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:
- GT 2008-01-26: In which I fail to be reassured
- GT 2009-02-07: Counter-economic optimism
- GT 2009-05-19: on agorism, counter-economics, and Black-and-Red markets
[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.
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This is one of the most clear and important insights you’ve shared in some time. Thank you.
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