Anti Capitalism
This 'zine is a place for articles discussing capitalism and consumerism, their dangers to - and repurcussions for - mankind and their alternatives. Of particular concern is the apparent incompatibility between green politics and the... [more]
This 'zine is a place for articles discussing capitalism and consumerism, their dangers to - and repurcussions for - mankind and their alternatives. Of particular concern is the apparent incompatibility between green politics and the dominator capitalist structure.
Capitalism & The Misconstrual of Death

In a previous post I speculated that capitalism is grey. From empirical observations, I have predicted that the increase in capitalism will increase the canvas of grey around the planet.
Now I would like to propose that capitalism breeds a misunderstanding of death:
It is said that when you expire you can't take wealth with you. The main objective of capitalism is to earn money, this cannot be disputed.
Therefore, the capitalist who hoards his monetary wealth must be ill-at-ease with the concept of death, for his own mortality forces him to acknowledge a cut-off point at which the treasures that he has expended so much effort in acquiring - that he has considered so useful and central to his raison-d'etre - suddenly becomes useless.
Mortality, with great severity, contradicts the philosophy of the capitalist.
The exclusive pursuit of money is self-limiting, literally. It requires that one focuses one's energies on constructing an empire of monetary self-gratification, perpetually mollycoddling the ego. Thus in the wake of mortality the loss - and disuse - of that empire, forces the capitalist to witness, with his eyelids jammed open, his meaningful universe, as if by magic, is rendered into a meaningless one.
We can also ascribe the capitalists' mis-computation of death to the geometry of capitalism:
The capitalist builds wide and high. The physical spaces of capitalism limit the mental spaces of all those who inhabit capitalism. That is, these high and wide buildings occlude our horizons, the smoke from the factories cloak the stars.
The absence of a horizon or of the stars, or even the absence of trees or flowers, begets an inability to verify the poetic, or spiritual, truths about existence, or the birth-death cycle. There is something about gazing up into the stars that reminds us that we are part of something grander than ourselves. Without stars, horizons or expanses of nature, we have fewer occasions to consider our (in)significance in the greater picture.
The capitalist, through his self-limiting geometries and philosophies, lacks the access to the poetical/spiritual truths about the universe that would otherwise enable him to override the paroxysms of his latent death-instinct.
The ever-dwindling non-capitalist cultures of our planet acknowledge the correlation between capitalism and death. Davi Kopenawa, Shaman of the Amazonian Yanomami tribe, states:
'You napepe (whites) talk about what you call development and tell us to become the same as you. But we know that this brings only disease and death."
Tibetan culture traditional holds death as a between-state, not as a punctuation mark that signifies termination.
As capitalist China continues its expansion into Tibetan land and replaces Tibetan culture with the dominator capitalist ethos, and consumes the Tibetan identity, the association between death and capitalism must once again be made.
Not only will Tibetan culture die, but its spiritual understanding of the nature of death will perish with it.
My conclusion is that capitalism is a sickness that limits humanity to its own presumed lifespan. As such it acts as a stressor to humans to force them to achieve, by unhealthy competition, the lion's share of scant material resources. Thus restricting human endeavour to the presumed lifespan is the first act of misconstruing death.
The second act is a more violent act. It is the dissemination of capitalism throughout the world at the expense of other, non-capitalist cultures. If - or as - these fading cultures have a greater understanding of the poetic-truths of the birth-death cycles of our existence, then capitalism aggressively deprives us a peaceful passing from life into death.
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