I read this article in the Swedish newspaper ETC about the unquestionable 40h workweek and arguments for alternatives, as in less hours at work every week.
This made me envision another society than what we're currently living in. This "vision" of mine, or what you want to call it, also holds influences from a place I visited about a month ago.
There's this place in this city where I live where a whole block of rental apartments works as a collective community. The atrium area, situated between these houses consists of small garden plots, green houses, a small hen house, berry bushes, fruit trees etc. I've also been reading lately in the same news paper as mentioned above, ETC, about small scale green energy production.
My vision consists of this article I read, a lowering of work hours to 6 hours a day, and to build all new blocks of rental apartments, and edit consisting ones to be like the communal one, where you can grow your own veggies, and where one builds solar cell panels and/or wind power stations on the roofs of these buildings, to get each community partially self-sufficient. The apartment buildings should also be constructed to be as conservative as possible concerning energy usage, and be well isolated to prevent heat leakage during the long and cold winters of Sweden.
There needs to be a significant change of the goals in the current professional sector, though for this to be implementable. To continue to strive for endless growth, for the working people to endlessly be able to increase the amount of work one can do in a given time frame, and for people to consume goods just for the sake of consumerism as it's own goal. Consumerism for profit, regardless of how much this rapes our planet? Is it just me or is it an ignorant, unsustainable and inhumane way of production? It's not possible in the long run, which is evidently confirmed by the continually occurring economical recessions and the contemporary ecological disasters.
Banks, investors and governments, running the same impossible treadmill. Men of power playing their casino games with normal citizen's money, or the board of members caring more about protecting the few investors' wallets than their thousands of employees livelihood. I'm not saying that this or that company should stop giving a damn about the investors.
I'm saying that the whole fucking system is rank. it's rotten and it's not sustainable.
Neither when it comes to ecological, humanitarian or in any other way than short-sighted profit motives. "When your roots are forgotten, your fruits will rotten" as Promoe (Looptroop Rockers) say's in the "Fruits of Babylon". The metaphor I'm trying to convey here is that the employees' value is constantly forgotten. Lenin was right in this matter, the workers in the western world receives this incitements of quite good working conditions and salaries, money which is taken from the environmental and worker's conditions, and salaries from the third world employees. International economic imperialism, sustained by the working class in the west and therefore continually operational and protected from the proletarian revolution since the minds of the proletariat is befouled by the thoughts and views of the bourgeoisie.
Appalling. Nauseating.
Shit's rank and the whole society needs to transform. Cold, inhumane motives needs to stand aside for a new age of sustainability and humanitarian thinking.
I can in no way concur with a system where greed is put on a pedestal and worshiped to such heights that rich, white middle-aged male's greed is what's ruling the world. Seriously, what the FUCK? know what I mean?
With this 6h work day, one could spend the remaining hours of the week to produce one's one food. electricity would be cheep since every community would produce at least part of their own electricity. With less time at work, a more participatory democratic system would be feasible.
Not everyone wants to spend their "free" time with their ass towards the sky and their hands in the soil. What also would be desirable would definitely be various communal workshops. Both cultural and musical ones, as well as software/electronic etc. My vision consists of compact cities which in turn consists of these blocks of communal part-self-sufficient accomodations with gardens and power stations. This goes hand in hand with people going around town on bikes or public transport. For longer distances, a well extended net of public transportation could be combined with carpools with both electric and hybrid cars.
The vision of my future sustainable and loving society lingers in my mind but is stained by the current way of life and way of human beings and their inhumane, selfish ways of interaction with, and exploitation of one another.
Friday 9 July 2010
Sunday 28 February 2010
The intellectual and moral revolution
The Babylon disease. Feeling that your entire being resents what is seen as the norm. And how the system works, to benefit the bigger fish and exploit the smaller.
What is seen as OK and good is appalling. The fact that to be normal is to eat unethical, unhealthy food, to care only for yourself, to sharpen your elbows and plough through the mass of people standing there to hopefully receive what is rightfully theirs. To turn your back to the exploited third world. To ignore how, almost prophetically true Lenin's thoughts about "imperialism" and "the highest state of capitalism" (even though I don't agree with his means to reach the goal). To forget the Heroes: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the anti-violent equality and rightfulness of all people that they stood for. How the norm is to be selfish, greedy and uncaring for "thy neighbour" in order to reward yourself on the cost of others.
How it is OK to exploit and pollute our foundation, the mother that gives birth to what gives us shelter, food in our bellies, water to quench our thirst. How it is OK to just trample on that and load up one's garbage on the plate that feeds you. It is okay as long as you can profit from it and hide it behind the product in a shiny package.
This is the norm, simply because this is what we are exposed to from when we wake up in the morning to when we go to sleep at night. We are constantly bombarded by this exploding vomit of commercial messages and information in the public forum that is all around us. What is even more twisted from my point of view is that this is completely OK...As long as you pay for it, "anything goes", pretty much, no matter how immoral it is. But if you don't have a permit and you create wonderful art which doesn't try to jump into your arms (via your wallet), or tempt you to spend money, it's a crime! Even worse so if it questions the current norms of society, appalling!
(Respect to the artist (Banksy) and photographer respectively, source: http://seizenine.blogspot.com/2007/03/banksy-en-londres.html )
Fortunately, the anonymous rebels of the dark nights radical art, the artists spreading the word, questioning rules, norms etc. Questioning the current view of (wo)man. Questioning the fact that it's OK to have a very low sense of moral, as long as you can cash in on the other end of it. How can that ever be OK? How can some fucked up, dehumanizing, immoral means be justified by a shiny packed new gadget that only a few percent of the world's inhabitants can afford to "consume"? Which also in the end, after it's life as a gadget that is, is turned into garbage and contributes to that vast mountain of polluting shit that is dumped on the same foundation that feeds us.
People like general knas, kapten röd, syster sol, cricket¸ svenska akademien, Promoe etc. keeps the hope up that maybe the next generation won't agree upon this immoral, polluting, exploiting chain of bullshit that just numbs us into indifferent, ever continuing jackoff-excuses of what is currently known as humanity.
Because, frankly, I just don't see the point of this society. There is nothing intellectually rewarding in consuming stuff to quench made-up needs, which in the end is just there to produce money for the jet set, who already have way too much for anyone's good.
What we need is a moral, anti-violent crossed-arms-revolution. What we need is a new Gandhi, as an avant-garde for all of us infected with the babylon disease and who are sick of this way of life from which one cannot escape. The only way is to change it into something better. It starts with you.
What is seen as OK and good is appalling. The fact that to be normal is to eat unethical, unhealthy food, to care only for yourself, to sharpen your elbows and plough through the mass of people standing there to hopefully receive what is rightfully theirs. To turn your back to the exploited third world. To ignore how, almost prophetically true Lenin's thoughts about "imperialism" and "the highest state of capitalism" (even though I don't agree with his means to reach the goal). To forget the Heroes: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the anti-violent equality and rightfulness of all people that they stood for. How the norm is to be selfish, greedy and uncaring for "thy neighbour" in order to reward yourself on the cost of others.
How it is OK to exploit and pollute our foundation, the mother that gives birth to what gives us shelter, food in our bellies, water to quench our thirst. How it is OK to just trample on that and load up one's garbage on the plate that feeds you. It is okay as long as you can profit from it and hide it behind the product in a shiny package.
This is the norm, simply because this is what we are exposed to from when we wake up in the morning to when we go to sleep at night. We are constantly bombarded by this exploding vomit of commercial messages and information in the public forum that is all around us. What is even more twisted from my point of view is that this is completely OK...As long as you pay for it, "anything goes", pretty much, no matter how immoral it is. But if you don't have a permit and you create wonderful art which doesn't try to jump into your arms (via your wallet), or tempt you to spend money, it's a crime! Even worse so if it questions the current norms of society, appalling!
(Respect to the artist (Banksy) and photographer respectively, source: http://seizenine.blogspot.com/2007/03/banksy-en-londres.html )
Fortunately, the anonymous rebels of the dark nights radical art, the artists spreading the word, questioning rules, norms etc. Questioning the current view of (wo)man. Questioning the fact that it's OK to have a very low sense of moral, as long as you can cash in on the other end of it. How can that ever be OK? How can some fucked up, dehumanizing, immoral means be justified by a shiny packed new gadget that only a few percent of the world's inhabitants can afford to "consume"? Which also in the end, after it's life as a gadget that is, is turned into garbage and contributes to that vast mountain of polluting shit that is dumped on the same foundation that feeds us.
People like general knas, kapten röd, syster sol, cricket¸ svenska akademien, Promoe etc. keeps the hope up that maybe the next generation won't agree upon this immoral, polluting, exploiting chain of bullshit that just numbs us into indifferent, ever continuing jackoff-excuses of what is currently known as humanity.
Because, frankly, I just don't see the point of this society. There is nothing intellectually rewarding in consuming stuff to quench made-up needs, which in the end is just there to produce money for the jet set, who already have way too much for anyone's good.
What we need is a moral, anti-violent crossed-arms-revolution. What we need is a new Gandhi, as an avant-garde for all of us infected with the babylon disease and who are sick of this way of life from which one cannot escape. The only way is to change it into something better. It starts with you.
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