“We are being led to our slaughter. This has been theorized in a thousand ways, described in environmental, social, and political terms, it has been prophesied, abstracted, and narrated in real time, and still we are unsure of what to do with it. The underlying point is that the progress of society has nothing to offer us and everything to take away. Often it feels like we are giving it away without a fight: when we sell our time for money, allow our passions to be commodified, invest ourselves in the betterment of society, or sustain ourselves on the spoils of ecological destruction, we openly (though not consensually) participate in our own destruction.” — Serafinski, Blessed is the Flame, An introduction to concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism
Civilizations’ death culture of accumulation, exploitation and consumerism, at whatever the cost is at its final stages spreading war and ecocide to every corner of the globe.
It has turned individuals into consumerist herds of wage slaves making us all addicted to some degree or other waiting for the false promises that will never be delivered for most.
How many individuals do actually want to work? I know I don’t. How many actually find pleasure in it having to repeat day after day, after day? Or have to give up on achieving their dreams, or sell themselves in the hope of reaching them?
This is the culture which creates the conditions of refugees fleeing the carnage of war having to walk across a continent to find safety, a better life for themselves and their family all the while begrudging fools would rather see them drown in the medaterian sea along with their children on dinghies so packed with desperate individuals it sinks.
While taking part in solidarity projects I’ve seen mothers in France having to live in muddy fields infested with rats, flimsy tents as protection from the elements. Small groups huddle around fires trying to catch some heat. Babies cries can be heard across the camp. I’ve seen the muddy swamp-like trails that weave through the refugee camp full of rat footprints and urine which appear each morning after the night’s darkness has gone. The very same conditions a 100 years earlier, as the first world war raged on, in the exact same location individuals from lower classes fought it out, blowing each other to smiderians all so wealthier classes could expand their riches!
This is the same culture which creates the conditions for a homeless crisis and makes it socially acceptable for individuals to be left to freeze to death on streets in shop doorways in Dublin’s city centre. I’ve seen the tent cities, the ques of soup kitchens, the desperate.
Society finds this all morally acceptable.The contradiction of civilization couldn’t be any clearer, on the one hand there is riches and wealth beyond beleaf and on the other hand there is poverty and exploitation inflicted beyond comprehension. This is the land of despair, cruelty, and greed.
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There is a certain sense of anxiety and unknowing about whats currently unfolding with the coronavirus outbreak. Life under covade 19 lockdown should teach and show us how we are all extremly relient on shops and the gears of capitalist production and markets. With out them we would starve. That is unless we know how to grow or forage for food.
We’ve all seen the rows of empty shelves in super markets and shops after a scared population started panic buying all cleaning products, pasta, rice, tinned food, and tiolet paper. It proves how dependent and vunerable we all really are to the market and the system itself. If the shops and banks close sooner or later we starve.
Not only helping with the food uncertainty of the pandemic, by growing your own fruit, veg, herbs and gaining some self sufficancy can help towards gaining some individual autonomy over your own life back from the expliotation and drugdery of capitalism and also cutting the environmentally damage caused by the production (agriculture) and distribution networks of industrail technological society.
I am going through this learning process myself. Follow me own a journey of self-discovery and learning of ecological gardening.