PHONETOGRAPHY

What Might Have Been A Knife Fight

[This can be seen as an extension of my post from last week.]

Some months ago, a friend of mine went to one of those seminars about becoming and remaining wealthy.  Not exactly a “get rich quick” seminar - his goal was mostly to learn how to manage his money better.

One of the key points of this seminar was that in order to become wealthy, your “passive” income should equal and eventually surpass your “active” income.  Your goal is to make more money in your sleep (from stocks, real estate, what-have-you) than you would by working your day job.

In short, the best way to become wealthy is to never do any work yourself.  When the money you make through the labour of others surpasses the money you make on your own, you’re in the clear.

Alarm bells!  This is monstrous.

That it is accepted by many (most?) is bad enough, that it can be held up as one of the shining achievements of capitalism is despicable.  The moment our lifestyle is provided solely by others’ work is the moment exploitation begins.*  I say this, though I have a small assortment of blue chip stocks, some money in mutual funds, and money in the bank (which plays the stock market with my money, whether I want it to or not).  I’m guilty, too.

This is the crux of the problem: in order to have any sense of security (assured food and shelter) in this wretched system, one must participate in it.  It’s possible to live off the grid, but it is also isolating,  extremely work intensive, and does little to alter the grander structures.

Of course, in the wake up the ongoing financial crisis, this post may become largely irrelevant.  People still make money from rent, which is essentially charging money for something they don’t use.  There’s still money in stocks (somehow), which is speculating on the speculation that a company will continue to do well, without actually putting any funds into the company itself - all the while making money from the efforts of the people working at said company.   However, the continuing crash of real estate and the stock markets may render the notion of “passive income” defunct for all but the richest elite.  Whether all the inevitable suffering will result in positive change remains to be seen.  All we can do is keep working at it ourselves, generating our own bright futures.

* I should qualify this statement a little.  Since I am at my heart a collectivist, I definitely believe that a kind of interdependence within a community is not only acceptable, but important.  The idea of a commons (any publicly held land, good, service - see also this Wikipedia link page) is key to any well-functioning society.  The problem with passive income is that it is purely extractive - it contributes nothing to any community, save what little is siphoned off by taxes.

Prostitutes

Despite the fact that capitalism represents the dominant ideology, I’m always caught by surprise whenever I hear someone talking about capitalism as if it’s good.  I can’t explain it.  I look around myself and can’t help but scowl inwardly whenever I allow myself to see the results of this tragic establishment.  And yet, people everywhere see the same things and think “isn’t it wonderful?”

It’s a brilliant fallacy that says that we in the developed world have benefited because of capitalism.  In addition to taking as a given that the world’s structure as it exists now is inevitable and unstoppable, it assumes that our standard of living would invariably be worse without the blessing of a greed-driven society.  How does that follow?  In North America, our resources were effectively boundless (many still are), our seasons are agreeable to farming, and there’s nothing but space in which to spread.

Could not our standard of living (if not our destructive lifestyle) be maintained without exploiting the poverty of the developing world?  Must we ship our garbage (toxic and eternal) to China or Nigeria?  Do we need to send our dying ships (equally toxic) to India or Bangladesh to be broken down for scrap, killing and injuring many workers in the process?  Is any of this necessary?  And if it is, how can anyone possibly stand behind a lifestyle that is sustained by it?

How can someone wear a piece of clothing made by a woman who may as well have been chained to her sewing machine, possibly facing sexual harrassment or assault, forbidden from even chatting with her coworkers - and say that our system is a good thing?  Especially when said clothing represents the bulk of what we can buy?  How can anyone justify an establishment that would see that same worker labouring for weeks - just to be able to afford one of the hundreds of garments she made during that same time?

It’s absurd.

What’s more, this fantastic ideology has left us with a scorched planet - the true costs of its shiny products hidden (”mystified,” to speak theor-ese) by the endlessly replenishing supply on our supermarket shelves.  But for a few specialty brands, we have no idea where our products come from, how they got to us, or who made them.  We don’t know whether the cotton in our clothes came from a farm with soil rapidly depleted of nutrients for the sake of maintaining the cash crop.  We don’t know whether the coltan in our cellphones came from the Congo, fueling its civil war.  We don’t know how much greenhouse gas was generated as our products were built and shipped to us (though we are starting to know the catastrophic effects those greenhouse gases are having on our climate).

Can anyone explain to me how this is a good thing?  How a destroyed world and a suffering population is worth a new TV or a cool jacket?  After the Second Great Depression began last year, how is there anyone left who thinks this system is worth saving?