Visions and Revisions

The following is directly copied from a response I recently sent to my friend Al Markowitz, after he sent me a link to an excellent article on Truthout:

Robert W. McChesney: "Capitalism as we know it has got to go."

My response was as follows:

Thank you for sharing this excellent article, Al. McChesney has many astute insights that are well worth discussing and disseminating.

My problem has always been with terminology--a view McChesney shares, in part.  Both the words "capitalism" and "socialism" are 19th Century concepts that tend to carry a lot of baggage and beg questions;  they are connotatively loaded, value-laden terms which people define in vastly different ways, but adherents of each tend to project all of their worst nightmares on to those who identify with the opposing term. Thus, for many supporters of socialism, a "capitalist" is by definition a heartless, greedy, corrupt, money-grubbing swine, whether he is the CEO of Monsanto or the owner of a local microbrewery; conversely, for many on the right, anyone who calls himself a "socialist" is secretly plotting a brutal Stalinist dictatorship. The terms themselves, that is, engender fear and polarization.

This is partly why I invented the alternative term "Glomart" to characterize the Global Market Economy--that is, the multinational corporate oligarchy that has hijacked our governments and mass media alike, and that has everything to gain and nothing to lose from plundering the planet and externalizing all costs of doing business, by polluting air, water, and topsoil, fabricating "patriotic" pretexts for resource wars, and exploiting cheap labor in a pernicious "race to the bottom." Glomart is basically a global monopoly game--the playing out of an unregulated, zero-sum money game on a finite system, wherein the only possible outcome is that one set of players (the 1 percent--or even 0.1 percent) end up owning everything, and everyone else has nothing, and is in chronic debt to the "winners" for their houses and hotels. This also, of course, leads inevitably to ecological collapse, and a corresponding disintegration of the social fabric into a violent and desperate Hell on Earth, with shrinking enclaves of fiercely defended wealth in a sea of chaos, starvation, and violence.

Can this apocalyptic Glomart juggernaut be stopped? I'm not sure. In my darker moments, I see no more capacity for the restraint of human greed in the aggregate than I do for maggots in a feeding frenzy. The corporations and their captive nation states will consume and compete for the dwindling resources of our dying planet with ever-increasing ruthlessness until nothing is left and the whole system collapses into chaos. 

But in my more hopeful moments, I can visualize a rapid dissemination, at the grassroots, of what I broadly call "Gaian consciousness" undermining Glomart by subverting and redirecting its primary life-support system--money--through the choices we each make about where our money goes, and for what. (That is why they spend billions in advertising everywhere we look. They need us to buy what they sell). 

 What would happen if a meme went viral on the internet, encouraging and enabling people to assume responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of their spending decisions ("Good Buy"), their livelihoods ("Good Work") and their social activism and engagement ("Good Will")--especially if the latter involved mass Satyagraha campaigns of nonviolent noncooperation with evil, speaking truth to power, and building self-reliant local community economies? In other words, what if public consciousness were raised, big time, about making a choice, in every dollar they spend, earn, or invest, and in every activity in which they engage, between supporting Glomart or supporting Gaia?

That is my dream, in a nutshell--and it takes the threefold form, at the grassroots level, of growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. (I like catchy slogans, as they are useful mnemonics for rapidly spreading transformative ideas). The key concepts, or memes in need of dissemination, are as follows:

1. Glomart vs. Gaia: 
1. The realization that the Order of Money--Glomart--is utterly incompatible with the Order of Nature--Gaia. Money is nothing but arithmetic--an abstract, zero-sum transform of information about the relative market value of commodities. And inherent in this arithmetical money game is the basic production rule that requires maximization of profits at any cost--More is always Better.
2. Gaia, conversely, refers to the Order of Nature, a positive-sum symbiotic network of organisms that depend on sunlight and sustain topsoil, air, and water, where optimality is the defining value--Enough is enough.
2. The Quiet Revolution: A global, grassroots movement of Gaians, predicated on three broad themes:
1. Good Buy--assuming responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of every dollar we spend or invest.
2. Good Work--assuming responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of our livelihoods. Becoming local gardeners, cooperatives, and entrepreneurs, to create alternatives to Glomart-produced commodities and services.
3. Good Will--Taking care of everyone and everything, and abandoning no one and nothing. Mindful, strategic, and relentless social engagement based on Satyagraha principles:
1. Self-Reliance (Swaraj)
2. Speaking Truth to Power (Satya)
3. Nonviolent Noncooperation with Evil (Ahimsa)