a leftist ideology that merges radical green politics and the worldview of the situationist international. capitalism must be dismantled and replaced with a socialist society that prioritizes reconnection to one other and to nature. this includes de-colonization, de-growth, de-commodification, and de-alienation. situations (the namesake of situationism) are communal moments of joy deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening authentic desires and prefiguring post-capitalist living. other influences of eco-situationism include the degrowth and half-earth movements; antonio gramsci's concepts of counter-hegemony and organic intellectuals; murray bookchin's libertarian municipalism; the re-commoning frameworks of elinor ostrom and silvia federici; joel kovel's spiritual eco-socialism; jenny odell's critique of capitalism's attention economy; and post-civ deconstructionism. "i want freedom; i want the right to self-expression; i want everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." -emma goldman-
Gotta pay to exist in the world now. Streets? Those are for cars. Shopping centers? If you don't buy things, that's loitering, and that is a crime. Parks? Best not stick around after dark, because parks close. Every damned square inch of the world is bought and owned by someone or something.
The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.
“Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’ What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!’”
–Barbara Alice Mann
OK but I do genuinely believe we need to push for something like this before it's too late - and not just in digital spaces. We should have the right to peace and quiet from advertising. There should be more limits on how much and where we get advertising because otherwise it'll just become a creep of more and more until every fucking public space is lit with several billboards blasting us with ads, and the walls between spaces lined with ads, and our commutes filled with ads, and local parks sponsored by corporations to offset the cost of local councils, and so on and on and on and on. No. I need quiet. I need spaces where ads cannot touch me.
The imperial mode of living promotes a specific relationship between the state and the population – ‘citizenship through consumption’ – which promises greater opportunities for consumption in exchange for acceptance of the existing political and economic order. Government social transfers make this promise realistic for many people even if they do not have (adequately paid) gainful employment. The legitimacy of democracy is also increasingly tied to the ability to consume.
The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism
"If we take for granted and accept unreflectively that community consists of an aggregate of unrelated, monadic, self-enclosed, and highly privatized egos; that the telephone, radio, television set, and night letter constitute our principal windows to the world; that the shopping mall and its parking lots are our normal terrain for public intercourse; that processed and packaged foods, transported thousands of miles from remote areas of the country, are our major sources of nutriment; that "time is money," fast-talking is a paying skill, and speed-reading is a desideratum; that, above all, bureaucracy comprises the sinews of social life, gigantism is the measure of success, and clientage to professionals and centralized authority is evidence of a public sphere -- then we will be irretrievably lost as individuals, will-less as egos, and formless as personalities. Like the natural world around us, we will become the victims of a simplification process that renders us as inorganic and mineral as the ores that feed our foundries and the sand that feeds our glass furnaces."
Murray Bookchin (author, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, 1980)
Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. The society of the 21st century is no longer disciplinary, but a society of the performance. Nor are its inhabitants called ‘subjects of obedience’, but ‘subjects of performance’. These subjects are entrepreneurs of themselves.
Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is much more effective than the exploitation by the others, because it is accompanied by a feeling of freedom. The exploiter is the same exploited. Victim and executioner can no longer differentiate. This self-referentiality generates a paradoxical freedom, which, because of the structures of obligation immanent to it, becomes violence […] In this society of obligation, each one carries with him his forced labor field.
What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results..
No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.
Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
― Byung-Chul Han, extracts from The Burnout Society
A 10,000 person protest could flip and torch a few cop cars, but 100 people acting independently could cut the valve stems on 100 different cop cars and render them unusable and unrepairable
A 10,000 person protest could smash some windows of businesses and offices, but 100 people could superglue 100 buildings’ locks shut overnight
A 10,000 person protest could loot a few stores, but 100 people skillfully and persistently shoplifting could liberate just as much over time
1,000 people could blockade the construction of an oil pipeline, but it only takes 1 to turn the emergency shutoff valve on an existing one
100 people could camp in treehouses and prevent a clearcutting, but it only takes 1 to spike a few trees to drastically slow them down or even destroy their equipment
I’m not saying that mass actions aren’t important - no doubt, they accomplish things that couldn’t be done otherwise - but be aware of what can get done independently when those protests aren’t coming together. Get creative, stay active, direct action gets the good
a lot of self professed socialists and left wing people have absolutely no consciousness on imperialism and when it comes down to it could easily be convinced of being fascists
seriously when the reaction to people making very realistic observations on how the structure of the global economy is unsustainable, especially for the first world, is “great way to make people support socialism by telling them their lives are gonna be worse under it”…
if you define quality of life and freedom in terms of access to cheap commodities and convenience at the cost of others, you might not be a socialist!!
socialism quite literally is not defined by “increased access to goods” (this is something capitalism technically does as well and what proponents of capitalism argue to defend it). it is defined by changes in the relations of productions, it is a shift in the social reality of daily life, through restructuring production and who is in control of production. reorganizing economic life according to peoples direct needs and not to existing superfluous capitalist markets that depend on an entire advertising apparatus to manufacture desire therefore will impact what is produced, and impact consumption. if your politics are primarily concerned with consumption and not around the locus of production and peoples working lives, you are not viewing this as a socialist, you just want social democracy. to say that the excesses of western life, propped up by hyper exploitation of the third world, are not sustainable and not preferable to the people whose labor produces them, is not even an argument on moral grounds, its a reality of the contradictions inherent to modern imperialism.
Not to sound like a boomer, but capitalism has monopolized our childhoods so thoroughly that commercials are one of our main sources of nostalgia, and it kind of sucks. Most of us in adulthood recognize ads for the alienating nuisances that they are; but because we formed an emotional attachment to these specific images as kids, they get a pass.
This isn't merely
Having nostalgia for movies or shows is different. There's actual craft and narrative and substance beyond the exchangeability. In contrast, ads are transparently — loudly — trying to sell you something. They're constant "hey there fellow kids" noise pollution composed by marketing execs hungry for profit.
In an ideal world, movies and shows will continue to exist. Ads will not.
Self-described leftists offer seemingly simple, “common sense” solutions that fail to address or even acknowledge the actual technical obstacles facing their plan, neoliberals offer overly complicated plans that obfuscate the actual problem. A good cartoon.
I love this tweet/meme so much because it perfectly encapsulates the difference between socialism's emphasis on use-value and capitalism's emphasis on exchange-value, respectively.
Socialists look at a problem and want to directly address it, with the broader goal of creating a world where money and profit aren't middlemen saboteurs of human flourishing. Capitalists look at a problem and, at best, only think about ways in which solving it can fit in a pre-established matrix of abstract exchangability (and at worst they are actively trying to profit off of the problem).
Socialists want resources to be publically-abundant and, as much as possible, free-at-use so that class relations are undermined. Capitalists want resources to be artificially-scarce, with their sources concentrated in as few hands as possible so that profit can be generated from their sale.
Socialists prioritize common ownership and usufructory norms in the public arena because they're ways of guaranteeing access to all people and they make explicit the social/transitory nature of possessions. Capitalists prioritize private (top-down) ownership and commodification of everything because they see property, acquisition, and competition as paramount to our identity as humans.
Civilization was not developed to produce food for people. It is specifically the organizational processes of limiting access to abundance as a means of social and ecological hegemonic dominance. Hope this helps :)
Rendered gaudy and impoverished by the tyranny of economics and the enchantment of neoliberal capitalism, our sensibilities need replenishment from the sacramental imagination. As Americans begin to experience the initial stages of imperial sclerosis and decline, and as the advanced capitalist world in general discovers the reality of ecological limits, we may find in what Marx called the “prehistory” of our species a perennial and redemptive wisdom. We will not be saved by our money, our weapons, or our technological virtuosity; we might be rescued by the joyful and unprofitable pursuits of love, beauty, and contemplation. No doubt this will all seem foolish to the shamans and magicians of pecuniary enchantment. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.
On this day, 17 May 1968, thousands of students in Paris marched for a second day in a row from the Sorbonne University to the Renault plant occupied by its workers to support them, despite trade union officials trying to separate the struggles. This is a great history of joint student and worker organising in the May 68 uprising: https://ift.tt/2InLIZ7
Pictured: the occupied Renault plant
Check out our range of May 68 50th anniversary merchandise here: https://ift.tt/2GPaHjn https://ift.tt/2KxgcEF
"The cliché which likens life to a play seems to evoke a fact so obvious as to need no examination. The carefully maintained conflation of life and play-acting brooks no discussion. Yet what is natural about the fact that I stop being myself a hundred times a day and slip into the skin of people whose concerns and significance I have really not the slightest desire to assume? Not that I might not choose to be an actor on occasion -- to play a role for diversion or pleasure. But this is not the type of role-playing I have in mind. The actor supposed to play a condemned man in a realist play is quite free to remain himself: herein lies, in fact, the paradox of fine acting. The freedom he enjoys obviously stems from the fact that his physical being is not threatened by a sneering executioner; the threat is directed solely at the stereotypical image that he creates by means of his dramatic technique and flair. The roles played in everyday life, by contrast, permeate individuals, distancing them from what they are and what they really want to be; they are nuclei of alienation embedded in the flesh of lived experience. At this point the game is over: there is no more 'playing'. The function of stereotypes is to dictate to each person on an individual (even an 'intimate') level the same things that ideology imposes collectively."
"[A]s the experience economy expands to include commodified notions of things like slowness, community, authenticity, and 'nature' -- all while income inequality yawns wider and the signs of climate change intensify -- I feel the panic of watching possible exits blocked. I keep wanting to do something instead of consume the experience of it. But seeking new ways of being, I find only new ways of spending."
