All eyes are on the economy as startling statistics are released daily: the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 35% this year, jobless claims are at a 26 year high in the United States and over twenty-five banks failed in the US alone in 2008.

Given the constant litany of bad news, most people now understand that years of unsustainable growth based upon overzealous money lending and rampant financial speculation have pushed the world into a major economic depression. In other words, the capitalist roller coaster ride has reached the summit of a period of economic boom and we are now racing to the bottom of an economic bust.

Cries for help resound from all sides. But all these urgent calls seem to have one common assumption: that what we need is an economic recovery. Is this necessarily the case? I wonder whether an economic recovery is really in our collective best interest or whether it will simply mean the resumption of a period of unsustainable growth in anticipation of another (even worse) economic collapse.

And then there is the question of whether our weary, devastated planet can even sustain another period of economic growth.

Is it time we stopped calling for an an economic recovery and started demanding an economic rethinking?

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book of philosophical meanderings into the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com

The pictures are astonishing: thousands of protesters in Greece have taken to the streets, rioting for days in response to the murder off 15-year-old Alexander Grigoropoulos who was killed by a Greek police officer.

But beyond the startling images of molotov cocktails exploding, cars burning and occupations of live television broadcasts there is another story, even more surprising: the rioters are acting with the implicit support of the majority of Greek society. According to the AFP, a poll conducted in Greece found that a majority of people believe the rioters are part of a “popular uprising” and not simply group of “minority activists”. That, it appears, is the truth the corporate media would like to hide.

What is going on in Greece could very well be the first hints of a coming global popular uprising. All it took in Greece was a spark to ignite the generalized dissatisfaction of the larger society. And now, the uncontrollable flames are spreading. What we are seeing is not disorganized chaos, but the intentional response of youthful spirits rebelling against the empty promises of a staid society based upon one goal: consuming more than your neighbor.

Could the same thing happen on your street? What would it take to ignite all those dissatisfied by the unfulfilled, and unfulfillable, promises of capitalism and hyper-consumerism?

Some of the most powerful imagery to come out of Greece is available at the Boston Globe website. Take a look at these pictures, and let us know your thoughts.

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book of philosophical meanderings into the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com

On November 28, in what may be the most daring act of civil disobedience committed in recent memory, an environmental activist in the UK calmly climbed two three-meter high electrified razor-wire fences, entered the main turbine hall of a coal based power plant and shut down a 500MW turbine. The result, explains the Guardian, was that “all power from the coal and oil-powered Kingsnorth station in Kent was halted for four hours, in which time it is thought the mystery saboteur’s actions reduced UK climate change emissions by 2%.” The anonymous activist then left a handmade sign which read “No New Coal”, a reference to an ongoing environmental campaign focused on Kingsnorth, walked out of the building and disappeared. The guardian has the full story.

The Kingsnorth station coal plant, has been the target of numerous environmental campaigns since the company revealed plans to replace it with Britain’s first new coal-fired power station in three decades. A plan that would result emissions of “the same amount of carbon dioxide as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined”, according to Greenpeace.

These climate change campaigners are challenging the fundamental maxims of capitalism which relies upon year-after-year growth that necessitates greater-and-greater energy production and consumption. And now a growing number of activists, the vanguard clearly being in the UK with direct-action organizations like Plane Stupid and No New Coal, are questioning our basic assumptions.

By putting their ideals into practice, these activists are giving hope that climate change can be solved and that a single act does have positive repercussions. Simply turning off a single turbine at Kingsnorth for four hours decreased the UK’s emissions by 2%. What if it had stayed off for 24 hours, would anyone have noticed?

Is it possible that we can build a society that voluntarily turns off its own turbines and sets limits to its growth?

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book of philosophical meanderings into the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com

The U.S. government has spent $4,600,000,000,000 on the corporate bailout thus far. According to ABC News, this is more money than the “total combined costs in today’s dollars of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the entire historical budget of NASA, including the moon landing”.

How could such an inconceivable expenditure go through without even a glimmer of dissent? In a recent Le Monde editorial, celebrated French philosopher Alain Badiou explains that the only ideology left today is: “Save the banks!”. World leaders, journalists and respected intellectuals all seem to claim the same thing: only by saving the banks can we save the world.

But for Badiou, the economic crisis is a spectacle that diverts attention from the reality of daily existence. He encourages us to step back and, turning away from the screen, to gaze not at the crisis unfolding in the news but the crisis unfolding on the street.

Badiou writes, “So what do we see, if we turn things around in this way? We see […] simple things that we’ve known for a long time: capitalism is nothing but robbery, irrational in its essence and devastating in its development. Its few short decades of savagely unequal prosperity have always been at the cost of crises in which astronomical quantities of value disappear, bloody punitive expeditions into every zone that capitalism judges either strategically important or threatening, and world wars that brought it back to health.”

Badiou’s passionate editorial is a call to question the basic assumption underlying the trillion dollar “bail out” whose function is merely to delay the sinking of our overspent, debt-ridden consumer society. If it is not the banks that need saving, is it “the people”? Or is it the environment… or is it something else? What are the real priorities and who should we really be trying to bail out?

(Badiou’s full editorial is online here.)

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book of philosophical meanderings into the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com

A dangerous idea is floating around the halls of megacorporations. It is seeping into the pages of popular magazines and the minds of sensible folk. If this idea continues to circulate freely, it could spell death for our already unwell natural environment. The deadly notion is that capitalism will save us from an economic collapse.

Steve Forbes clearly articulates this argument in his article “How Capitalism Will Save Us.” Forbes argues that as long as people don’t try to hinder capitalists, everything will work out fine.

Underlying Forbes’ logic is nostalgia for a mythic past, one in which capitalism bestowed great gifts on the world. Forbes writes, “Between the early 1980s and 2007 we lived in an economic Golden Age. Never before have so many people advanced so far economically in so short a period of time as they have during the last 25 years.”

What Forbes doesn’t say is that this so-called Golden Age was dependent on the massive, systematic destruction of the natural environment. Capitalists took nature, mixed it with toxins and sold it as disposable garbage to consumers. All in the name of profit. Capitalists can only refer to the last 25 years as a “great time” by ignoring the destruction of the natural environment. We all know the alarming statistics: world biodiversity has declined by almost one third in the past 35 years; twenty-five percent of all mammals now face extinction.

What we are seeing now are capitalists’ desperate attempts to stay on top. As Naomi Klein explains, “today’s preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multinational corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis.” The question is, do we have the courage to propose alternative ways to get out of this state of fear?

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book on the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com

As culturejammers, we need our own culture. That is the essence of our movement. We see that western culture is beholden to commercial interests whose sole concern is to extract profit from our social interactions and artistic achievements. In the face of this overwhelming consumerism we strive to achieve a new culture – unadulterated and authentic.

The mega-corporations have made a mistake in assuming they can use money to seize our creative communities. Instead they have initiated a cat-and-mouse game. The moment they swoop in to purchase our spaces, we abandon them as they have ceased to be ours. Hence the perpetual struggle: corporations constantly chase our cultural achievements and claim them as their own because they can never create true art themselves. But this game has gone on long enough. By abandoning our spaces and allowing them to be overrun by corporate influences, we have failed to build a tradition strong enough to stand against the dominant consumer culture. It is time we devise a new strategy to protect and spread our new culture.

Consider the example of Blackspot Shoes. In the years since its launch, Blackspot Shoes has sold 25,000 pairs – proving that an ethically produced, anti-corporate shoe is a viable alternative to sweatshop sneakers and massive advertising campaigns. But what is to prevent a mega-corporation from buying Blackspot Shoes? The answer is simple: Blackspot Shoes are based on the principle of “Customer = Participant,” a principle that would spell the death for any corporation that attempted to co-opt it. By building into itself virtues anathema to mass-produced corporate culture, Blackspot Shoes ensures that it will always remain a stronghold for culturejammers.

The challenge culturejammers must now consider is how the lesson of Blackspot Shoes can be applied to founding a widespread anti-corporate culture. On this question, history holds some clues. The 2,000-year-old Roman historian Livy wrote that Romulus founded Rome by welcoming all immigrants whether they were vagabonds, outlaws or outcasts. From this diverse group he created a unified people through the adoption of symbols and rituals, some borrowed from nearby cultures and others created. Culturejammers find themselves at a similar place in our history. We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and anarchist entrepreneurs unified by a culture of anti-corporate rituals and shared artistic symbols we produce. The campaigns we have adopted are our defense against assimilation and to co-opt our rituals would mean the death of consumer culture. However, we should not be content with what we have already built for there is one direction in which our cultural development is sorely needed: the charitable care of our needy compatriots.

In an economy dependent on consumer spending, the anti-consumption message we embrace will have fundamental economic effects that hit the poorest culturejammers first. Of course, one of the ways that consumerism is perpetuated is out of fear of moving away from this economic model. However, we cannot let this fear keep us from the direction we know our culture must go. Instead, we should adopt a new social campaign that will provide a safety net for those culture jammers living at the lowest levels of consumption – those tireless, full-time activists and artists who put their beliefs ahead of their own careers and livelihoods.

To support the heroes of our movement, I propose a voluntary and self-imposed tax inspired by the Islamic notion of Zakat, the Christian Tithe and the Jewish Tzedakah. The idea is simple: every month, culture jammers should set aside two percent of their earnings. Once a year, these collected savings should be given to a deserving culturejammer in your local community whose efforts have furthered the movement. The goal is not to create another institutionalized charity organization, but instead to give our support directly to the individuals in our communities who deserve it the most. In this way, we will insure that an increasing number of culture jammers are encouraged to make building the movement into a full-time pursuit. I call the idea Blackspot Zakat and have already begun by putting aside two percent of my income while I look for a deserving culture jammer. It is a simple idea that is anathema to capitalism and that will give our movement self-sustainability and independence while preventing the desire of our most talented vanguard to “sell out.” If we adopt this voluntary ritual, then we jammers will finally begin to build our own lasting culture.

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book on the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com