The day you discover that economic growth is not a vital
requirement for sustaining socioeconomic development or contributing to the
wellbeing of people around the world[i],
it feels like a slap in the face, as if everyone in your life up until
that day had been lying to you about everything. Your teachers, the news, politicians,
the books you read in economics class, advertisements on TV, your colleagues,
friends, parents and smart people you admire telling you “we need economic
stimulus to revive economic growth so we can finally live happily ever after,
and you can help by going out and shopping, supporting the economy and making
your own life a little bit better by purchasing the newest gadget you don’t
really need”: lying to you your entire life.
And when you learn further that economic growth is only
necessary to service ‘usury’ (the fancy word for interest charged on loans)[ii] in a
perpetual, never-ending cycle whereby money loses its intrinsic value as a
convenient tool of market exchange and instead becomes synonymous with debt, chaining
you to banks and creditors who survive and thrive on your hamster-wheel pursuit
of a better life by convincing you to take out loans and use credit cards to
pay for cars, college, a house for your family; and then encouraging you to take
out more loans as start-up funds for your sure-thing money-maker
entrepreneurial project to get ahead and help pay back all of the loans you’ve
already taken out; and when your project fails because Walmart is selling it
cheaper and you’re blaming yourself for all the mistakes you’ve made and now
you’re further in debt with no hope for the future and contemplating a
strategic suicide that looks like an accident so your family can at least cash
in on your life insurance benefits…
When you’re THAT LOW and you learn that it’s actually not
your fault, that the system is designed for you to fail, for you to be in debt
always and forever in order to keep the system itself alive - when you learn all
of that, you’re angry and you’re not sure at what or at whom, and your
head is in your hands because you’re humiliated that you could have
fallen for such an obvious Ponzi scheme, and your fist is in the air and
you start blaming the powers that be, unsure of who or what they are, and you
file bankruptcy and now you’re hiding any remaining cash you have in a mattress
so they can’t steal anymore of it, and now your credit is shit and you’re not
sure whether to care about that or not, and you find whatever job you can just
to pay the bills and to maybe someday afford an iPhone because your kid needs
it to fit in. And you hate your job and you hate your life, except for on
the weekends when you can drink a few beers and watch the game on TV – the old
TV you’ve had since the 90s, not the flatscreen you want, because you still
can’t afford it. And then you feel pretty bad about yourself because everyone
else has a flatscreen TV (don’t they?), and now you’re in the fridge popping
open another beer and polishing off the Doritos.
The final blow comes when you become aware that you and your
shitty job and the unemployment crisis and those skinny brown people dying in
poverty all around the world are all caught up in this great big mess of a
lie whereby the rich keep getting richer at the expense of the poor, and
it’s not your fault that you work a dead-end job and it’s not actually poor
people’s fault that they are poor; when you learn that the rich are rich
BECAUSE the poor are poor and that the poor have to stay poor in order for
the rich to stay rich (and indeed get richer), that’s when it all clicks
and the whole thing comes together. You can no longer simply write off the
world’s reality as Marxist fodder for crazy communists, because you see it and
you live it and you feel it, and you are it. when you begin to acknowledge
that the realities around you -- persistent unemployment, slave-labor
conditions, and environmental destruction across the globe – are actually the
manifestation of Marx’s theory on the reserve army of labor and the structurally
required divisions between a reliable supply of cheap workers, unbridled access
to land and resources, and an increasingly wealthy class of capital-owners as
inherent to the fruition and functioning of the capitalist system; when you
recognize that as a result, such poverty and environmental plundering have to
exist in the capitalist system as innately structural to it in order for prices
to stay low enough that you will buy Doritos even though they clog your
arteries and make you fat, just so corporations can make money and get rich and
contribute to economic growth; and when you remember that economic growth is
only required to help the rich get richer and to service an ever-increasing amount
of international debt and pay back the banks; quite reminiscent of your own
endless debt cycle, with you as the recipient of a loan from a bank, with media
and consumer culture convincing you to keep chasing the unattainable American
dream so that your interest payments keep coming into the bank to keep it in
business so it can lend to new borrowers to stimulate consumption as the means to
fuel economic growth[iv]
and so on and so forth until the end of time when you’re dead in your grave and
your kids are dead in theirs and there aren’t even any more worms to eat your
rotting flesh because not even the microorganisms of the planet have survived
the global capitalist system’s social and environmental self-destruction; and
when you finally feel like you’re going insane, worrying about worms eating
your dead corpse, it is at that moment, that YOU GET IT.
And your mind is blown and your head is exploding with smoke
coming out your ears and you just can’t stand it anymore – the sheer
injustice of the system and its puppeteers getting away with murder – for WHAT?
economic growth? Which you now know doesn’t have any real purpose other than
servicing debt -- and as a result of it all you hate your life and people everywhere
are starving and working themselves to death and the planet is dying – and you
can’t just keep sitting idly by and letting these people and their system get
away with it; and you see no choice but to put down the Doritos and finally do
something about it. But what on Earth are you going to do? And who are YOU
anyway to challenge the entire existence of reality and make your friends and
families stop eating Doritos? Maybe they like Doritos; did you ever think of
that? No matter how much you know, no one’s going to listen to you, especially
now that you’re a Marxist (how’d that happen?) and they’re all going to laugh
at you and call you a freak communist. Discouraged yet again, you go back
to eating Doritos and numbing your mind to expensive commercials on TV.
Now you’re elbow deep in your second bag of Cool Ranch and
you’re rubbing the chemical spices between your fingers, pondering your existential
conundrum, when all of a sudden your eyes open wide and crumbs fall out of your
gaping hole of a mouth and holy crap you’re having an epiphany! And it could
not be clearer. The Doritos bag crashes to the floor dramatically, chips everywhere
and you couldn’t care less, because it is in that moment that you realize you
are not alone in your misery of awareness; that there are others who share your
sense of helpless, powerless impotence of knowing too much and not knowing how
to begin doing something about it. You’re smiling now because you know that this
is happening all over the world; that people are waking up to the misery of
their own mindless work-to-consume lifestyles, their monotonous, meaninglessly uninspired
day-to-day existence working for the man just trying to make ends meet and feed
their families. And just like you, they are increasingly less willing to keep
doing it and more willing to step off the hamster wheel into the unknown. And
now you’re excited because you recognize yourself for who and what you are – you
are the global countermovement[v]
– and you know you’re not alone and you also know you’ve already done the
hardest part – waking up. You’re fully awake and ready to act on your
own free will, and you haven’t felt like this in years, or maybe ever!
You’re doing laps around the block and the last Cool Ranch
Dorito flake falls off your shirt, and now the neighbors are coming out of
their houses to look at you – they have no idea what to make of you and you
don’t even care – you are so free you don’t even care what they think of you.
They go back inside because, quite frankly, they’re a little freaked out. But that
doesn’t rain on your parade. Instead, you start feeling sad for them because
you know they are still living in misery and you want to help them wake up
and join you in the countermovement. So you start talking to them, and some of
them slam the door in your face and don’t want to wake up because it’s easier
not to, or they are scared because they can’t imagine a different future. You don’t
fight back; you let them retreat into themselves until the time is right. You know
you can’t make people see the light if they are unwilling to open their eyes. Others
listen and nod their heads politely, perhaps interested but not ready to take
the plunge; you know they will eventually come around, so you give them time
and gentle encouragement – these are the ‘early adoptors’ who will be vital to
the cause[vi].
The remaining few, however, are your new allies. They are the people who
respond to what you share with hope and inspiration, expressing their own ideas
of a new vision for the future. You know that you need to hold on to these ones
tightly, they are your partners and innovators in the countermovement. And
you’re talking about sustainability, eco-effectiveness[vii] and
renewable energy and you’re planting community gardens and building cooperative
neighborhood associations and businesses, and together, you are the vanguard
of the countermovement’s new envisioned future. and you are doing it, and
living it and breathing it and being it. a second ago you were numb in
front of the TV and now you are alive and empowered to support humanity in its
historic transition, and you drop to your knees in tears, shouting “I am the
change I’ve been waiting for!"
...
While perhaps exaggerated in emotion and oversimplified in economics,
this anecdote is a metaphor for the global awakening now at the core of
organized resistance campaigns and grassroots community solutions that have
come to define the global countermovement at odds with elite-led capitalist
world dominance. As more individuals and social movements recognize and embrace
our current historical moment as the waning of the modern ages and the start of
something new, providing space for connection, dialogue, design and vision, the
countermovement grows exponentially, gaining momentum toward critical mass in
order to eventually tip the scales in favor of a new paradigm of living; a new
Story of the People.[viii]
Today, we are in the drafting stage of that new story, with local experiments
in sustainable economic development and ecological effectiveness going far
beyond the limited confines of market-oriented approaches to socioeconomic
development and environmental conservation.
In an overt rejection of the capitalist world order and its
codependent relationship with mainstream consumer culture, the countermovement
connects these experiments with social movements embodying true reverence for
Mother Earth and deep regard for social justice among all of humanity. While
powerfully diverse in their many manifestations, the emerging global processes
of awakening, re-envisioning and implementing innovative projects share a
number of common threads, which conveniently provide an outline for the discussion
to follow: 1) rejecting outdated systems by de-linking growth and wealth
accumulation from development policy and social well-being; 2) developing and
articulating local, regional, national and international frameworks for social,
economic and environmental sustainability as alternative approaches within the new
paradigm; 3) recognizing that the countermovement is defined by global civil
society networks uniting for change and finding strength both in opposition to
the status quo and in building new systems to make the old irrelevant; and 4) ‘doing
utopia’: envisioning, designing and implementing sustainable projects across
the globe that promote meaningful livelihoods, collective community values and a
new economics to support human dignity and social well-being.
The next installment in this five part series will focus
on the countermovement’s ‘wellbeing revolution’: de-linking growth and material
accumulation from economic development policy and conceptualizations of social well-being.
[i]
Easterlin et al. The happiness-income paradox revisited. PNAS, December
28, 2010, vol. 107, no. 52.
[ii]
Eisenstein, Charles (2011). Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the
Age of Transition. Berkeley, California: Evolver Editions. Ch. 6: The Economics
of Usury, pp. 93-124.
[iii]
Paul Grignon. Money as Debt. May 9, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K5_JE_gOys
[iv]
Paul Grignon. Money as Debt. May 9, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K5_JE_gOys
[v]
Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine
Democracy (New York: Picador, 2009): 108.
[vi]
Taylor, G. (2008). Evolutions Edge, The Coming Collapse and Transformation
of our World. Canada: New Society Publishers.
[vii]
McDonough, W. and Braungart, M. (2002). Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way
we make things. North Point Press.
[viii]
Charles Eisenstein, “The Space Between Stories”. December 28, 2012. http://charleseisenstein.net/2013-the-space-between-stories/
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