Capitalism Archives - Forget The Box

Some things are more important than money. Things like knowing someone wants to be in a cabin in the woods with you, spending our days in no hurry, reading, making art, and building forts. Burning wood and making love, swimming naked under the stars and howling at the full moon.

I want to plant a field of sunflowers so we can hang out in them. I want to fly kites and climb trees, run through fields and streams, I want to rip my dress, and I want you to tell me it’s ok, because it’s just a dress and there are more important things to worry about.

Money has never been something that concerned me. I know it is a necessity for prosperity in a modern capitalistic society, but why? If everyone just went vegan, grew their own veggies, composted and repurposed everything, and just self sustained in general, we could all go on living in harmony forever without the evil tendrils of capitalism and greed sneaking into every orifice of our identity as humanity. Nothing is free though, is it?

The oldest profession is prostitution, trading your physical self, your lady tunnel and supreme mountains, the curves of your sweetness, for dirty green paper. Children are sold into sex trafficking rings across the world, its fucking horrific. Consent is what is needed, my body is mine alone.

Dirty green paper kills people, it is the root of all that is evil and wrong. I also use my body for money. I dance. I dance because I must, because there are so many things to say. I dance because I know people will always watch.

Amusement and titilation, the politics of body language are not universal. I live in a lace cage, its stretches but you can’t tear through, straps and garters, nets and spikes, don’t forget the blood red lips. Art is not free? You mean, I am worth something more?

It feels good to get paid for something you love. There is no such thing as too much boob. Counting crumpled dollar bills while naked like a drug dealer’s girl (they make women count money and bag drugs while naked so they don’t steal anything).

I give myself golden showers. Glitter for days. I always douse myself in the luminescent perfection. To be loved and hated for your glitter at the same time. Some people want me to rub my body all over them and steal my glitter. My disco tits inspire.

Others won’t touch me, those are the glitter is herpes people (and they can go fuck themselves). Burlesque is a beautiful world of sparkling bits (it is also getting fake shit on by a bag of chocolate frosting in your best friend’s crotch sometimes). Shock value is priceless, giving someone a moment they will never forget is what life is all about.

I barely break even, spending money on costumes and makeup as soon as I make it. My weekly show is just enough to buy a bag of weed and keep me in glitter.

Can I just live life topless? I want to start a BOOBER instead of Uber where I am just topless and charge 10 times as much. There will be a bouncer in the front seat.

Sometimes artists have a hard time doing free shows, feeling like their my time is precious and expensive. Artists are constantly expected to do work for free. Sometimes I am HAPPY to do things for free if I care about the project and want to donate.

And yes, it is true that I do not like money, I despise it and want to burn the capitalist system to the ground. I want to piss on its ashes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need some money to live. Not to live life lavishly, but to survive and meet my basic needs and primitive wants. Go to Amy’s Place and get the vegan french toast AND the bbq seitan BIF sammich. I deserve it. I want to say yes to the dress and go to all of the concerts and plays. I want to take a day off to run through a field of blooming flowers barefoot.

I take my clothes off as currency. My revolutions and movements are enough to feed me. I am inspired to do this forever because I cannot trade my life for a cubicle. I will never ever work for the man or sit in an office ever again. I do not look good in a fucking pants suit.

More money more problems. Less money more problems. Seems like everything is just problematic. Happiness is easy if you stop worrying about bills and bullshit. Everyone should free their mind from insecurities and just get naked.

The roar of a crowd is invigorating, higher than any drug. People are more afraid of being naked then being burned alive. Let your confidence and beauty feed you. Take off your clothes every chance you get.

We are now entering the terminal stage of austerity, a disease whose symptoms are most acute and visible in Greece. Within the past few weeks, a macabre cortege of politicians, economists, bureaucrats and technocrats have tried in every way possible to asphyxiate any sign of recovery and nullify any sentiment of hope and optimism within the Greek people. The degenerate disease has spread to such a degree that even the antibodies, the last democratic pulsations, ultimate rampart of health, attempting to salvage a thread of dignity within a sea of humiliation, have been declared by the prognostics of the charlatans of high-finance as viruses that must be eliminated.

Today as Greeks turn to the polls, with the ponderous task of breaking with the dictum of austerity, never has the real purpose of such an ideology been as clear. No matter what the outcome of the Sunday referendum vote might be, the process in itself has already accomplished a great deed, that of debunking the mysticism of austerity.

It’s like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Only the technicians of austerity think that their rhetorical verses still charm, when in fact the rhetoric of austerity is naked.

In the past week, the incompatibility of the democratic process with austerity was once again unveiled for all to see. First there were the calls from the European elite that a referendum was unreasonable.Then there were direct calls for regime change.

It has been a understood rule, since the onset of the 2008 crisis, that austerity and democracy don’t mesh, that austerity is fundamentally incompatible with democratic proceedings and the two are mutually exclusive. Through the intransigent stance of the Eurogroup, i.e the Troika, austerity has revealed itself to be more of a means than an end.

The Greek Crisis, the imposing of austerity by the world financial institutions, has never been about “debt” or the extreme moral necessity of repayment for the well-being of the global financial system. Austerity in itself is void, it services a specific purpose: creating a rhetorical and moral leverage for the restructuring of the societies in which it’s applied.

Austerity in Greece isn’t merely an economic doctrine, serving a specific economic purpose, but a means to justify the usurping of democracy, the transfer of the common wealth into the private sector through privatizations, the militarization of police forces and socially conservatives policies in the name of budget priorities and adjustments. Austerity is an ideology as per the premise of The Fourth Revolution written by Woolderidge & Micklethwait as a “restructuring of the state,” not a downsizing of it.

As Lenin analysed the world of 1917, he concluded that imperialism was the highest form of capitalism, its final stage in many ways. Lenin identified that imperialism was a by-product of capitalism, that it could only exist as an ideology as an extension, as a rhetorical tool at the service of capitalism, of the “liberalization” of the markets i.e the forced creation of new markets through capitalism.

Within the analytical framework put forward by Lenin, ideologies that appear to be situated outside of capitalism such as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, are actually fundamentally integrated into the capitalist dynamic. At the time (just like today), imperialism was an ideology that mobilized a humanist rhetoric to justify its utter brutality. The commercial and financial elites of the time used the Gun Boat Policy and delusional humanistic principles of the burden of the white man to subjugate and exploit most of the world.

What imperialism was for capitalism yesterday, austerity is for capitalism today. The so-called “need to civilize” of the time is called “the need to balance budgets” today.

Austerity is the highest form of capitalism we know today, a sort of necrophilic vampirism, an ideology that promotes capitalism in its purest form. But “purity” entails fragility.

At this point, given the current disposition of forces, the current rapport of forces, the Greek referendum appears as the shattering moment of this porcelain ideology. The victory of the OXI camp would call into question the legitimacy of the moral premises of austerity. Austerity as an ideology, such as imperialism, only exists because of the belief that people give to the moral premises that lay at its foundation.

The Greek people have the awesome opportunity to shatter the glass castle of austerity. But all in all, it’s only a matter of time until people see through the mirage. In that light, we can found a new moral foundation in which people trump profit.

* Featured image by Ggia via WikiMedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons