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Countereconomic commentary

Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.

Today’s postulate:

One genius of the system we live under is that the strategies it requires to survive it from day to day are exactly the opposite of what is required to change it.

— Catharine MacKinnon (1987), The Art of the Impossible, in Feminism Unmodified, p. 16

(MacKinnon is talking about the survival strategies women have to adopt under patriarchy. The point generalizes, or analogizes, for many other forms of domination.[1])

Today’s corollary:

The point of practical counter-economics, as a strategy for social transformation, is to reverse the polarity. You do some grassroots organizing, and when you do it right you open up new social spaces, within the shell of the old, where the best strategies that help you flourish from day to day — the ways you make yourself a living — become precisely those that weaken the system’s supports, and drive its mechanism towards collapse.

Today’s epigram:

Establishment (military-industrial) economic life processes us all into the oil for the gears of the machine. Grassroots organizing has to free us up to become the sand.

See also:

[1] If you don’t believe me, just try adding up the number of times you lost a day filling out government forms last year; the number of times you wrote down your Social Security Number in a blank box to better enable the government to keep track of where you work and what you make; the number of times you put on a false face and tried to make disarming small talk with a traffic cop or a TSA goon; the amount of money skimmed off from every gallon of gas or submarine sandwich you buy, every month’s rent you pay, and every dollar you make, into the wages for the very cops and bureaucrats and border guards and soldiers who shove you around, and who invoke your name, without your consent, to justify oppressing and murdering and stomping on your neighbors and your fellow workers and innocent strangers halfway around the world.

4 replies to Countereconomic commentary Use a feed to Follow replies to this article · TrackBack URI

  1. Aster

    This is one of the most clear and important insights you’ve shared in some time. Thank you.

  2. Discussed at www.echoesandmirrors.com

    Echoes and Mirrors » Daily Links:

    […] Google Reader: DADT: And Then They Came For The Hermaphrodites, chillax(ious), Barack Obama vs. Wayne Allyn Root, Live at Caesar’s Palace, The Boy Behind the Juice Box: "I make bad purchases all the time", Court TV, Announcing The Largest Federal Workforce. Ever., Trailer: !!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;The Secret Life Of…’, Countereconomic commentary […]

· December 2010 ·

  1. Discussed at radgeek.com

    Rad Geek People’s Daily 2010-12-07 – Get the Gun Out of the Room.:

    […] people become more self-sufficient, materially secure and culturally respected while working “outside the system,” encouraging forms of protest, social activism and community organization that operate outside of […]

— 2011 —

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