User talk:Shadowchoir

snarfed from Discord on 2020-01-02

(Putting this here for later: 3am restless thoughts) Capitalism, to function as a humane ideology as its defenders claim, requires a commons. It requires a way for you to say no, to refuse to work for anyone, and to sustain yourself. In mercantile Europe there were still untamed wilds and quiet valleys where you could go make your own farm, and live in peace. In colonial times, you could just head west in America and stake your own claim, taking the best tools society had to offer with you (though that was immoral as fuck, because colonialism).

But we've claimed the earth. We've grown to the point the whole planet is operated as one great machine- there's nowhere left to go to create your own little machine to sustain yourself. Survival can no longer be left up to the individual and assumed to happen. Survival needs to be assured. The great machine of the world needs to be assured that it will work to ensure human survival. Capitalism as a workable or positive phase in human history ended with the death of common land.

Survival is no longer an individual and assured matter and cannot be treated as one. Survival of others is everyone's problem. There is nowhere else to go, no place you can make your own home for you.

As it stands the world is a prison. You work in this perfectly optimised profit machine that occupies every square inch of land through concepts and monopoly on violence, or you die. The only option left to us as inmates is to riot.

Before, there were always other environments you could go to, somewhere on the other side of the desert. Nature could provide. Now humanity is our environment and we must provide for each other.