Introduction
It’s time to fight back. We cannot afford to be complicit slaves anymore. The world cannot afford it. Capitalism and corporatism, and the war machine that both upholds it and is supported by it, is breeding a disengaged, self-aggrandising civilisation that promotes increasing polarity between haves and have-nots, and the rape of the planet’s resources. If we don’t act to make meaningful change sooner rather than later, the whole of mankind will be enmeshed in a complex web of electronic manipulation and virtual reality from which we may never escape again - where individuality is merely a manufactured illusion, and where the voice of dissent is quashed by computer algorithms and hidden faces with hidden agendas hiding behind a vast, inscrutable corporate wall, through which only the chosen few are allowed to pass. If you have any doubt as to the self-centred, destructive evil of capitalism, and the closed corporate structure that upholds it, do some open minded, objective research, and if you’re looking for a place to start, try this.
We must never lose our hope and vision for a better world, and this article offers a few suggestions by which we can resist uninvited change. It’s an ongoing document, and suggestions for addition and improvement to the article are welcome. It doesn’t offer hope for, or collusion with, physical combative warfare, for that is a route fraught with immense peril that can only be seen as an avenue of last resort for self-survival. Instead, it is suggested, we should begin to dismantle the machine that controls us by refusing to engage with it, and openly opposing it where possible by non-violent means, in the hope that a growing momentum for radical change will finally sweep the old order away by the sheer force of will and self-belief: there are precedents for this having happened before, as the article will reference. Every one of us needs to become wiser about the world we live in: about the fragile ecosystem that supports us, about the history of manipulation that has controlled us, about the power of numbers, and about those who are our real friends.
Protest
Power almost invariably corrupts. Just look around you at the governments of today, in any given week of global news, one after another embroiled in fratricide, genocide, money laundering and self-aggrandisement – normally under the veil of a democracy that is merely a guise to keep the masses complicit. Even the ‘Arab Spring’, that in Egypt briefly shone a ray of hope for some semblance of democracy, was soon usurped by coercive military tyrants. Corporations are no better: under the capitalist model, the ultimate objective is to achieve monopoly, in which the consumer has no choice. Imagine food and water supplies in the hands of corporations who are headed by insane, psychopathic oligarchs who have no empathy, merely a lust for power and wealth – then ask yourself whether any corporation such as Monsanto or Bayer – or worse still a proposed merger of one or more such players – bodes well for humanity in general. Regardless of the real or perceived intentions of such organisations in the present day, the tendency towards monopoly is an inherent and irreparable flaw in the capitalist model, one that does not enhance and freedom and choice, and coupled with the general propensity for weakness within humanity when faced with the lure of self-aggrandisement, it would seem that no faceless corporation should ever be handed such a level of power and control in the first place. Those in doubt might benefit from viewing the film Soylent Green – a nightmare vision of a future where a self-important elite think they know better about the common good than the masses they purport to represent. In addition to the above, it should be noted that even outside the world of politics and capitalism unbridled power is conducive to corruption, as the recent scandal involving so-called ‘aid workers’ sorely underscores, but capitalism, with its aversion to control and public accountability, provides particularly fertile ground for the seeds of deceit. It can be concluded that corruption is an inherent human weakness and that large organisations, whether they be political, commercial, or even ‘charitable’, merely allow greater anonymity for corruption to operate either unseen, unchecked, or both, to the detriment of the greater public interest.
In most parts of the world our democracies are mere illusions, designed to keep the masses complicit whilst the minority enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. The old political systems don’t work anymore, because most of the electorate are, in effect, disenfranchised. It’s time for some serious mind-searching and deep debate about how these should be replaced. Some would suggest anarchism: but if you consider that this approximates to the natural order of things at the dawn of humanity, it could be argued that its natural progression is towards the chaos, and the rule of ‘might is right’, that we have now. (This is a subject that will be examined in greater detail on the website at a later date). Therefore, perhaps a more authentic democracy – a democracy of the people, by the people, for the people, aka direct democracy, would be a more effective solution: where every citizen has the right to both vote and to police the voting process, either as an individual or a group (again, something for much closer examination on this website at a later date, but already such ideas are being trialled by the likes of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy). To start changing things, however, we need to engage in discussion, and to build up a momentum for replacing the outmoded systems that we have today where party politics is merely another self-interested and self-aggrandising corporate entity. There are plenty of forums around the internet, including this website, as well as social networking platforms, where that debate has already begun, so take a look around and share your thoughts and ideas. In addition, this website carries news regarding a few current protests here; please contact us if you want your event added.
Petition
Linked to the above, it has to be a good thing to take part in petitions about things you are passionate about, if your overall vision is for a fairer, more harmonious world. Public shaming can and does actually get results, even if ultimately the individuals or corporations involved only relent out of self-interest and damage limitation rather than any genuine change of heart. Below are a few petition sites that might be useful to you:
SumOfUs
Change.org
38 Degrees
Boycott
Don’t be fooled by the lure of clever advertising or political lobbying. Anybody who is trying to ‘sell’ you something is almost invariably looking after their own interests first and foremost, and the hype of ‘new’, ‘better’ or ‘cheaper’ is merely an illusion to hook you in. Do you really want to deal with individuals or corporations that cheated the system – the system that the rest of us are expected to abide by – in order to improve their prospects and profits by, for example, not paying due taxes, or providing false information or data? – as, for example, in the recent vehicle emissions scandal. Do you really want to give them your business in preference to those who operate with one hand tied behind their back by pursuing more ethical agendas? Why even give such organisations or individuals – including political figures – a second chance once they’ve been caught red-handed, and thus endorse the ethos of deceit? The same can surely be argued with regard to companies that sell you poor quality products that don’t stand the test of time and quickly become merely another worthless addition to the world’s burgeoning landfill mountains - why ever buy from them again? Teach them a lesson they should have already known instead, by hitting their precious profit margins. You can access a few ideas for entities to boycott on our website here.
Become a more savvy consumer
Stop being a must-have, reactive consumer. Capitalism is based on the endless consumption of goods and services for profit. Most of us are just complicit in the consumption end of the equation, for the profit of others. We allow ourselves to become enslaved into endless work and labour by the debt that is incurred from this consumption, compromising our potential in life. Meanwhile, our world is being raped of resources, such as the destruction of the great rainforests, compromising the long-term viability of the planet for the short-term gain of the few. The capitalist machine has an insatiable greed for you to keep feeding it your earnings, and (in a cash-based economy as opposed to a resource-based economy) consequently your complicit enslavement. It cannot function without an endless supply of consumption. In the longer term we need to move towards completely new models that replace wanton consumerism, but in the short term we can throw a spanner in the works by immediately reducing our overall consumer footprint and, additionally, consuming in a more ethical manner. Here are a few ideas:
Learn about the psychology used to cynically and subliminally manipulate you with the power of advertising, such as the old cinema flash images. You might think twice before participating in consumer surveys in the future, for many of them are merely trying to find better (viz. more profitable) ways to sell you ideas and products. Likewise, adverts cost money. The cost of adverts on television and in cinemas and magazines is ultimately passed on to you – so how much superior is the product really, and how much premium are you actually paying because you’ve been brainwashed into thinking it’s worth the extra cost?
On a related theme, commercial television and radio stations are run for profit – the clue is in the name! Therefore, all the information and music they feed you will have been carefully vetted in order to maximise their selling power. How can you trust such institutions as reliable sources of objective information? Commercial music stations are killing music – they have a playlist of a few score songs that are repeated endlessly throughout the days and weeks, all aimed at keeping you receptive to the advertising. In fact it’s easy to argue that commercial radio and television is largely about the advertising and that the programmes are just bait to get you to tune in. Meanwhile, the vast majority of real artists, especially those who are considered ‘left-field’ and not compatible with the consumer goods that are being marketed, are left on the sidelines with no exposure. Your tastes and your breadth of experience is being dumbed-down to conform to someone else’s agenda. But you can always turn away, and tune into a station that doesn’t carry advertising.
Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF). A genuine bargain perhaps – but only because the seller can’t shift the stock, wants to lure you to become a regular purchaser once the product returns to its inflated full price, or needs to make way for it to be replaced by something ‘new’. Nothing is free in the capitalist world-view, so if something is offered as ‘free’, it’s a sure sign that the normal price is excessive or they are being forced to shift their stock.
‘New’, and ‘Better’. This wording on products is often a con-trick. How can things indefinitely get better? New and better is often merely different, and the packaging or product might have been modified merely to sell you something more economically or to fool you it’s worth forking out more money for.
Designer obsolescence: do you really need this year’s model of the latest smartphone or other gadget, when the improvements are often minor, and were deliberately held back from last year’s model in order to sell you something new the following year? This preys on peoples’ innate greed and narcissism, knowing that many will want the latest thing just to impress their peers. We need to evolve beyond such base emotions that allow us to be easily manipulated. By caving in to such manufactured pressures you are merely helping to feed the consumer machine that will ultimately consume you.
Loyalty cards. Now why would a company want your loyalty? So that you continue to shop with them of course. But if they were the best and/or best value, you probably would anyway, depending on your parameters, and ultimately a company cares nothing about you other than how much they can profit from you – whether that be in hard cash or good publicity. Maybe the company should ‘buy’ your loyalty by excelling, but in effect, as with everything else in the capitalist model, nothing’s for free and you’re actually paying for your loyalty reward. Moreover, a penny or a cent back in every pound or dollar isn’t really much of a saving if the same product can be bought several pence or cents cheaper from the local independent store elsewhere in the neighbourhood. You might also want to think about the fact that you’re now a captive audience once you’ve handed over your contact details: in many cases they will more than recoup the ‘reward’ they’ve given you by incessantly posting you ‘special offers’ and thereby luring you with impulse buys.
Clickbait – the scourge of the internet. This is a new, cynical, and insidious way to get you to part with your cash, where websites parade sensationalist or tacky tabloid newsbytes – or a bit of naked flesh - merely to lure you into scrolling through endless screens to find the information you really want hidden away behind a barrage of advertising. It’s a cheap manipulative trick, but the power is still in your hands, for you have a choice to turn away. You could also use a browser such as Avast that has a built-in ad blocker.
Manipulate them like they try to manipulate you. Fight back! Forget about brand loyalty. Shop where it’s cheap, and as soon as somebody else offers you it cheaper, go to them. Unless, of course, you have a specific interest in protecting a local trader from a larger monopoly: remember, the ultimate end-game of a monopoly is manipulation; once they’ve blown the competition out of the water they can charge what they want for their goods and services. That’s where capitalism is inherently flawed: it doesn’t work for the good of anybody but the capital holder without artificial controls and measures.
Fight back against corrupt landlords – see this example.
Avoid credit. Credit is money that could be in your own pocket, but which you are lured into handing over to someone else for the privilege of buying something you can’t really afford. Why allow fat cats to get rich merely from the interest they earn on their capital, whilst you further enslave yourself into more toil? Money lenders are the piranhas of the capitalist system: avoid them or they will threaten to devour you.
You can help in a small way to redistribute wealth by buying from Third World countries rather than the capitalist fat-cats that exploit them. Fairtrade, and other ethically sourced products, might be more expensive, but those at the other end of the supply chain who produce and process the products are often living in acute poverty, just so you can have as many cheap things as possible rather than what you actually really need.
Generally speaking, the capitalist machine isn’t interested in the world’s environmental balance because it affects their profit balance - unless there’s something in it for them, such as publicity that helps drive sales. But to those without their heads in the sand the deteriorating global environment isn’t a product of fiction - take a look at this short video for example. By a combination of boycott and reducing your overall consumer footprint you can help to heal the world and thereby pass something better on to future generations.
Alternative Economic Models
After the 2008 global economic crash, caused by capitalist greed, more and more people are looking at alternatives - although some, like Jacques Fresco, had these visions 60 years ago, after the previous banking crash and the global war that followed. Capitalists will tell you that there’s no viable alternative to their model – but others will beg to differ, and people are beginning to look at new models such as resource based economies (rbe), that do away with money altogether and make more efficient, and more equitable, use of the world’s resources. Here are a few useful starting points for further research:
The Venus Project - and see also this video here
Community Banking
Bitcoin
Blockchain
3D Printing: a serious threat to the capitalist model
Take a look at this innovative African alternative to corporate banks
Be a Whistleblower
If you are in a position of power and/or trust, do you want to be complicit in the deception of the masses for the benefit of a corrupt few at the top of your organisation? Karma has its way of finding you, and at its heart is your own conscience. If you want to make a positive change towards a better world for all you should surely find a good investigative reporter and ‘spill the beans’: you can always do it anonymously if you feel that’s best.
Educate
Educate yourself, and then pass on the information to others. This partly involves re-educating yourself, for the chances are that you were fed a sanitised version of your nation’s true history at school, where atrocities committed along the road to ‘success’ have probably been largely whitewashed out. Take a look at this video regarding the British Empire for an insight into the murky realities behind the spin – but be aware that this story is true of most nations, and none of the great empires of the past, including arguably the greatest – or rather, most successful of all, Ancient Rome, are remotely covered in glory once the grim truth is unearthed. Use the reference and documentary playlist sections on this website for more inspiration.
The History Of Struggle
In particular, learn about the history of struggle – for the elite that hold power almost never relinquish that power willingly, and most of what currently enfranchises ordinary citizens has been hard-won by struggle against oppressors. If our past is anything to go by this, unfortunately, is a pattern that will have to be repeated in the future. Here is a list of things you might wish to research to further expand your knowledge:
Magna carta
The Peasants’ Revolt
English Civil War
Levellers
Diggers
European colonial imperialism in Africa, India, Asia Australasia and the Americas and the exploitation of ‘first nation’ people such as the native Indians in North America, Peru etc.
Luddites
Chartists
Samuel Plimsoll and the fight against ‘coffin ships’
Trade Unionism
Suffragettes
The Jarrow March
Peterloo
The abolishment of slavery in UK and United States and elsewhere
Norway’s fight for a more equitable society: a torch for the future
Che Guevara: a story of how idealism was defeated by pragmatism
Cable Street
Grosvenor Square
Lewisham
Greenham Common CND Protests
Anti-apartheid victories in South Africa
Trafalgar Square
False Flags and Misinformation
In the process of educating ourselves about the past, and so better arming ourselves for the future, modern generations have an enormously powerful tool – the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, the controlling factions realise that if the full power of knowledge and truth was unleashed their days would be numbered. Therefore, it’s common knowledge that the Web is now awash with misinformation deliberately planted by employed shills, in order to muddy the waters and render dangerous facts into, as much as possible, useless white noise. What is true, and what is false? It’s hard to be sure anymore - but some sources are more trustworthy than others, and by objective analysis and cross-referencing, using museums and libraries in addition to modern technologies, we can usually arrive at something that bears some semblance to the truth.
Here are some examples worth researching that illustrate the lengths our so-called leaders will sometimes go to to mislead:
The Gulf Of Tonkin Incident
USS Liberty
Operation Northwoods
Off-Grid Living And Survival Techniques
Let’s be realistic: if the authority of the ruling cabal faced serious immediate threat from insurrection, the switches would go off: no internet, no cellphones, and only carefully manipulated radio and television services to help herd the masses back in line using the time-honoured tactics of fear, deceit and coercion. There are already current examples of such processes in action around the globe, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China and elsewhere. These are just a few of the tactics that would be visited upon people that dared to upset conventional wisdoms, in an age of electronic warfare that possesses the technology to silently and stealthily repress and even kill. These are good reasons why violent insurrection isn’t really a good idea; another is, what would take the place of usurped institutions in the heat of the moment rather than by careful and considered reconstruction? Another factor we need to consider is that, in an age of cyber warfare, it might not be our own government that is the perpetrator. One way or another, if the worst came to the worst most of us would feel pretty helpless, given the dependency we have developed for modern gadgetry. Don’t be fooled into thinking that everyone will be singing from the same hymn sheet in a spirit of achieving a common cause – unfortunately, humanity isn’t quite like that, and there will always be a faction who will prey on those they perceive as weaker than themselves – one of the reasons why anarchism wouldn’t necessarily work. It’s time to go back to roots a little and learn to survive off-grid: for one, it will help in itself to reduce the consumer demand that fuels capitalism, and for another, it might just mean the difference between life and death at a time of regional or global crisis. Things to consider include the following:
Build up a stockpile of non-perishable foods, potable water (remember this has a limited shelf life so needs to be constantly renewed), fuel, toiletries, and medicines that will help you and friends or family survive for several months or more in the event that the grid collapses and the normal outlets for supplies are no longer restocked. Make sure you have a compass and a paper map of your local region in case networks are switched off, and that you have basic map reading skills and can read and convey map coordinates.
Build up a network of real friends, over and above internet social networking circles, who you can reach and co-operate with at a time of crisis. In the longer term we need to develop locally maintained electronic networks to assist wider communication.
Learn basic first aid.
Learn the art of fire making.
Learn some emergency survival techniques, such as the art of lighting fires, foraging, morse-code signalling, and erecting emergency shelters – just in case you have to make yourself scarce from real or perceived threats. All of this, of course, is best done by a group of co-operating people rather than lone individuals.
Learn the art of self-defence, whether with or without the use of weaponry, remembering that avoidance is usually better than confrontation.
Spiritual Growth and Free Thought
Organised religions are part of the ‘system’, and hence part of the problem. Throughout the centuries they have sought to manipulate and control, by fear and coercion, sanctifying mercenary thugs as kings and often aiding and abetting them in the theft of land and resources from the masses.
But that isn’t to say that spirituality is a false path, merely that the great global religions have twisted true spirituality to suit their own ends: they are, in the final analysis, just one more corporation. True spirituality is indeed probably the most important facet that separates mankind from the rest of the species on our planet. But it’s a personal journey: books and theologies are mere guides towards insights that you have to feel, not just read about. In the rush of modern life you need to somehow find time for quiet introspection, either at home or in the Great Outdoors. When you spend serious time doing this your perspectives might shift, and you might begin to see the folly of following a path of rampant materialism, consumerism, and egotism, and begin to have more empathy for people – and other living creatures – that you once thought of as enemies. You might find Buddhism a useful starting point: regardless of how it has been misrepresented and misused in modern idioms such as Myanmar, it’s a philosophy for life rather than an authoritarian religion, and encourages personal introspection, merely setting out pointers along the way. The elite don’t want people thinking outside the box like this, for it will render their social conditioning ineffective, and begin the end of control systems that have been more about repression than emancipation, enlightenment, and the maximisation of an individual’s life energies.
In earlier centuries scriptures and other writings were used to convey complex spiritual and political matters to the largely uneducated masses. Over-simplifying issues using metaphor, fable etc. often results in a dumbing-down of complexities, and this can result in confusion rather than clarification – particularly when metaphor becomes mistaken for actuality. Furthermore, in unscrupulous hands these devices can be used to deliberately mislead people by distorting truths or substituting them for lies.
Nowadays many more people around the planet are educated to a higher level than the ancients were, but still have too much reverence for the printed word, including so-called histories written to uphold hidden or lost agendas and the voices of those we have been misled into believing are superior or more ‘knowing’ than ourselves. Thus, whilst speeches and written texts in books and around the Web can be extremely informative, they can also be powerful devices for those who wish to misinform. We need to be much more objective, and consult multiple sources rather than trusting one so-called voice of authority. By listening to all sides of an argument, and also doing our own objective research and cross-referencing, we can begin to build a more accurate model of actual truths. This takes time and patience, but it’s only by grasping such objectively reasoned truths that we can move forward in a meaningful and constructive direction, rather than stumbling towards someone else’s false dawn.
© Globalfightback, 2018
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Last revision: January 18, 2020
