Living Fully and Happily Outside the Capitalist Culture by Ignoring It Everyday

Yuck.. fistfights, gunshots, chaos and insanity...America's [and now Canada's] Pavlovian consumer frenzy is in full swing, fortunately it hasn't swung as far into the backwaters as Blackpoint. Here at the hideout it's just another buy nothing day. The advice to 'Buy nothing, stay home, rake the leaves, read a book' is part of the buy as little as possible everyday lifestyle.

Adbusters is doing their best to counter the Black-Friday meme by re-branding it Apocalypse-Now. My thanks to Adbusters who has led the anti-consumption chorus through the years and their Buy Nothing Day non-logo has led this meme war. Check out their website, it always features great, provocative, essays and stunning pictures that challenge us as westerners to define necessity.

In one essay there today Naomi Klein writes, "There is one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner terms it 'resistance' – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.”  That's perfect, that it, that's my goal [and that of many other folks], to live fully within a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.

Naomi probably read Subcomandante Marcos's new series of essays ‘Them and Us’ out recently too. In them Marcos explains that 'we the people' are surrounded and seriously outgunned, how the combined mass media brainwashing and security state apparatus make the Empire impervious to real democratic change or force. Marcos sees the same flaw in the empirical matrix, that 'resistance' can include a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture, can include ignoring it, reading a book, raking the leaves. Turn on, tune in, drop out is still good advice all these years later.