Why sustainability means anti-capitalism and anti-statism

This afternoon, I went to a place where I like to sit and think and just be outside. It happened to be somewhat near where the annual Sustainability Fair was being set up for this weekend. While I watched vehicles come and go and listened to the hum of a generator, I thought about sustainability and it's relation to capitalism and the state. So, here are some thoughts:

Capitalism is a system that demands ever-growing markets, profits, access to “resources”, and “sacrifice colonies”—areas where the exploitation of the earth and its communities (whether mineral, non-human animals, humans, labor, land, etc.) is carried out to consolidate capital and enrich the ruling class, corporations, and imperialist nations.

The system of capitalism is always hierarchical in its very nature; capital flows up a rigid hierarchy through exploitation, oppression, class structure, war, and other tools, to be consolidated by the elite and ruling class (whether that is kings, corporations, the wealthy, or whatever terms are appropriate).

The state is a system of social control and domination that serves as capitalism’s protector. Through the state, wars, occupation, subsidization of corporations, and other means to capital accumulation are utilized to normalize, maintain, and expand power. It is the state that codifies the status quo, ensuring that those with power and capital wealth become increasingly more rich and more powerful. The state makes certain that the overwhelming focus of violence is directed down the hierarchy, while punishing through prison, poverty, and death those who find themselves at the bottom of the class system.

Capitalism will always be ecologically devastating, just as it is always socially devastating. At times, this devastation is apparent, even in the centers of accumulation and affluence, although more often it is conveniently obscured and hidden through physical distance (as with sweatshops operated overseas and in the global south by western corporations), insulated class differentiation, and cultural distractions (drugs, jobs, television, and all the other ways in which so many of us are able to ignore the reality of this system). Regardless, the results are the same—isolated people bereft of authentic community, shattered indigenous ways of living and being, ecological devastation, and loss of personal and communal autonomy.

Capitalism is a system that allows only one story, one in which everything—the earth, its communities, human lives—are all a means to profit, control, and power. A truly sustainable world is a world with many stories. It’s a world in which individuals and communities have the power to create their own stories and their own meanings. Those who benefit from capitalism’s hierarchy of exploitation and the system that supports it will continue to grasp onto their single version of “life,” their story that says there is one way to live, one way to exist. But those of us who dream and fight for a richer world, full of the beauty and complexities of life, are struggling for the many stories, the endless ways of being, that are a part of being human and living with this earth and all its communities.

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"Industrial capitalism, based as it is on the looting of nature and humanity for capital accumulation and power, can only take place where human autonomy itself has been looted."
--David Watson in Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and Its Enemies

How to tell a different story

There has been a noticeable level of tension and animosity in regards to evaluating the strategy, tactics, and actions during the street resistance in Saint Paul this September. Critique, open dialogue, and honest communication are an absolutely integral component of growth within the anarchist and anti-capitalist “movement;” and the volume of thought and effort already invested in this has been excellent, indicating both a long-term vision and a renewed sense of immediacy and agency.

However, it seems that often these discussions are developed within a myopic perspective that fails to recognize where a significant portion of both our latent and expressed strength lies. Just as capitalism and the state will fail because of their homogenous, inflexible nature, so, too, do we risk embodying this weakness by replicating the patterns of discourse inherent to capitalism and hierarchy and, importantly, structuring our resistance and our relationships in the patterns we have been socialized to accept and reproduce.

What is apparent in many of the reportbacks, arguments, and commentary following the anti-convention actions of this summer, is a trend of buoying one particular element of the resistance in rhetoric and argument, while belittling other aspects of the mobilization.

This method of dialogue follows a tried and true capitalist model of elevation (of product, ideology, tactic, etc.) through comparison and subsequent degradation of the other (product, ideology, tactic, etc.). This weakens our struggle, as it draws lines in the sand, proclaiming one tactic, one strategy, one way of thinking and being, as the correct, the most revolutionary, the most radical, and failing to see the strength in diversity, complementary action, and, at the risk of sounding trite, cooperation.

Simply said, had any element of the anarchist presence in Saint Paul been absent, we would have experienced a different, and likely a more disempowering, outcome. The blocs that roamed the city on the 1st were possible in a large part because a significant portion of the police and other state forces were occupied elsewhere in the city, responding to a variety of tactical applications of libratory desire. Without the blocs disrupting the veneer of impenetrability, the blockades alone would have failed to create an atmosphere of possibility, a space in which not only the realm of the normal and essential of capitalism was attacked, but the spectacle of democracy disrupted.

And all of it, the solidarity, the friendships made, the sound of bank windows breaking, the sense of possibility, would have simply remained a hoped-for future if not for the organizing that set the stage for all of our actions and interpretations of resistance, of insurrection, of action. For one of the first times, I actually feel a part of something that is larger than its pieces, that is a movement, that is a real and powerful thing because of the relationships within it.

In a world where there is supposed to be only one story, we succeeded in creating a different story. That was our success and it is no small thing.

the rooftops

body bags, cold ditches

it rained in the morning
just like the earth knew
it knew what had happened
and the rain flooded the streets
those streets without traffic lights
the rain flooded those streets
and it tried to drown all that
but it couldn’t
nothing ever will
and it’s the same scene
with some different names
but they’re all the same
sometimes mountains
sometimes streets
or a city or a village
a capital or the country
it’s the eyes behind the sight
it’s the cold bodies with the clothing cut away
there’s a spider on the man’s coat
it’s a black wool coat because it’s that time of year
there is blood on the floor
children straining to see through a grate near the ceiling
the spider is crawling on his coat
the bodies are pulled out like drawers

souvenir from saint paul