💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › margaret-killjoy-cooperative-scavenging.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:44:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Cooperative Scavenging Author: Margaret Killjoy Date: 2010 Language: en Topics: economics, post-civ Source: Retrieved on 1 January 2011 from http://www.postcivilized.net/2010/07/cooperative-scavenging/ Notes: This article first appeared in Dodgem Logic #3, published in 2010.
“We have no more interest in repairing civilization than a scrapyard
does in repairing cars. When you see a roadkill deer, you don’t attempt
emergency breathing — you skin and eat it. Well, if you eat meat.” —
Sara Czolgosz
In the previous issue, I laid out the basics of post-civilization theory
(affectionately referred to by most people I know as “post-civ”). The
really, really short version of it is: we don’t like civilization, but
we’re not primitivists either. Oh sure, we learned a lot from our
relationship with civilization, but in the end, it was just too abusive.
It’s time to break up, it’s time to move on.
In this issue, we’re going to take a close look at post-civilized
approaches to production and highlight a possible way to undermine the
capitalist economic system.
Let’s say there’s a civilian, and she’s hungry. She chooses a recipe
from the cookbook and then goes to the store to purchase the
ingredients.
Elsewhere, there’s a scavenger that’s hungry too. She looks to see what
food is available and plans her meal accordingly. At all times, she’s
passively on the lookout for food, from her garden, from the dumpsters,
the discount bins, or gleaned from wild plants.
You might have guessed it: we post-civilized favor the scavenger
approach. This applies to most all things, from art to science to
education. We favor this approach for so many reasons (admittedly,
aesthetic taste is among them).
The civilized idea is that productivity exists for its own sake:
automobile manufacturers make cars because it’s what they do. At no
point is the question asked, “Have we made enough cars yet?” (The answer
to that question, by the way, is obviously yes. Even if we wanted a car
culture, we have all the personal automobiles we could possibly need,
waiting to be repaired or improved upon.) Forests get cleared and new
houses get built while buildings elsewhere sit empty.
This sort of behavior is not reflective of the cunning and
resourcefulness of the animal we evolved to be. It’s a cultural
imposition forced upon us by civilization.
A civilian will shop for ideologies like she’s buying a new phone,
taking a gander at a few before picking one right off the shelf. A
scavenger will dissect ideologies, collect the interesting bits, and put
them together with other ideas to form her own worldview.
Because, when it comes down to it, a scavenger is a hacker, a hacker is
a scavenger.
“That’s fine and good for a tiny minority,” you might be thinking (or,
more interestingly, screaming and gesticulating wildly), “but an entire
society couldn’t function as scavengers: who would grow the food? Who
would build the tables?”
And you’d probably be right, if you were thinking or yelling that. Most
of us live in population densities too high to sustain a hunter-gatherer
lifestyle. But hunter-gatherer isn’t what we’re going for, exactly.
We’ll grow food, we just aren’t going to grow monocultured corn for
export. We’ll still build tables, but we’ll build them out of what’s
available, and we’ll build them where it’s appropriate.
This isn’t about a purity of approach. In fact, it isn’t about purity at
all.
We want to use the resources that are available to us already before we
go about making more. How, then, do we restructure society to allow for
this? Revolution is always a possibility, albeit one without a
tremendous track record. Collapse? Civilization, at least the global
one, is as likely as not going to do itself in at some point. But who
wants to die, and who wants to wait until we’ve left the land and oceans
scorched and devoid of life?
Post-civilization theory posits that it’s useful to begin to live
post-civilized here and now, whether or not a rev-ocalypse is going to
save us in a year or two. So how are we going to do it?
Nothing I’ll talk about in this column, today or ever, is meant as
prescriptive. But there are a couple ideas out there.
One of them is to begin to supplant the market capitalist economy, right
the hell now. The co-op and syndicalist movements of the 19^(th) and
20^(th) century were on the right track: the co-ops took the middleman
out and distributed directly to people, saving everyone money. And the
syndicalists took control of industry by firing their bosses and working
as equals. But we don’t really want money or industry, certainly not on
the scale we have today.
If most of the things — the actual tangible objects we need — have
already been made, it can be as simple as getting them to people free of
charge. Free stores, we call them in the US (and give-away shops
elsewhere, I believe). These are storefronts operated by volunteers that
act as secondhand shops in which everything is free.
But by and large, these storefronts are isolated and cannot handle the
enormous mass of goods that will otherwise be wasted every day in the
civilized world. So then, my proposal, to be enacted on a citywide
level:
throughout the town. Distribute said resources.
As more people’s needs are met outside of market economics, the less
they will depend upon that market. With less people shopping, the
capitalist economy will suffer, leaving more people dependent upon the
new, alternative economy, which will experience growth. Eventually, the
old methods will be obsolete. The gift economy will grow beyond
secondhand items to include food, artisan crafts, and volunteer labor.
There are two major obstacles to overcome on the local level in order to
be effective: rent and the clubhouse effect.
By starting with a network of stores (and a warehouse), rather than a
single location, we can hope to minimize the clubhouse effect. People
often feel alienated by the cliquish nature of radical circles. Some
people who have pointed this out in the past feel like the proper
solution then is to water down our politics, or to ascertain that we in
no way look or act “weird.” This is the lowest-common-denominator
approach that, among other things, explains why large-scale majoritarian
democracy always leads to such bland, useless culture and politics.
So instead of a single homogenous radical culture, it’s best to have a
large number of diverse cultures acting in solidarity with one another.
Allow the central warehouse to be common ground for all of the groups,
but let each individual free store be as subcultural as it wants. Just
be certain to encourage all subcultures to participate and get in on the
act.
The issue of rent can be more complicated. The stores could run on a
voluntary subscription model: subscription carries no specific, tangible
benefits (like the first pick of the best recycled stuff), but would
encourage people to donate some portion of their income every month to
pay the rent on the individual stores and the central warehouse.
Obviously, methods that minimize costs may be necessary. This can work
with no paid staff (after all, a full-time volunteer ought to be able to
live entirely off the goods within the gift economy!), bike carts and
bakfiets can be used to transport goods whenever possible, and
storefronts can be squatted in places where open squats are tolerated.
But these obstacles are, really, quite minor. And now, in what yet might
be the death throes of the existing economy, the need of — and
opportunity for — a better method of economics has never been greater.