.
DEMAND
EVERYTHING, INSIST ON YOUR DREAMS AND RESIST THE URGE TO
COMPROMISE IN THE STRUGGLE!
