Power back to the people

The revolution about giving back power to people.

History has told us that powerful people always had control of the  masses.

From Kings and  Queens  , from politicians to dictators, from individual business people to corporate organisations. All of them have controlled masses, land and resources. They have controlled production and distribution of goods, control and  distribution of food, control and distribution of energy. And they still do.

Nowadays other controls are taking place in our society. The control and distribution of facts, the control and distribution of gadgets , electronics and communication systems.

Since the advent of television the manipulation of masses has worsened. If in the past slavery was the ownership of the individual body and power of a person, nowadays slavery has taken away the minds of the people. No need for a war to control millions if not billions of people. All is done in a very subtle way. The brainwashing machine(s) are at work on a daily basis, but in such a way that nobody notices it. Day by day, year by year these machines are controlling, teaching people how to be subservient to the capitalistic system, which ( needs) has the needs of people in order to survive.

The system is created in such a way that can only be fed by its own people producing goods and the very people consuming them. The beneficiaries are the organisations who control the people. Politician are at the mercy of these organisation and therefore the legislation created by them are there to keep the productive machine going and the organisations happy.

We now live in a word where an individual can earn thousands of pounds a day and at the same time millions cannot eat a meal on a daily bases. The individuals who earn so much cannot never spend that money and the others cannot never earn  it in their lifetime. The accumulation of money and power from some individuals are the main causes of the problem the planet is suffering and from which is dying slowly. The re-distribution of these powers through the creation of goods such mobile phones( for example), makes all of us responsible of the destruction of the planet for the benefit of few.

This complex mechanism is so intricate in its ramification of multiple mechanism that is difficult to be understood. This is way everything we do  today in our routine life has consequences for the planet, but we do not realise it. The way we travel, we wear, we wash, we eat, we consume and so on only takes  away resources without  putting anything back. Even our pee and solids are not recycled and we know now that they are  precious resources for creating compost or energy.

As human we are the worst specie for inefficiency. Our greed is so monstrously big that now we are using three times more the resources available from our planet. The point is that this way of life has privileged some people to the expenses of others. And to be honest, a minority of people in this world are exploiting the majority of the rest without knowing it. When we buy a mobile phone, do we know where really comes from? Do we know who has been exploited and how many? Do we know that some wars are part of the control of the minerals need it for these gadget?

There are many points of discussion. Take for example clothing. We buy cheap clothing because they were made on cheap labour in poor countries. We spoil our children by exploiting others mother’s children. But this is not the end of it. We buy so cheaply that we then through away lots of these  items to buy more. In the past old clothes were mended, passed onto friends or family or given to charity shops.

But in an age of "fast fashion" people dump 500,000 tons of clothes in landfill every year - compared to the two million tons bought in shops. But numbers here are irrelevant, as it is the action of waste that is worrying. People just do it without thinking or think that is Ok to do so. Wrap research  found that Scottish, Welsh and northern Ireland  in the last year alone left a staggering 1.7 billion items unused in our wardrobes”. But the sad thing is , in the countries were the cloths are produced for us the people over there have little clothing to wear.

The concept of “ sustainability” I think is now abused and inefficient, both in practical terms and in intellectual terms. We need urgently to shift to a major approach which will imply a radical change in our way of life. The thinkers behind a revolutionary change are there but political establishment and powerful corporation will try to boycott their concepts to be out  and available to people. People themselves need to be re-educated and this is a massive task for any courageous politician who want to try to implement it.

“De-growth”. This is the only way we can save our planet and future generations. In the short term, the application of this concept will avoid  the misery of millions of people and many wars which are design to control the resources in the planet.

As Wikepedia described at the beginning of the page: Degrowth is a political, economic, and social movement based on ecological economics, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas.

“The contemporary degrowth movement can trace its roots back to the anti-industrialist trends of the 19th century, developed in Great Britain by John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement (1819–1900), in the United States by Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and in Russia by Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910).

The concept of "degrowth" proper appeared during the 1970s, proposed by the Club of Rome think tank and intellectuals such as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Jean Baudrillard, André Gorz, Edward Goldsmith and Ivan Illich, whose ideas reflect those of earlier thinkers, such as the economist E. J. Mishan,^[17] the industrial historian Tom Rolt,^[18] and the radical socialist Tony Turner. The writings of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and J. C. Kumarappa also contain similar philosophies, particularly regarding his support of voluntary simplicity.

More generally, degrowth movements draw on the values of humanism, enlightenment, anthropology and human rights.

The books I have read from Ivan Illich, William Morris plus Serge Latouche  have influenced my thinking in the recent years, shifting the application of the concept of sustainability to a more radical concept of “ stepping back” to stop the crazy run  toward disaster well imbedded in the capitalist system. James Lovelock book, “ the revenge of gaia” made me think that something is still possible to re-direct the tendency of the suicidal approach of the capitalistic system. Although Lovelock said clearly that it looks like we are on a boat with an engine failure ( happily enjoying the landscape around us), but not realizing that we are approaching a huge waterfall…..


To be continued.