Capitalism has our consent through two different channels, one through the consumer choices that we make when buy things, the other is through our stratified and locked in Labour that is enforced by social division and status, where most people earn just enough money to cover their weekly outgoings before returning to work on Monday morning after having only a weekend for own time and time to rest.
It is a divisive and fraudulent setup that passes on a slavery virus with everyone it interacts with on the way, from the producer to the consumer; it has no ethical foundation or guidelines other than to make profit, and to make more profit through expansion and growth with no regard for any other living organism in its path. 
The virus spreads: an orgy of legalized theft and acquisition
Capitalism in our times is moving towards an advanced stage in its viral proliferation, it has spread to every corner of the globe. The Politics of capitalism, Neoliberalism and its technocratic had picked Politian’s are once again in predatory mode as they asset strip our social support structures and make them their own through acquisition. Yes, you heard right, Neoliberal Politicians are selling off of our social support structures that we have already paid for through decades of taxation. By voting Neoliberal governments into power, we are effectively voting for people who when all of the vaneer of rhetoric and smart conservative appearance fades, are really nothing more than thieves and conmen who specifically got into power to split up and sell off our collective assets, like a diamond thief getting a Job at a jewellers shop so to speak.
Quarantine the virus
Like all prolific viruses a good quarantine measure can halt its spread, within the present context I am referring to we need to simply pull back from consuming, and begin producing locally and within a community setting when ever possible for it is within resources and how they are controlled and allocated where we can hit the virus. The latter stages of the capitalism virus has logic, and that logic within the present is to enslave people, control people through debt and resource scarcity and to continue to exploit resources from the natural world is they were infinite. The logic of deconstructing and dissolving capitalism must employ diverse tactics and strategies when dealing with such a widespread infection that has been imposed on the world. 
A permanent culture beyond capitalism
Capitalism and its Political ideology Neoliberalism are responsible for a number of ongoing atrocities including the pollution and degradation of the natural world through the illusion of infinite growth; it is also responsible for the enslavement of billions of the world’s population, In the Neoliberal world its ideas and practices are the absolute antithesis to creating and bringing about a Permanent culture. The ethics of permaculture provide a powerful Post Neoliberal antidote which will enable all species of life to thrive, and now that we are actively in praxis it is our task to put these ethics into place within our own lives and others whom we interact with, for without them we stand little chance of developing any kind of just and long lasting world.
Steve
Greed helps
There’s an alternative: one can always move to North-Korea of course. Or to Iran.
@ Marco, that’s what Bill gates said about anyone who didnt like Capitalism, or one can fight for social justice instead of running off to Authoritarian quasi socialist states, cheers Steve
@ Stephanie, greed help what?
Well Steve – i don’t believe in any political ideology, no matter what name it has. They all want one thing, ultimatly: to dominate. And when there’s one recepy for catastrophy it’s domination. People will start to realize that we’re NOT seperated by nationality, ideology, religion, but that we’re one people, one species. We share the same DNA and we breathe the same air. All of us. What we need is food, water, clean air – not a dead planet. I’m a social being because of my mother, not because of some red book.
Same here Marco, not a big fan of Ideology myself, cheers Steve
Cheers
So what’s your vision of this ‘Permanent Culture’, Steve? What should it be like?
Hi Marco Mike here from PCN, I would like to see a commons society organized around ethics of permaculture, see here for more info http://www.onthecommons.org/work/introduction-commons cheers Mike
Thnx Mike – i appreciate it
But I would also like to sit down with people like yourselves and work it out 🙂
You have my sympathy
I like the *ends* of permaculture, and most of you have really good ideas and attitude. So I don’t want to be too harsh, but really there’s no way around it. The *means* you give for achieving you’re goal can only work for rich people. For instance: “we need to simply pull back from consuming, and begin producing locally and within a community setting when ever possible for it is within resources and how they are controlled and allocated where we can hit the virus”. The problem most people in the world have is that they are dying from under-consumption, and have no access to the land or means of tilling it, and no access to the other means of production. In the UK, the problems are the same for lots of us (though there are more rich people) – some don’t have enough to eat, lots of us do not own our houses and most of us have no meaningful control of our lives.
So, producing things for ourselves isn’t something we can do right now – unless we’re middle class and so have the money to buy land, or at least the right kind of accents and inherited privilege to convince the council to give us some. This means that your solution dis-empowers most people, who can’t afford it. So it actually ends up re-enforcing hierarchies and class structures.
We’re not going to be able to produce things for ourselves without first taking control of the fields, factories, and workshops that we need to do this. We do not have the economic power to do this within capitalism. Nor are the rich just going to hand them over. So, the only solution is for us to take them by force – most of the rich are not going to give them up without a fight. In the short short term, shoplifting and stealing from work is a far more realistic way for people to live outside of capitalism (and break down the consumer paradigm, as well as the boss-worker relationship), and in fact is something that a very large proportion of workers and unemployed people already do :-). In the medium term, we need to organise in our communities and workplaces so that we can take mass, co-ordinated action to force the capitalists to stop screwing us over so bad. This kind of organising already exists (not so advanced in the UK – but look at the via campesina, the CNT in Spain, etc for good examples). If this organisation is done well from the start (participatory, anti-hierarchical, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist), it can then form the basis of re-organising society too (aka revolution).
You’re ideas aren’t far off – but please remember that the ways you’ve given of implementing them so far are completely impossible for most people, and are in no way practical for achieving large-scale change. A few permaculture-like projects can be helpful and I don’t oppose you doing them! But ultimately, they will only ever be examples. Examples are really important and encouraging of course! But only so long as we only ever see them as such.
Hi mate, its steve here who wrote the piece, i agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I am a working class bloke on the dole living in a proper run down bit of Bolton, and by using permaculture me and my misses have been able to not only provide a great deal of our own resources but have also fed 2 other families who aint got a pot to piss in, It is do-able over here in the uk, even in areas that are fucked, I also taught ex-offenders permaculture in the early summer, two of the lads i taught who have been re-housed are now growing and making a lot of the stuff that use on a daily basis.
Where I do agree with you mate, a lot of the sort of stuff I am doing is generally done by middle class folk, for me its all about taking permaculture away from the middle class hippy ghetto smallholdings and onto our council estates.
cheers Steve
We completely agree that changing class and social relations are key to achieving a better more equal society. The permaculture ethics state earth care, people care and fair shares as the basis for organising society and that really means a dissolution of class relations and inequality to a non hierarchical, commons based more equal society, that is accountable to us all. But before this happens if we can help people to meet their needs outside of the market even if that is only small then this can ease the pressure on their lives, as well as showing people that there are ways of living and cooperating that are outside of the neo liberal consumption model. – Mike
Hi mate, its steve here who wrote the piece, i agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I am a working class bloke on the dole living in a proper run down bit of Bolton, and by using permaculture me and my misses have been able to not only provide a great deal of our own resources but have also fed 2 other families who aint got a pot to piss in, It is do-able over here in the uk, even in areas that are fucked, I also taught ex-offenders permaculture in the early summer, two of the lads i taught who have been re-housed are now growing and making a lot of the stuff that use on a daily basis.
Where I do agree with you mate, a lot of the sort of stuff I am doing is generally carried by middle class folk, for me its all about taking permaculture onto our council estates, cheers Steve
Humanity’s Economic Disease: Capitalism
By Frank Scott
“ Our situation may not only be stranger than we suppose; it may be stranger than we can suppose.” J.B.Haldane
People demanding governmental change are not united in focusing on the political economics at the root of most global problems but they are moving in that direction. This shows that many can understand the situation, however strange it may seem. But that understanding does not transmit to much of what passes for global leadership. Leadership’s inability to cope with, or its desire to maintain “our situation” , even with the potential for planetary disaster, reinforces the egotistical greed of private profit and perpetuates the anti-social problem of public loss. That problem has reached a point at which it threatens all humanity and not just divided and conquered national, religious, racial or other falsely labeled identity groups.
Many people understand that we have reached a critical turning point that demands radical change in how and why we produce the means of supporting life to the advantages of a shrinking minority which amasses incredible wealth while the vast majority are living in or fast approaching a status close to poverty. But that reality is more often completely denied by global leadership, especially in the western world. Since this is where the problem originates and is sustained, it becomes more important that the west play a greater role in the movement to radically change global policies, starting by transforming national leadership. That has begun in some parts of the world like Latin America but here in the USA, it might as well still be the 20th century for all the “change” in the power of tiny minorities to run a supposed democracy by buying and occasionally selling its leadership the way all commodities are traded in the profit and loss marketplace. That is the serious situation in which humanity finds itself, and Americans, despite a taught notion of positive exceptionalism, play the most negatively exceptional role in the creation of waste where there was plenty, and war where there was peace .
Current policies to maintain empire at all costs are misread by many who accept affirmative action for capitalism as the substance of social change. When people of diverse cultural, ethnic, racial or sexual sectors preside over as well as participate in the mass murders of foreigners in wars to perpetuate minority domination, many imagine that the dead smile happily at having been slaughtered by such a wonderful collection of minority groups exercising democratic power. More important, redistributing tokens in a system threatening disaster for humanity hardly changes anything but for a few who will – very briefly – be most comfortable while their societies are flooded, destroyed by wars or disintegrated in some other form by an angry nature taking its measure of a species that draws closer to outliving its sustainability.
We need to follow at least some of the advice offered by groups like the Royal Society of London and Another World Is Possible. Despite their differences in funding and outlook, one being establishment and the other seeking alternatives to that establishment, in confronting our problems they come to many of the same conclusions. Both clearly call for a reorganizing of social priorities and an end to the wasteful commodity culture of the west as the only way to end the poverty suffered by billions and begin making a better life possible for all humanity. Both highlight the dangers posed by climate change and clearly identify political economics at the root of our treatment of the planet and its people. They use slightly different language and propose slightly different programs, but they are united in saying that another world is necessary if humanity is to survive and progress. That will call for a totally different economic and political foundation even if these groups do not state that fact in the same words.
The warfare culture that treats human welfare as a secondary consideration should not only be obvious from the perspective of those killing and being killed by the massive military organizations supporting an equally massive market force of comfort for some at the expense of deprivation for most. People far removed from the military battlefields and who sincerely profess reverence for deities , preach humanitarian unity and practice sincere if primitive forms of democratic politics still tolerate tens of thousands of humans living in the streets, sleeping under bridges and in doorways , while tens of millions of pets live in comfort in the homes of the same good people. Social and humanitarian priorities are skewed under the domain of profit and loss capital which forces all good people into situations that provoke bad things.
The domestic priorities of a market system which finds animals more valuable than people is the same one making foreign wars that find some humans even less valuable than those same animals. This has little to do with any individual acting in bad faith and much more to do with a system of political economics which cannot help but benefit some by treating others as a lower life form than our pets. We would do well to stop seeking individual villains, though there certainly are many, and pay much closer attention to the system in which wonderful people – and they are far more in number – cannot help but perpetuate growing disaster simply by following the teachings of business as usual and accepting that profits on one side that create loss on the other are some form of decency and humanity when the evidence is, and becoming more so with frightening speed, quite the contrary.
“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” John Lennon
email: fpscott@gmail.com
Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which is available online at Legalienate
http://legalienate.blogspot.com