i might as well face it

“so what’d you do today, T?” 

my DC BFFs and i were standing in their kitchen, convening over a glass of wine to digest the day. i was in town visiting for the week and was at the height of my ‘live-life-to-the-fullest’ vacation philosophy. given past experiences, they didn’t know what to make of my sly smile.

“fell in love. what’d you do?” their eyes rolled in unison.

“you didn’t fall in love, Tara, give me a break. you’ve hung out with this guy for like two hours.”

“so what, i’m still in love.” i had spent the Spring afternoon drinking happy hour Peronis on a posh patio in Dupont Circle with an old friend turned newfound love interest. charming, quick-quitted, just the right amount of shy to keep me interested. looking at him now, i regretted overlooking him in college; we’d be married with a two-year-old by now. it was a three-city romance and we were only in city number two. it’s Spring in DC and he’s a writer and he laughs at my jokes and one time he drove his mini-van all the way from Venice Beach to drop me off in the valley. of course i was in love.

“you’re not in love, T. you’re just addicted to being in love.” 

zing: reality check. the kind only lifelong friends can provide. i glared at her above my long-stemmed glass, wishing she was wrong. 

_______

super nintendo, ‘N Sync, surfing, spinning class, dark chocolate, impossible relationships, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, traveling, playing clarinet, Spanish, booze and partying, yoga, writing, Stairmaster, jumping off tall things into water, tanning, live music, Marxism, romantic conquest, food in general, the death of capitalism, indigenous spirituality, surf trips, facebook, detoxing, rebelling against authority, and now apparently, being in love. and i’m sure friends and family could remind me of a few more i’m forgetting.  

“you have what’s called an addictive personality.” while i was hesitant to accept his label, the free psychologist i saw twice made the obvious observation i had refused to acknowledge in myself. i had always wanted to see it as more of a blessing than a curse, a valiant sense of drive toward accomplishment and passion for the things and people i loved most in my life (interestingly, they say that great leaders exhibit the very same character traits found in people with addictive personalities; our biggest weaknesses are also our greatest strengths).  i still have trouble admitting it’s even a problem, and i imagine addicts with substance-abuse problems, in AA and rehab and stuff, they’d probably look at my issues and laugh in my face.

in my case, my supposed addictive personality has never been cause for serious concern, since luckily my addictions have thus far been (mostly) positive as opposed to life-threatening or drug-related. rather than being addicted to substances or self-inflicted physical pain or any one thing in particular like some drug addicts or alcoholics, people with addictive personalities have a range of things to choose from to get their fix, finding solace in a different activity, behavior or gluttonous practice of consumption beyond that which is considered normal on any given day, or in any given hour for that matter. this makes addiction to certain things difficult to recognize in oneself, easy to hide from others, and even easier to perpetuate indefinitely. it also makes your addictions harder to overcome, since there are so many of them and it’s less about the thing you’re addicted to than about the way you’re wired as a person: your personality is the problem. with  a ‘predisposition to addiction’ built into the very essence of your being as the defining characteristic of addictive personalities, the world is your oyster, and everything in it that attracts you or peaks your interest becomes fodder for addiction. it is said that one thing separating addiction from just loving something a whole lot or pursuing as a hobby that which brings you pleasure, is that people with addiction problems spend excessive time and energy on a certain activity, behavior, object or relationship because they feel like they have to, not because they like to. It’s not an “I want to…” or “I love to…” it’s an “I need to, I have to, I must…” and it’s always ‘right now this very instant’.

lucky for me, my main addictions are for the most part self-balancing, allowing me to disguise them as activities that bring me joy and keep me healthy and sociable, making me appear driven and passionate toward meaningful goals and allowing me to fit in as normal in most social situations. for example, balancing my compulsive overeating addiction with my exercise and surfing addictions keeps me fit, and if for some reason i get out of balance and gain a few pounds when i don’t find the time to burn enough calories running to make up for a serious stint of binge-eating, i get to re-balance by simply turning to my detox addiction, getting back on track with a colon cleanse or juice fast people admire as an example of living a healthy lifestyle. tell that to the three chocolate bar wrappers hiding in the trash can.   

“can you think of a few things you might have been addicted to in the past?” while i fired him shortly after asking it (something a little too creepy about your shrink’s constant mention that he loves your name because his dead wife loves (note: present tense) Gone with the Wind, especially when he points to her picture staring at you from the coffee table), this question inspired the list i created above, and has allowed me to get in touch with deeper psycho-emotional realities i could have otherwise continued masking under the guise of living my life’s passions. and i think some of these new realizations extend past the realm of addictive personalities into the spheres of our shared experiences as social and socialized beings, which is why i’m taking the time to write this.

my answer to his question in the moment, though, came to mind quickly and simply: “i’ve been addicted to everything and everyone i’ve ever loved.”

____

after studying ‘my condition’ in the resources i could find in a simple google search, i found the information interesting and revealing, not just because i could relate to the associated character traits and behavior patterns, but also because i could see how my addictive personality may have less to do with me as an individual possessing an innate character flaw, and more to do with my subjection to and socialization within the society of which i am a part. it’s not necessarily me as an entity in and of myself, but rather the combined result of me + me subjecting myself to the sociocultural norms of my society, which have contributed to the creation of my personality as both a social actor and social subject. i knew i had work to do on myself, but i felt somehow relieved to know that it might not just be me or others like me with addictive personalities, but rather that many of us suffering in modernity or consumer culture or whatever we want to call the experience of life we share today, may very well be experiencing similar problems as a result of our socialized and subjectified selves. the following is an exploration of this idea, connecting the addictive personality with other manifestations of our lives as social subjects in the pursuit of happiness.

addictive personalities, from where i’m sitting

for those of us with addictive personalities, we have the privilege of bouncing from one addiction to the next or being addicted to many things at once instead of relying on one substance or activity to keep us high, like some addicts who don’t necessarily fit the addictive personality prototype. here’s an example from my own life to give this some context: i walk to the beach with my board to get my daily surf fix, only to find the waves are flat. panic sets in so i go on a run instead to get that runner’s high feeling, then i meet friends for dinner to celebrate life with a feast, a few glasses of wine and four ‘shared’ desserts (of which i scarf down the most and any possible leftovers), then i feel guilty, fat and ugly for eating so much so i go out and buy a pretty new dress, giving me a shopper’s high (followed by ensuing consumption guilt), yet still making me feel good about myself physically because damn, i look good in my new dress, giving me the emotional strength to write a heart-wrenching email to my long-distance non-boyfriend who has just attempted to end our codependent relationship for the seventh time in four years; wiping the tears and swiping on a fresh coat of mascara, i go out and party to welcome my rebound phase in style, having the time of my life drunkenly flirting with men who make me feel like ‘i’ve still got it’ in slurring speech and stinking breath, getting home late and passing out in my clothes, waking up horrendously hungover until i can paddle out for a few waves to get my head straight again, followed by a heaping breakfast for three consumed by one, at which point i begin re-evaluating my life (what am i doing?! this isn’t me. i don’t need this party lifestyle with strangers to make me feel 'good enough'. i’m going to get over getting dumped by being true to ME for a change!) and i make new promises to self: from now on i’m consuming no carbs, no sugar, no dairy, no caffeine and no alcohol – FOREVER! rinse and repeat to infinity.

for an addictive personality, there’s always a new high to avoid the low, and the longer you’ve been at it, the better you get at perfecting your own personalized bag of tricks, drowning yourself in one addiction to get over the pain of the loss or ending of another. it becomes predictably cyclical really, and it means that living in extremes is your only option, because moderation in any of the things you are addicted to is by the very definition of addiction, impossible, no matter how many times you’ve convinced yourself otherwise. so you’re either eating only chocolate cake or none at all, you’re partying your face off or staying home with a strict 10pm bedtime, you’re surfing every day twice a day or not at all, you’re marrying your non-boyfriend or never speaking to him again. no in-betweens, no maybe just a little bit; you’re all or nothing at any given time whether you like it or not. because that’s just how you are, whether you like it or not.

experts and pyschologists say it’s because we with addictive personalities have low self-esteem, are prone to anxiety and depression, seek to avoid pain at all costs, cannot delay gratification, are uncomfortable in social situations, feel that we’re ‘not good enough’, believe that we do not fit within societal norms, and are unable to handle stress, and as a result, we end up chasing experiences or indulging in behaviors that give us an escape from those issues, allowing us to experience a sense of joy or high by using our addictions to avoid feeling low. thus, as soon as the enjoyment of one addiction wears off, or if we are for some reason deprived of it, we swiftly switch over to another addiction promising a similar sense of enjoyment. however, when we use our addictions as a coping mechanism in this way (which is of course what we do), the joke’s on us, since our addictions do not actually soothe us in any sustainable way; rather, they perpetuate deeper and deeper addiction by providing only momentary relief from feelings of anxiety, frustration or discomfort, making us feel like we need to feed our addiction more and more in the hope that if we do it enough, we will be able to feel that sense of relief and enjoyment permanently and escape our problems once and for all. Unfortunately, this is not how it works, so at the end of the day we are still left with our feelings and insecurities, and all of our addictions to boot. Speaking as a clinically diagnosed addictive personality, i resonate with these descriptions and there isn’t a single one i would deny in myself.

i can’t help but wonder, though, are these ‘personality traits’ so exclusive to us addictive personality anomalies or are they more common than we think? i imagine if you’re still reading this, a lot of it might be resonating with you, too. and that’s the part that grabs me, that in one way or another, we all might resonate with the identifying factors commonly associated with addictive personalities. and i think the aspects that we most identify with are telling of our experiences as socialized subjects of modern society and the norms of our inescapable consumer culture: 1) seeking escape from the confines of our increasingly homogenous yet overwhelmingly stressful reality; and 2) the desire-driven fantasy of achieving lasting satisfaction through the pursuit of the things or activities that, by their very nature, bring us only fleeting moments of joy and happiness -- a fantasy created and perpetuated by consumer culture’s promise of satisfaction by way of material accumulation, consumption and living the (increasingly unattainable) American Dream.

consumer culture, at the heart of capitalism, persists in tricky ways, despite a growing recognition that owning more stuff or even collecting countless exciting experiences is not what contributes to lasting happiness or overall wellbeing. psycho-analytic interpretations offer a useful explanation for relentless consumption, interestingly quite similar to the behavioral processes experienced by us addictive personalities. The overwhelming staying power of capitalism in general, and consumer culture in particular, rests on its ability to produce in its subjects a useful cycle of desire and fantasy based on the Lacanian pursuit of jouissance, a state of fleeting excitement or a momentary sense of fulfillment which ‘promises a satisfaction it can never deliver’. As consumers, we get a glimpse of this jouissance by way of our ‘material or affective’ practices of consumption – feeling that twinge of joy by purchasing or indulging in something that makes us believe we will eventually feel permanently satisfied once we consume enough of the thing or experience that provides that sense of fleeting joy; if only we might ‘get enough’ of that which will never give us the satisfaction we believe it will, we create the illusion in our minds that we will eventually get to a point of true satisfaction. sadly, as in the case of addiction, this is a game we will never win, and as the psycho-emotional effects of consumerism demonstrate, we may very well exhaust all consumptive and/or addictive avenues seeking to attain a neverending jouissance, which, by its very definition, is an impossible fantasy. the ensuing low is then even more unbearable, prompting us to perhaps try a new consumptive approach or seek to escape our hopeless predicament through other avenues and experiences, maybe through mind-altering drugs, travel abroad, or going for a surf.

Zizek’s comments on the subject date to 1989 in the book The Sublime Object of Ideology, where he wrote the following regarding the relationship between jouissance and consumer behavior (as cited in Rob Fletcher’s 2013 article in Human Geography, titled “Bodies do Matter: The Peculiar Persistence of Neoliberalism in Environmental Governace):

an opportunity for further accumulation is created as [consumers] seek to re-experience the desired emotional stimulation in search of an illusory satisfaction. As the object of this process is an ephemeral affective state that passes quickly with little residual impact on the body, the accumulation process can be virtually infinite, facilitating continual capitalization without readily discernable limit or consequence…. compelling increased consumption of the products and services through which jouissance is pursued.

this perpetual yearning for an impossible satisfaction fits nicely in the capitalist framework whereby we, as an entire global society, will continue over-consuming, out of feelings of angst and emptiness, all that is being over-produced, therefore fulfilling our role as consumers propelling economic growth through accumulation, the very core of the global economic system.

when we think about it this way, are we not all on the same hamster-wheel, perpetually seeking an unattainable yet promised satisfaction by way of consumption, ill-fated addictive personality or no? might it be, then, that the addictive personality is not such an anomaly after all? could the addictive personality, in fact, be the personality prototype of modern life in capitalist society?

as capitalist subjects coming to terms with the depressing nature of our fantasy-driven pursuits, we’ve been seeking ways and means to overcome consumer culture’s grasp on our lives and begin transforming our systems toward non-capitalist alternatives. but how do we surmount the contradiction in terms that is our own subjection within a system we aim to invalidate and abandon? how do i transform my addictive personality, which is reliant upon the unattainable promises of consumer culture, to accommodate a post-capitalist reality? society has grown rife with anti-capitalist sentiment, yet capitalism persists; our self-subjection to capitalism keeps us trapped – trapped in ourselves through addiction and consumption, and trapped in our ensuing self-enslavement to the economic and sociocultural dynamics of the capitalist system, alternatives to which we are still unable to imagine as the capitalist subjects we are today.  

J.K. Gibson-Graham, in their book A Postcapitalist Politics, refer to the ‘pain and possibility’ in unraveling our self-subjection to capitalism, a preliminary step wrought with perturbing existential challenges vital to envisioning other economic and social realities. this is the same psycho-emotive scenario experienced  by addictive personalities coming to terms with the need to change self and transform personality in order to overcome addiction; indeed, no easy task. it’s painful to try and change ourselves from a reality we’ve always known, yet if we wish to experience a post-addiction and/or post-capitalist world, waking up to our own self-subjection within capitalism’s requisite consumer culture is a difficult, yet necessary first step. for addictive personalities, this unraveling stage begins by convincing ourselves of the harsh reality that our addictions, no matter how much we feed them, are never going to provide us with the lasting satisfaction we think they will. from there, it’s a matter of overcoming deep-seated insecurities at the heart of our actions and transforming psycho-social behavior patterns we’ve relied on as coping mechanisms for as long as we can remember. for the rest of us living in modernity, the unraveling stage is quite similar and has already begun, based on a waking-up through recognition; that is, recognizing that neither material nor affective/experiential consumption makes us happy over the long-term, because its promise of a satisfaction or jouissance it can never deliver leaves us wanting more in perpetuity; the more we consume, the greater the lack we feel. from there, beginning to reconstitute ourselves in previously unimagined ways, we explore the possibilities of our unraveling, a coming-into-being of post-capitalist actors and subjects in a concomitantly emerging post-capitalist reality: becoming ‘other’ so that ‘other’ social and economic realities may finally come to fruition.  

_____________

i find this entire reflection at once fascinating and humbling as i think about what it means in my own life, in how i’ll even begin to transform my addictive personality into something i cannot yet fathom. ironically, i’ve embarked upon an academic career devoted to killing capitalism (one of my many addictions, as it were), yet it’s only now that i’m coming to realize that i must also kill capitalism in myself by overcoming my addictive personality. the irony there is my pain and my possibility: the unraveling of my self-subjection to capitalism will hurt, and i will, as a result, have increasingly fewer addictions at my disposal to pick me back up again, yet i find solace in hoping that in unraveling i will create a space for my as yet unimaginable post-capitalist self to emerge as part and parcel of the simultaneously emerging post-capitalist society. 

and in that hope i dare to believe that the unfathomable is indeed possible.

the awakening (part 4 of 5): talkin' bout a revolution

don't you know 
they're talkin' bout a revolution 
it sounds like a whisper… 
don't you know 
they're talkin' about a revolution 
it sounds like a whisper… 

when Tracy Chapman first sang those words it was 1988, and very few people were in the mood for global revolution - especially in the West - despite the sprouting seeds of growing inequalities, environmental concerns and corporate interests coopting democracy. flash-forward 25 years and what then might have sounded like a whisper is now a world-wide chorus of screams we can’t possibly ignore. and they really are talkin’ bout a revolution now, even when it’s couched in friendlier language like ‘transition’ or ‘shift’ or ‘occupy’. we use those lighter words because when we hear ‘revolution’ we think guillotines and Jacobins in 1789 France or the decades-long Islamic Revolution in Afghanistan whose violent aftermath persists today. we hear revolution and we’re scared of what it might entail: will we have to die so that others might live in justice and freedom? what will the new system look like and how do we know it won’t be worse than the one we’ve got? god forbid, will we have to change the ways we live and exist in the world to accommodate more sustainable ways of living?

we forget that revolution need not be violent or even abrupt as it has been in the past; instead, we might conceive of our present revolution as a steady change now decades in the making, finally coming to the fore as global citizens unite against oppressive power imbalances, taking a stand versus corporations running politics to the detriment of people everywhere, and demanding a reversal of the destructive pillaging of the Earth on which all life depends. but the revolution we’re experiencing today isn’t just ‘against’ the powers that be with no direction on where we go from here, akin to a short-sighted protest lacking vision or purpose. no, our current revolution is both deconstructive of injustice and creative in innovation at the same time, offering tangible examples of what kind of world comes next while concomitantly destroying the old order through resistance movements and withdrawal of consent to oppression and exploitation. when we recognize our revolution for what it is – the dismantling of the old and the simultaneous creation of the new – it need not be terrifying, but rather inspiring that a fundamental change in power relations, socioeconomic structures and governing institutions is indeed on the horizon. and that our many interventions, be they minor or grandiose, are contributing to this change in ways we might not even recognize or understand.

we all have a unique role in supporting the change: fighters, writers, farmers, artists, activists, eco-socialists, community leaders, spiritual gurus, filmmakers, academics; young, old, rich, poor, North, South, East, West. we all have something to contribute; and more and more, these interventions are coming to be seen not just as choices we make in support of a sustainable and just future, but as moral obligations of the global countermovement to build new realities and to rise up against the system and its increasingly illegitimate institutions controlled by corporate interests:

the legitimacy of both states and international institutions is now contaminated by corruption, usurpation, and bias. it is therefore the obligation of the people – in this case the people of the world – to “alter or abolish them.” given such an obligation, there must also be a right to take the action necessary to fulfill it. further, institutional structures, practices, and purported laws that block or punish such action are inherently illegitimate and unconstitutional. they represent little more than lawless force and violence. these concepts legitimate a withdrawal of consent of the kind that… provides the underlying power of social movements.[i]

with governments unresponsive to citizen demands for socio-structural change, it’s less about rallying for piecemeal legislation within unworkable political frameworks and more about entire system transformations aligned with new-paradigm thinking and a complete overhaul of the global economic model at the heart of hegemonic oppression and exploitation; for in the words of Audre Lorde, “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house”. in that sense, our revolution is disassembling the global capitalist system and its instruments of control by way of building new-paradigm approaches to social and economic relations and institutions based on collectivity, cooperation and shared solutions to common challenges. as we are seeing in the growing presence of social movements and protests in major cities around the world, global society is ready for change and our systems are ripe for revolution; now it’s just a matter of when and how.

in the circle I had a vision of a buffalo skull and it said: ‘now is the time to rise up; we can’t wait any longer.’  

these words linger in my ears and brain crevices now, months after they were spoken by a sister at the moon dance, finding deep resonance in the sense of urgency we’re experiencing in the seemingly imminent need for change NOW, not tomorrow or the next day but right this very instant. and it seems that more and more people are being called to the causes that irk their heartstrings and make their souls sing: climate change, poverty and famine, labor rights, sustainable development, social equality, economic and environmental justice. and while our motivations differ, our objectives are one and the same: a radical transformation in the current global order toward equality, justice and peace for all of humanity in harmony with nature. it might not be about a grand scale plan, since grassroots change and local solutions are proving powerful in driving global change from the bottom-up. but no matter how local the effort, the interconnected nature of our transition networks is strong through solidarity and shared ideals of the new paradigm. we know what we don’t want, and we’re now in the seemingly chaotic reorganization phase of defining what we do want, yet we’re still not all the way sure how we’re going to get there or what it’s going to look like when we do:

“never in history have there been prepared alternatives. when feudalism disappeared and capitalism arrived, no one announced that at 12 o’clock one would end and at 12:01 the other would begin” (El Diario Interview with Arcadi Oliveres, Professor of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and President of NGO Justicia y Pau (Justice and Peace), May 11, 2013; translation mine).

our new type of living social system has to evolve; it can’t be invented and assembled, but rather it will always be a surprise based on trial and error given the previously unknown capabilities of new systems.[ii] but we are clear on one thing, and that is that we can’t wait any longer. and while we might be scared of the unknown, we are even more scared of maintaining a status quo that condemns the lives of billions to subservience, oppression and marginal existence. doing nothing is no longer an option. for in doing nothing, in being content to live our day-to-day lives blind to the suffering of our brothers and sisters and our life-giving Mother Earth, we give consent by way of complacency to the injustice of elite power dominance over humanity and nature. and once we open our eyes to that reality, it is no longer a choice or an uncomfortable burden to our conscience, but a clear and irrefutable obligation to act. and to act now.

so what are we gonna do and how is this whole thing gonna go down? is violence our only option as dominant power interests hold tight to their reins in the face of resistance movements whose window for peaceful means of change grows increasingly narrow? many in the countermovement would say yes, that lacking traditional or democratic mechanisms for dismantling global capitalism without resorting to violence, we must meet force with force. i’m realistic enough to concede that at this stage in the game, they may unfortunately be right, and we may very well see the situation get worse before it gets better. however, i for one am hopefully (and practically) optimistic in aligning with a peaceful trajectory for nonviolent eco-socialist revolution. and it’s messy and uncomfortable and it forces us to be surreptitiously creative and outspoken when we’d otherwise cow to social pressure to conform because it’s easier. but we can, and we must, so we will.

withdrawing consent through civil resistance

“my life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

since the durability of power relies on the consent of the governed, particularly in democratic regimes where government is supposedly a representation of the desires of the people, the most important component of revolution is the withdrawal of that consent as a process of delegitimizing power. while seemingly obvious, this crucial step is perhaps the most difficult to catalyze given modern capitalism’s far-reaching tentacles and subtle tools of social control, including media, pop culture and consumerism, whereby the internalization of capitalist values by the majority is the most powerful form of consent, and the hardest to overcome. as David Harvey explains, the constructed consent of the majority of people is what allows the injustice and exploitation of the capitalist system to persist, requiring “the construction of political consent across a sufficiently large spectrum of the population”, centered around what Gramsci calls ‘common sense’, or ‘the sense held in common’, which is itself “constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization often rooted in regional or national traditions”.[iii] so while people everywhere are being fed images of glamorous modern lifestyles espousing the accumulation of wealth and materialism as social aspirations, the revolution seeks to undermine such practices by drawing awareness to the fallacy that these lifestyles are even attainable let alone desirable given finite natural resources and income’s diminishing returns to happiness as discussed in the previous posts of this series. the Occupy Movement has been perhaps the most successful in this process, using the simple imagery of the 1% versus the 99% to single-handedly turn capitalism on its head and into a four-letter word by drawing attention to structural inequalities inherent in the system. social movements can continue this important work of deconstructing consent by propagating similar images in mainstream culture through social media, magazine articles, blogs and documentaries to raise consciousness as to why a complete overhaul of the system is necessary.

as part of this strategy, transforming patterns of production and consumption are coming to define the countermovement, whereby economic localization and individuals’ voluntary withdrawal from consumer culture have become important means of resistance to corporate control of what and how we live, relate, produce and consume. by opting out of the global economy and saying ‘no’ to the modern consumer lifestyle by buying (minimally) and producing locally, creating non-capitalist mechanisms of exchange and barter, and swapping previously-owned goods for other previously-owned goods instead of buying new things, we are leading by example and weakening the influence of mass production and its mantra of ‘buy-buy-buy’ to support corporations and the economic growth mechanism fundamental to global capitalism. at the same time, opting out of the debt-cycle money system is another way of withdrawing consent by limiting the power of banks to enrich themselves and their executives at the expense of the working class, while simultaneously reversing the power relationship between people and moneylenders. this entails students saying no to repaying outstanding student debt, families opting against taking out a loan or mortgage to buy a house, and small-business entrepreneurs finding alternative means of financing outside the banking system. while these processes may be slow to catch on given the socially ingrained lifestyle practices of modernity and the internalization of the values behind the American Dream, they are specific and tangible steps with potentially powerful and wide-reaching implications when more and more people join in the fun.

similarly, nonviolent protest in the form of civil resistance has been increasingly powerful in the withdrawal of consent despite mainstream media’s minimal coverage of mass protests in cities around the world. disobeying illegitimate laws, showing up for protests at all levels, sitting or standing in silence as a form of resistance, and impeding construction efforts for environmentally destructive energy projects all fall under the category of nonviolent civil resistance, and their impact is broad yet subtle. undermining state power in stealthy ways is one method of saying ‘no’ to social control and injustice, and the more of us who are willing to risk the consequences, the greater our chances of making unjust laws a thing of the past.

i have been accused of political posturing and criticized as too radical by proposing things like abstention in US elections, but i write these things as a challenge to all of us to consider our role in perpetuating global injustice, violence and war by legitimizing otherwise illegitimate policies; we do this by exercising our supposed democratic right to vote and elect our leaders and policymakers, and taking it a step further, by funding the wars and economic practices we claim to oppose by continuing to pay taxes, fueling the machines of war and contributing to the loss of innocent lives to protect what we are told are our ‘national interests’. we are beginning to recognize that those national interests are in fact not ours but rather those of a teeny-tiny majority at odds with the needs and lives of billions around the world, yet we continue to offer our consent by doing things like voting and paying taxes. at what point do our leaders and representatives’ actions become illegitimate if we are the ones tacitly offering our consent in the democratic system of which we are a part? when it stops being about ‘we the people’ versus ‘them the leaders we elected but whose policies we don’t agree with’, we cannot ignore our role in this great big mess we call democracy – WE ARE THEM AND WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR POLICIES because we legitimize them through continuing to play the game of democracy, thereby supporting murder, exploitation and environmental destruction in the process. the overt withdrawal of these forms of consent is what is ultimately required by us as individuals propelling the revolution as the means of delegitimizing our corporation-controlled governments. we may worry that our singular acts of resistance are futile against the overwhelming power of dominant interests and the state apparatuses of control, but with all of our individual actions taken together as a multitude of drops in the countermovement ocean, we are not alone, and we are powerful indeed. and there aren’t enough jail cells to house us all anyway. :)  

strengthening the global countermovement for peaceful revolution

…fear not, fellow revolutionaries: our time is now.

another, more positive reality, however, is that much of the global countermovement is not centered in the Global North, whose hesitance to disobey is slowing the revolutionary process. instead, many of the revolutionary epicenters are in the cities and communities of the Global South, where people are no longer waiting for change to come to them; on the contrary, resistance and socioeconomic alternatives are emerging organically and powerfully by the people of the South in the form of new social movements, political parties and local strategies to design communities and government institutions in the best interest of people and the planet, rendering mainstream systems of dominance and control increasingly irrelevant. Raj Patel writes of this phenomenon as the countermovement and contends that “the people leading such movements are the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalized, the people on whose shoulders the externalities of the rich often fall, the world’s least free people who are discovering that they are The Change They’ve Been Waiting For”^[iv].

Philip Smith and Manfred Max-Neef refer to this flow of people-power energy as “an unstoppable underground movement of civil society”:

what we have is two parallel worlds. one concerned with politics, competition, greed and power, which seems to have everything under its control; and another concerned with equity, well-being, respect for life and solidarity, which doesn’t control anything, but grows and expands as an unstoppable underground movement of civil society…. the latter, because of its dispersion, its diversity, its fierce independence and its chaotic structure, cannot be beheaded nor can it collapse…. the need for radical change of the dominant economic model underlies all the components of the movement”^[v] [italics mine].

this movement of civil society is making its presence felt in societies of both the Global North and South as a reaction to the harms of modern lifestyles of overconsumption and profit-seeking plundering and exploitation. citizens in the North have begun expressing their desires to escape the ills of modernity, to ‘un-develop’ for greater sustainability, sufficiency and a return to the ‘human home’: “accepting and living by sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to what is, culturally speaking, the human home: to the ancient order of family, community, good work, and good life; to a reverence for skill, creativity and creation…; to communities worth spending a lifetime in; and to local places pregnant with the memories of generations”^[vi].

as Fritjof Capra notes poignantly, it is this connection between civil society in the South and sympathetic Northerners with power that is finally tipping the scales in the direction of revolution, creating a global social movement promoting people-centered approaches and democratic, participatory political processes[vii]. we see these trends emerging in the annual World Social Forum, the International Forum on Globalization’s seminal report on “Alternatives to Economic Globalization”, ongoing meetings of the Group of 77 (G-77), now comprised of 132 developing countries united within the UN system to support collective economic interests and strengthen negotiating power, and most recently with 350.org’s Global Power Shift – all coming to define the revolutionary processes of ‘globalization from below’[viii] to counter increasingly discredited institutions like the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

the unity in solidarity we are seeing in these new movements is not merely a coincidental convergence of similar yet unrelated calls for individual and social change, but rather an early reflection of what Morris Berman calls ‘the waning of the modern ages’: “the dual process of the disintegration of capitalism and the concomitant emergence of an alternative socioeconomic formation”; what is to be “the central story of the rest of the century”^[ix]. as alternative socioeconomic formations continue taking shape, we move closer to satisfying Lindner’s requirements for the transition to a ‘dignity economy’, which:

requires a multi-thronged approach with two core moves…. it must be a hybrid bottom-up and top-down approach. a simple combination of bottom-up and top-down would not suffice, because we cannot wait for the majority of the world’s citizens to become Mandelas from the bottom up. we can also not wait for the politicians of our time to implement necessary changes from the top down.”^[x]

as the interests of social movements, civil society, grassroots community organizations, and select policymakers conjoin within the global countermovement, we find hope in envisioning a peaceful transition toward new alternatives to support the full realization of human potentialities, meaningful community livelihoods and relevant ways of living in harmony with nature – outside the confines of the global economic order and its international instruments of domination, exploitation and oppression. in building the new, the countermovement undermines the power of the old by making it both unnecessary and irrelevant.

while this post helps us get a clearer understanding of what the revolution looks and feels like on the individual, national and global levels, the following and final installment of this 5-part series will get into the meat of what comes after the revolution as a guide for where we’re headed next: post-capitalist alternatives and people ‘doing utopia’ in communities around the world.   

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[i] Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, & Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000): 45.

[ii] Graeme Taylor, Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transforming of Our World. (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2008).

[iii] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 39.

[iv] Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (New York: Picador, 2009): 108.

[v] Philip B. Smith and Manfred Max-Neef, Economics Unmasked: From Power and Greed to Compassion and the Common Good (UK: Green Books, 2011): 173-174.

[vi] Alan Thein Durning, “Are We Happy Yet?” Ecopsychology (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995): 76.

[vii] Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living. (New York: Anchor Books, 2002).

[viii] Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, & Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000).

[ix] Morris Berman, “The Waning of the Modern Ages,” Counterpunch (September 20, 2012).  www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/20/the-waning-of-the-modern-ages/

[x] Evelin Lindner, A Dignity Economy: Creating an Economy that Serves Human Dignity and Preserves Our Planet (Oregon: World Dignity University Press, 2011).

a spy on the wall: part 3 of 3

day 2.5: lingering goodbyes

by now it was dinner time, and everyone came downstairs clean and refreshed from the day, overdone perfume blending most dissonantly with the chef's culinary creation of Grabbyhands' catch of the day (aren't you sick of mahi by now?). i rolled napkins around silverware, priding myself in my own mini-rebellion of not wiping off the water spots on the knives before setting them on the table. i am woman, hear me roar. still semi-hungover, no one was interested in drinking, but the now-jolly giant was determined to get his hands on some weed. being the generous guy that he is, the chef hooked it up for the old man, sharing some of his own supply and loading it into the one-hitter. following brief instructions, the giant inhaled as a true giant would, and the next thing i know, he's coughing uncontrollably between exclamations of "holy shit!" and "load that thing again!". i couldn't decide whether to laugh or call an ambulance; i mean this guy is pretty old and now he's hacking up a lung. am i liable for this? fortunately(?) he survives and scarfs his banana fosters a-la-mode a little faster than the others, enjoying each bite more vocally than the one before it. monopoly mustache shares drug stories from the old days in the fraternity house - LSD, PCP, speed; he'd try anything once. Grabbyhands comments on how marijuana is much more potent now than it was back then, and everyone agrees. i recall a similar conversation i had recently with my dad and i immediately start feeling eerily uncomfortable. the good chef gifts them with a little extra something in a piece of cellophane before we leave for the night, everyone sitting around the poker table in minimal clothing.

so this was goodbye - i wouldn’t return to that same house the following night; i’d be working sushi and trying my hand bartending at a different mansion for another big-name pro-team owner. yes, i could name names, maybe embarrass these guys a little bit. but i won’t and it really doesn’t matter; they could be anyone in the end. this is every day: the players change but it’s the same old game. and it’s disturbingly normal.

and you know what the worst part is? i want to hate these guys, and i can't. i want to demonize them for embodying all that's wrong in this world, and i just can't. i can't hate them for cheating on and lying to their wives back at home, for subjecting these hired women to their repressed sexual fantasies, objectifying and subjugating them in the process, for no better reason than just because they can. for the love of god, one of them actually grabbed my Georgetown-educated, yoga-sculpted ass without even hesitating and didn't even apologize, and i still couldn't find it in my sad little heart to hate him for it. and of course i knew why. when i talk to these guys, i see them as people, not as nameless creeps with too much money and sex addictions. i look at these men and i remember hearing about my favorite uncle taking dozens of golf trips with friends to Baja over the years when i was growing up; i see my ex-boyfriends and college classmates and their countless bachelor parties and prostitute stories from when they traveled abroad; uncomfortably, these men even remind me of my own father and i feel it in the pit of my stomach and it gets even harder to hate them or convince myself that on a different day, even the men i admire most might very well find themselves in a similar scenario.

i can't dehumanize these men because they remind me of the men i love and care about in my own life, and instead of making them the enemy and singling them out as creeps, more than anything i want to understand. i want to know why this experience i observed and participated in is just the tip of the iceberg, why it happens all over the world, every single day of the week, fifty-two weeks a year. why do men with money need to buy women in foreign countries and treat them as objects - all part of the all-inclusive weekend getaway package? how do they go home to their wives with trinkets from the airport and go on living life as usual? do their foreign escapades make it easier to live a reality they despise? what is missing in your extravagant lives that this becomes so everyday, so normalized, so accepted as just the way things are? do you think about how your actions affect the lives and souls of the women you pay to sleep with you and pretend to like you while you live out the fantasy you’re too scared to explore in real life? or does what happens in Costa Rica just stay in Costa Rica forever: a distant memory of a crazy weekend with your buddies; fodder for future men-only fishing trips and golf getaways?

i think about the lives of the working women who supply the sexual and companionship services demanded by wealthy men en masse throughout the world. as long as there is demand for it, there will always be supply – sometimes the picture is pretty like Lucy and Candy and the girls who do it part-time for extra cash and seem generally in high spirits. most times it’s uglier, taking the form of human trafficking and underground prostitution rings servicing powerful government employees, corporate CEOs, diplomats immune from international prosecution for their sex crimes. hell, in our day, hookers don’t even have to be hookers to hook, especially the pretty ones can just cuddle up to a nice old gringo on a business staycation in Dakar and he’ll buy her and her extended family anything they need, as long as he’s gettin’ his when he asks for it. and no, she doesn’t love you; she is using you for your money as much as you are using her for sex and companionship - exchange value finding its most perverse expression. women selling sex is the oldest known industry on earth, so they say, and from where i’m sitting, it doesn’t look to be changing all that soon.

even harder to swallow is this overwhelming sense of powerlessness when we consider that there are no simple solutions despite the uneasy feeling we get knowing that this reality is so pervasive, recognizing that there is something ethically and socially wrong about it all, but not quite sure where to place the blame. sure, it would be nice if rich old dudes would stop paying for sex in foreign countries, perhaps slowing the cycle a bit. but where would that leave these well-paid women who rely on prostitution to support their families and livelihoods? a few local organizations have tried with limited success to convince women to get off the street, providing them with free basic skills training and connecting them with employment agencies to find other means of income. in general, these organizations’ impact has been marginal at best, especially when women are faced with the real-life decision of making minimum wage working long hours in a dead-end job or continuing to sell their bodies to the highest bidder for an hour or two of unattached if not soul-depraving sex with a faceless stranger, affording them and their families an otherwise dignified lifestyle full of the things society tells them to want. the economics of it is all too clear, and neither demand-side nor supply-side strategies have any lasting influence: trying to rein-in men’s demand for sex services or control the supply of women willing to work as prostitutes is a pipe dream when there are no viable or meaningful employment alternatives for the women involved. in a world where sex sells and women can be bought and sold as objects, they have no real choice. what else could they do that would make them as much money to support their family in the short-term? in the long-term? in plain economics, these women are better off working as prostitutes, a reality they are fully conscious of regardless of the social stigmatization they confront; a reality i also understand no matter how sick it makes me feel. and through resignation to my own utter powerlessness, all judgment turns to compassion.

in the words of Douglas Dowd, “if every thing has a price, every person has a price”. sex, and even the simulation of loving companionship, is just another commodity to be bought and sold on the market, where people and life experiences have a price just like anything else. as just one more facet of our all-encompassing consumerist society, why should women’s bodies and the sacred, intimate experiences of sex and love be exempt from the far-reaching tentacles of capitalist market exchange? we know this to be our reality, but it’s one that doesn’t let us sleep easy, and that is where our humanness sets in, sending up an ethical red flag to our consciousness: “hey, something isn’t right here…”. when what we know as sacred is treated as profane in the crudest sense, our morality responds to remind us that if the system we live in can create this type of rational behavior among so many of us in our society, there must be something inherently wrong with the system itself, for it is the system that defines and dictates our behavior within it. while we may be paralyzed to change the global capitalist system that breeds and supports the dehumanization, subjugation and objectivization of women in the sex-tourism industry, our moral radar on the subject is indeed useful for its ability to alert us to what we know in our hearts and guts to be ‘wrong’, perhaps as a first step to at least beginning to envision an alternative system in which this type of behavior would not have the slightest incentive to exist, let alone thrive as it does today.

while this experience with monopoly mustache, Grabbyhands, the gentle giant, Lucy, Candy and ‘the girls’ brought me face-to-face with one of the most uncomfortable human expressions of our diseased global system, forcing me to confront my own paralysis in a situation I know in my soul to be ‘wrong’, i come out of it with a semblance of hope and trust that as a society we can do better and that sooner or later we will. the system is crumbling on its own and new systems are emerging that offer inspiration for a renewed appreciation of universal human dignity and values-based (rather than profit-based) social relations. people living and being treated as people, rather than being bought and sold as things for sale on the market. Morris Berman calls our current transition phase “the waning of the modern ages”, referring to the dual process of “the disintegration of capitalism and the concomitant emergence of an alternative socioeconomic formation” as the central story of our time. spiritual economist Charles Eisenstein (my most recent economist crush, btw) describes our present historical moment as “the space between stories” as we wait for a new Story of the People to emerge, bringing meaning to our lives and supporting our new vision of humanity. He writes: “when a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life. so today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse”. as our current collective story nears its end and we experience its ugly manifestations more frequently and more unavoidably, let us recognize them for what they are – the lingering goodbyes of a dying system now on its deathbed (DNR), croaking and gasping for air before its inevitable demise; a skeleton clearing the space for our new story to emerge.