Crashing The System: Denial Of Participation Attack

I’ve written before in these pages about Australian thinker David Holmgren. Holmgren is an environmentalist and anarchist, and is one of the co-founders of the Permaculture movement together with Bill Mollison.

In this short talk, Holmgren thinks through some of the possible responses to the threat of climate change and environmental destruction. In the US, we have seen one response this year, in the form of indigenous lead direct action against fossil fuel infrastructure, in the form of the Standing Rock resistance movement and it’s offshoots.

I believe that this type of direct action is a vital part of the resistance to the US petro-state alliance of energy capitalists and state actors. But not everyone is able to chain themselves to a tractor and be arrested. Holmgren offers another way, through withdrawal from the global capitalist economy, via a progression to local community economies, including on-site food cultivation using permaculture methods. He posits that if we can convince a significant percentage of the middle class that a richer, more humane life is possible by withdrawing large parts of their energy, labor and capital from the capitalist system and into local and household economies, perhaps we can significantly slow or disrupt the system.

The triggering of a new global financial crisis is one way to disrupt the ongoing release of fossil fuels into the air, even if it is something of a blunt instrument. It seems clear that no combination of informing, pleading or moralizing towards the state and private powers which control the world will make a difference. There is no lack of information about our future on the current climate trajectory. Even the oil companies have known for a long time what is coming, and built their critical infrastructure high above sea level as a result. It is not a lack of information. These entities, like the Exxon Mobils of the world, are simply not constitutionally able to stop doing what they are doing. It falls to us to stop them, and because they have such a powerful grip on the levers of political power in our democracies, the only options that remain to us may be a kind of individual or cultural divestment.

The existence of modern capitalist life is for most people an alienating one. If we could create a societal meme that a better, richer, more human life was possible, away from the market and its ocean of plastic consumer misery, perhaps we could begin to drain this beast we have allowed to grow atop our world of its economic lifeblood. Like a government, the global consumer system only exists through our participation in it. If we withdraw that participation, perhaps something else is possible.