WHAT EXTENT OF MY COMFORT DO I OWE TO CAPITALISM?

And where does the answer leave me? My life is filled with a lot of comforts; an electric blanket, a good bath, the ability to go to a store and buy a variety of different food that I haven’t needed to grow or process myself, videogames, a decent transport system.

In many ways I live the way monarchs have lived throughout history, only they directly and visibly relied upon – and upheld with physical violence – a system of slavery and serfs. In my case, the things propping up my lifestyle are made to appear ‘out of my hands’, and in some cases are. Even so, I have fossil fuels and badly treated workers that sustain my lifestyle (and probably slavery as well). To me, the differences aren’t significant enough to feel okay about how I live my life. I want to know what has caused this in order to know what to do about it. Is it capitalism that has made my life so comfortable? Capitalism, the socio-economic system that is driven by accumulation of private profit for private wealth? In so many ways I think yes. But these are things I don’t think we would have wanted if we consider the layers of increased ecological destruction, enclosure of commons, slavery, colonisation, inequality, oppression of workers and alienation from life that this system has also brought us. So, what do I do about it? Ideas I have are to keep resisting and building alternatives, blockading, defending, healing, organising, empowering, working in solidarity and conversing, but all that isn’t very concrete. One concrete thing is thinking through and connecting myself to the life cycle of everything I consume to survive and thrive. I try to do this without shaming myself and others, but as an anti-capitalist project to re-attach myself to my material needs and imagining what true sustainability and interconnectedness could be and can be now. My imagination tells me I’ll have a lot less cool stuff and easy comfort if I actually take the ecology and autonomy of my fellow beings seriously. But also, maybe I’ll have a closer-knit community that works together on achieving things, which will probably make me happier. Another concrete action is to continue being grateful, a nice tradition my family passed onto me, though I’m separating it from its religious roots (my grandpa always said ‘we are so blessed’). This helps with the other concrete action I’ll mention, which is looking after myself so that I can put most of my waking hours and energy into working out how to change the current system, and doing that with (mostly) a big smile, a sense of humour, patience and openness, which is creating the world I want to see.

This short piece was written before the idea for the website was finalised, and shows part of the thinking that goes into the project.