capitalism won't save you from capitalism

Think about your average problem in life- maybe your boiler is broken and you have to shower in cold water until you can afford to get it fixed. Maybe as hard as you're grinding you still can't afford one months rent so you're staying in an abusive home. Maybe you have fallen into a deep depression because of the pressure you feel to exist in school or work. Maybe your friend got locked up recently. Maybe your father left when you were little. Maybe even, your girlfriends parents don't like you because you're an artist. What if I told you all these things have been ingeniously bred for hundreds of years through capitalism, colonialism, imperialism? Is that hard for you to believe? You may be suffering from capitalism stockholm syndrome.

What's really worse than not believing that all these things are rooted in capitalism, may be the hope that earning more capital will save you from any of them. You know, it's really like applying a plaster to a wound that is rotting, spewing puss, infected, bleeding you out completely. And, the difficulty lies in the fact that, we want to heal this wound, but we're not as focused as we should be on what is CAUSING it, rather than just the wound itself.

One of the things our collective consciousness is calling for us to do is let go of the... I'm not even sure what to call it... 'entrepreneurial' idea that poverty and economic oppression is something we can come out of by earning more money. It doesn't do much but relieve us of those immediate poblems, but that doesn't get rid of them for good. The systems creating these problems are what need to be more closely reassessed.

It doesn't matter to me, as in it will never hold any weight in my life, to be rich if I know that that exists only for me as an individual. Making it out of the struggle does not make the struggle cease to exist. Moving out of my ends will not change that they are still there, lived in and suffered in. My comfort (our comfort) will neither come from more of us having university degrees, nor stable jobs, nor more capital. I wish for us to create a world where none of those things are required for someone to have safe housing, food to eat, means to tend to our health. Do you think that's really radical?

When we keep oursleves to this same frequency of individualism, to the illusion that saving oursleves is enough, we will only continue to perpetuate the same individualistic attitudes of the rich men who got us here. A shift in the collective's perspective in terms of what money should mean and deserve someone, could take us so far. Everything that exists on the individual level eventually manifests itself in the collective - as the paradox of 'that's what society says' reminds us that, we ARE society, we must first take up that change in oursleves. To demand any change on the collective level it requires for us changing it first in oursleves.

Our generation has been so resilient. And we've all been through so much - and for that reason I will always extend my love and compassion to the next individual who is still stuck in that illusion, that what will be most gratifying and freeing looks like a large home and six figure salary to indulge in & protect oneself with, a nice car, in change to the riding the bus. But all these things are distractions, mass mass mass distractions. The very reason we seek them is because we're too familair with their lack.

Imagine all it would achieve when the goals we have shift to opening community gardens to feed one another; taking housing complexes back from the state and greedy private landlords and housing eachother; redistributing our wealth; knowing our donations are helping people REALLY in need of them and not vanishing into the invisibility of charities. How different would our world be? It's difficult or, some say, 'idealistic' to envision, but that vision is the first step in the right direction. "The only war that matters is the war agaisnt the imagination" - Diane di Prima - it's true, envisioning as being the first step to knowing which direction we're going in as the revolution is coming. Killing our mental and emotional capacity to think things might ever change, is indefinitely powerful. We have adjusted the best ways we know how to what is required of us; bent backwards to fit into the mould created for our lives by capitalism, for our time and labour and bodies and thoughts and routines and feelings. Some of us have gotten so good at these adjutments, we feel successful at them. Ah yes, I have won the game. I will not be one of those losing. Sometimes that's the reason I think people who have progressed furthest in the system, are actually some of the most traumatised by it. They think it's really right. Stockholm syndrome.

Learning to function in it's abuse is not success, it is not glory. What good will it be to succeed in it, even if through that I can extend my helping money hand to friends and family, if primary schools in our ends are still underfunded, concrete still precedes the colour green, half our neighbours have to rely on food banks? It is all no good. Until we're all free none of us are free.

I'd also like to challenege the iea of what money is; it is not the root of all evil. It is a fertile agent to take us through life, and what intention we plant in it is how it'll grow. Money is needed on our side in the revolution too - it'll be so potent if in the hands of the people, delegated to each cause which needs it most. I am not telling you not to earn money; we can overpower the scarcity we've known so far that's made us so tightly hold onto a our spare change. What I only emphasise is the intention we earn it with. The individual effort to rebel against and turn away from the system as we know it. Small changes and big collective results. Bless