Surviving Capitalism (Not) : War and shopping - an extremism that never speaks its name

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, September 23, 2011

War and shopping - an extremism that never speaks its name

Click here to access article by John Pilger from his website.

While looking for a bookshop that was no longer there, this perceptive Australian journalist inadvertently enters into the artificial capitalist world of a shopping mall and sees so much of the extremism that illustrates characteristics of the larger capitalist world of wealth and poverty.

The mega mall, the biggest in Europe, is built in the midst of grey tower blocks not far from where the recent riots occurred, its “designer” products, made mostly with cheap, regimented labour, beckon the indebted. That it stands on a site where London workers made trains – thousands of locomotives, carriages and goods wagons – in what was once called manufacturing is of melancholy interest. The mega mall’s jobs produce nothing and are mostly low-paid. It is an emblem of extreme times.

I don't see that the article has much to do with wars as the title suggests, unless he is thinking in the context of class wars.