Source: Realists of a larger reality - Dark Optimism
Author: Shaun Chamberlin
Highlights
Our globalised world finds itself caught on the horns of a seemingly impossible dilemma — either cease growing, and so collapse the economy on which we all depend, or continue to grow until we overwhelm and destroy the ecosystems on which we all depend.
Despite the numerous inspiring examples cited, surely the mainstream economy is just too big, too established, too real, to be overthrown by such utopian dreams.
our time demands “realists of a larger reality”.
As such, I turn to my internal realist with a challenge — which reality is it that deserves our allegiance: today’s political economy or physical reality?
What is necessary, that we might have a future?
An economy so violently contrary to our human instincts and desires that it leaves epidemics of depression, loneliness and suicide everywhere it goes. That uses mass media and financial stress to hollow our souls and seize control of both our days and our hearts, sparking not only economic and environmental devastation, but cultural and spiritual annihilation. Like villagers glancing fearfully up at the castle of some dauntingly powerful vampire, we live our lives under the shadow of the economy of undeath.
We owe this reality no allegiance. But we owe it respect. It is a worthy adversary, no doubt.
Yet its weak point is obvious. People straight up hate it. They hate their jobs and the futile — often desperate — materialism imposed on their lives. Nonetheless, as I grew up inside it the corporate media kept us blind to other possibilities, made it seem patently obvious — only common sense — that continuing to participate in this grim reality is the only realistic option.
Easy to forget, perhaps, because for all that we resent the hollow emptiness it imparts, the prospect of its absence too is terrifying, for those of us who were only raised to secure water from a tap; food from a supermarket.
Only by knowing how to stay alive without the dominant system can we actually have the courage and wisdom to abandon or dismantle it.
I am writing this article from the small community in Ireland started by my dear compañero Mark Boyle. It is a home from home for me, and one of many, many places around the world where the residents are making the logic of money and the market obsolete — abandoning it, before it abandons us. For example, the ‘free pub’ and bunkhouse here — The Happy Pig — is a place where anyone can stay, free of charge, and remember what it is to not have to find money simply to have a place to exist.
Despite knowing little or nothing of the bloody, mucky realities of land-based lives, techno-utopians will warn you to be careful not to romanticise the past.
On this I agree, and I know it first-hand.
But be even more careful of those who romanticise the future.
We are rediscovering the ways human beings related to each other for hundreds of thousands of years before we were ripped into isolation by the brief historical anomaly of market capitalism, into which most of us alive today happened to be born. Suddenly it makes sense that living as we do here should feel so right. After all, what is The Happy Pig — which sounds so radical to modern ears — if not a simple rekindling of the ancient Irish tradition of hospitality?
In a competitive market economy a large amount of roughly equally-shared leisure time — say, a three-day working week, or less — is hard to sustain, because anyone who decides to instead work a full week can produce for a lower price (working longer hours lets them produce more, and thus earn the same wage while selling each item or service more cheaply).
These more competitive people would then be fully employed, and would put the more leisurely out of business completely.
This is what puts the grim into reality.
Of course, in theory all the workers could just work half-time and still produce all that is needed, as is promised by today’s latest wave of automation utopians. But in practice workers are often afraid of having their pay cut, or losing their jobs to a stranger who is willing to work longer hours. In the absence of a sense of community or mutual trust, and having been taught to seek their security in a wage, people instead compete against each other for the right to perform the pointless tasks that anthropologist David Graeber memorably characterised as “bullshit jobs”.
And Fleming provides the radical but historically-proven alternative: focusing neither on the growth nor de-growth of the market economy, but on huge expansion of the ‘informal’ or non-monetary economy — the ‘core economy’ that keeps our society alive, even today.
This is the economy of what we love: of the things we naturally do when not otherwise compelled, of music, play, family, volunteering, activism, friendship, romance and home. Yet over the past couple of centuries, this core economy has been much weakened, as the ever-growing stresses of precarious employment, debt and rising prices have left people with less time and energy for friendships, family and fun.
Those extensive holidays of former times were far from a product of laziness. Rather they were, in an important sense, what men and women lived for. ‘Spare time’ spent in feasting, performing, collaborating and merrymaking together formed the basis of communal bonding, membership and trust.
The [future] economy will depend for its existence on a deep foundation in culture. It is possible to live without it, but only for a time, like holding your breath under water.
Wherever we are, we can spend our days relearning how to seek our security in each other — and in Nature — rather than in money, and as we do, we notice that the unfolding end of the undeath economy (no longer our undeath economy) becomes less something to fear, and more something to celebrate.
We think less about what we might stand to lose and far more about the joys we had already lost and are slowly learning to regain, together. At long last we are remembering how to build a world in which, as dear David wrote,
There will be time for music.