Passenger seat. It is raining. The engine is too loud to shout over. We can’t find CBC Radio. So, I think.
Politics ruminations, if carried out with concentration over a long enough period of time, often lead to questions of the spiritual. I don’t know if this is typical for other people. If I think long enough about how the Planet Earth could be successfully organized in such a way as to provide enough food, land, water and self-satisfaction to every member of every tribe, nation, family and history, I will soon begin to make plans for how such a vision could be implemented in the shortest amount of time, so as to save as many of those currently dying of poverty, stunted imagination, racism, boredom and wealth from their fast approaching fate. And then I think along the lines of: How do I get us there? And then: Why?
The system I often come up with after the first step of wonderings involves the abolition of capitalism. Capitalism, I believe, is a system that runs smoothly for some, but forces an invisible majority into lifelong misery in order to continue to operate. If there isn’t a pool of people willing to enslave themselves to jobs they hate for the sake of money, there is no way to have a factory: because very few 12 year olds would say, when asked “what do you want to be when you grow up, that they want to spend 8 hours (or 12) a day loading and unloading widgets from a forklift. But many do end up there. And its because in Capitalism there is always the inherent threat of poverty: capitalism only exists because misery exists. If we lived in a country where measures existed that completely protected the unemployed from destitution and social exclusion, we wouldn’t have a working capitalistic system, because nobody would want to work a job they hated if they didn’t have to. This is how capitalism chokes down the broken.
But it also screws up the “winners.” It makes people believe that the only way they can get what they want (security, a family, love, happiness) is by accumulating money, and securing it with purchases that are dependable. With money, one can acquire elements that will allow them to have all the rest. It’s not about building a family that can withstand life’s troubles, it is about paying down a mortgage and securing a home so that the family (that falls apart in the meantime) can have a secure place to live. Decisions are made based on how much something costs and how it fits into the budget: can we afford this vacation right now? Is this house close enough to our jobs, to market conveniences, to be a smart purchase? And so, capitalism takes away humans capacity to think in any terms other than money. The way we use language expresses this: “afford” (the emotional stress), “spend” (the time), “pay” (for hurting me). We use money language to talk about stuff that is purely human. Capitalism shackles the imagination, and the spirit!
So, apart from being built upon a foundation of the creation of poverty, it also inhibits the lives of those who are supposedly “doing well” within the system. If you have enough money, you don’t even need to know how to cook your own food, let alone mend clothes, change the oil in your car, cut your hair, or knit yourself some socks. I don’t know which end of capitalism is worse, the one that breaks your health and your dreams, or the one that lobotomizes your creativity, but both are evidence to me that the whole thing has to go.
But then, of course, as Paul continues to drive on, I wonder: how to get rid of capitalism? You would need to re-educate the children, instill different values, different judgment standards. And quickly, as soon as the ramifications of eliminating something so ingrained in the culture that you drop a coin in a slot to go pee in some places branch off into unimaginable direction, I am thinking: how to do it quickly? This is when the spiritual starts to play in, because revolution is always about life, the loss of it and what it is really supposed to be about.
These are spiritual questions:
What is a human life worth? Do they have a purpose, and if not, why do you care to find a system that is gentler on them than Capitalism is?
Is a human life worth as much as its mind, because you will find many adult minds contaminated by decades of subjugation to paths and patterns that have trained it out of imagining any way free of money, free of pain. Are these minds lost causes? Should their masters then be disposable? Of course, eventually there is the question of killing. Killing is the easiest way to get rid of an idea that doesn’t fit with your own, but is it ever justified? What is the end of a life? What does it mean? And if those questions are unanswerable, what gives one person the right to make the decision for anyone else, about when their chance at life is over?
I can’t imagine a way of overthrowing capitalism that is bloodless. So, the spiritual questions sometimes act as a blockade for my political map-making. But maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe if you can figure out: What is a human life worth? You could have all the answers, anyway.
