if we want it, it is ours
A year ago or so, when I was completing my kundalini yoga teacher training, I remember one day at lunch I was speaking angrily about the fact that people of my generation will never be able to own a home or afford retirement. One of the teachers, a member of Gen X, commented that perhaps people of my generation have the opportunity to create a new way of living. At the time, I somewhat brushed the comment off, because I was angry and felt I had every right to be angry. I am still angry and still think I have every right to be angry, but I also think she was right.
People of my generation and the upcoming generations should accept that late-stage capitalism has produced a world where the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck, will never own a home, and may never be able to afford to retire. We are more educated than generations before us and yet can attain less in life than our parents. I want to focus on that word "attain". What is it that we really want from this world? What were we conditioned and socialized to desire and to believe we were entitled to, so long as we "worked hard"? After all we have borne witness to, coming of age into crisis after crisis, do we even still want any of the things that were promised us?
The horrific genocide of the Palestinian people, the people of Congo, Sudan, and the people of other parts of the world, has completely changed my prerogatives in life. For several years prior to the recent genocidal campaign against the Palestinians that launched these issues to the forefront of many of our lives, I was railing against capitalism, trying to help organize various efforts at a general strike. And I am still doing so, as it is all connected. But back then, even as I was doing all this organizing, I would spend money on things I didn't need, accumulating endless possessions that I hardly ever touched or used. I would justify my own behavior by telling myself that I was buying things from a small creator or artist or designer and that I was supporting a real person, not a corporation. I still think this is a fairly valid justification. But I also think we need to seriously question the goal of such endless accumulation. I noticed especially that the stress I felt working full time and never having time to do the things I care about would compel me to spend money as a way of relieving the stress and feeling like I was taking back some semblance of control over my life, my feelings, and my ability to be happy. Obviously, though, shopping is a poor substitute for the luxury of having one's time.
Returning to the genocide in Palestine, as I doubled down on my commitment to fighting for the safety and wellbeing of the Palestinian people, I began sharing and donating to the crowdfunding campaigns of people trying to flee Gaza. I have spent a good deal of my time and energy working on mutual aid efforts in the past. But the extreme emotions many of us have been experiencing all these months brought me to a moment of time-stopping moral clarity: I had the realization that there is literally no possession or material attainment in the world that could ever matter to me more than someone's life. When I framed it in these terms, I realized that I don't actually want much at all. I have more than enough possessions. I used to want to buy a home because I resent renting, but my partner provided me with the perspective that owning a home is actually very expensive because of the upkeep. It's not so much that I resent renting, but that I resent having such a high percentage of my income extorted from me by greedy landlords, keeping me in a constant state of treading water. So I realized that, apart from not really wanting or needing more possessions, I don't even really want to own a home. I realized that everything I thought I wanted is just a status symbol foisted upon me by a toxic, deathly ideology that I do not subscribe to. I don't want a car; I want a walkable city with solid public transportation. I don't want a good career; I want a paradigm shift through which the notion of a career itself is rendered moot.
Bringing this back again to the Palestinian plight, we have seen many exciting efforts in terms of calls for global general strikes over the past months. We have seen a huge upward spike in the boycott, divest, and sanction movement against Israel. We have seen college students and faculty shut down and occupy campuses demanding their institutions divest from the weapons manufacturers arming Israel. Never before in the history of the world have people from every country and every corner of the Earth come together to fight for a shared goal in the way that people are now coordinating and banding together for the sake of Palestine. And I believe we are finally gaining the type of collective power necessary to dismantle capitalism and colonialism. The majority of us might be living paycheck to paycheck, but the reality is that every single major corporation and every obscenely wealthy billionaire CEO relies on our continued purchasing of their products. Why stop at asking universities to divest from weapons manufacturers? Why don't we divest wholesale from every corporation and from capitalism itself?
We don't need any of their stuff. We have enough. We have each other, we have community. We know how to share and how to take care of each other. We are building mutual aid networks. We might be having the value of our labor stolen from us as workers, but there are so many more of us than there are of them that if we simply stopped buying stuff, apart from the most essential things (and the beautiful things created by our friends), we could destroy these pathetic leeches. They can't force us to buy shit we don't want and don't need. What if we chose life? What if, instead of spending our scant disposable income on more and more possessions that weigh us down spiritually and materially, we chose to invest that money in the wellbeing of the collective by practicing mutual aid?
Imagine the totality of the scenario I am describing to you: the global majority, the workers of the world, the people decide to stop playing their game. We decide to stop buying into capitalism. We all make a social agreement with one another that we have fucking had it and we're going to play by our own rules now. We starve these gluttonous corporations of our buying power, our cash. As a cohesive collective acting for the sake of a shared purpose, we annihilate these companies. Within a matter of days, they are scrambling in terror and do not know what to do. And then - get this - with all that money we didn't spend with the useless, extractive, exploitative corporations, we invest in the collective wellbeing by practicing mutual aid. We look at our immediate community and see who needs food, who needs shelter, who needs medicine, who needs another sort of care? We meet that need. We look globally, we coordinate with our comrades across the world and we figure out where to send our funds so that someone's quality of life is materially improved. We take care of us.
Of course, I understand it is all more easily said than done. It could take many dress rehearsals before we get it right. Surely as we materially change the world through our efforts, new pathways will open and old ones will close. But the point is that this opportunity is latent in the world, it exists within the realm of the materially potential. We can have it, but only if we really, and collectively, want it. The good news is that more and more people want it. More and more people have had their eyes opened to the potential of collective action, have participated therein. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Once you have done it with your own hands, you know empirically and kinetically that it can be done.
My point is that we can choose something else for ourselves, we can draft a new social contract founded on the highest wellbeing of the global majority; in other words, we can create an actual and true democracy. We must lean into the deep, inward knowing and understanding that we value life over possessions and the manufactured desires we were brainwashed to chase. Choose life. Choose solidarity. Choose the highest collective good. And continue choosing it each and every day, with every action, with every breath. If we want it, it is ours.