051: The World of The Golden Square, Part II: Experiences & Methods

The Future Is A Mixtape

In the midst of global apocalyptic collapse, the so-called solutions on offer from the imperial core are miles away from even marginal forms of dignity. The disdainful refusal to muster anything more than symbolic misdirects buried under bureaucratic mazes of means testing illuminate how deeply incapable the neoliberal boot-strap ideology is of addressing basic human needs. An anxious capitalist class and its corrupt, craven supplicants are waging an all-out war against any measure of “socialist” “entitlements” that might help build the social infrastructure desperately needed in this age of climate chaos and psychic despair. To acknowledge that everyone deserves The Golden Square—the unconditional and universal provisions of Food, Shelter, Healthcare, and Education—should be as common sense as sunshine. As Peter Kropotkin detailed in The Conquest of Bread at the end of the nineteenth century, if society was organized around first meeting human needs, we could easily be living in a world of abundance and leisure for all, all while working much less. But instead of cooperatively creating a rational and egalitarian world of post-scarcity, the cult of propertarians and their armies of indoctrinated worshipers & wage-slaves have foisted upon us polluted cities and poisoned water, expecting us to be grateful for fast fashion and fast food, the complimentary side-dishes of batshit construction and bullshit jobs. What we need, instead, are walkable cities, shorter work weeks, balanced job complexes, and a post-scarcity economy based on care and freedom. Imagining such a future involves asking a series of questions that must be fully explored . . . How would our lives be different? How would work get done, and who would do it? Would meeting The Golden Square require a focus toward centralization or decentralization? In this second of a three-part series envisioning The World of The Golden Square, Jesse and Matt investigate the experiences and methods of a world re-made to meet human needs in a rightful relationship with the planet. We live in capitalism – a patriarchal social order forever insisting that there is no alternative – a system that has been violently curtailing ideal innovation for more than two centuries, just as feudalism and the divine right of kings did for so many centuries prior. The heartless handmaidens of this system are tyrannical mega-corporations living as “para-states,” floating above the world’s so-called democracies, leeching every available drop of use-value from the earth and its inhabitants in a callous competition for monopolies of power & profit. These corporate parasites will continue to destroy everything in sight as long as the deeply irrational market-logic myths about “Supply & Demand” and “The Rationality Economic Man” are the organizing basis of our shared reality. This Age of Techno-feudalism – to borrow Yanis Varoufakis’ neologism – is a bullshit system that makes batshit products, based on horseshit ideas. The urgent existential responsibility that we now face – to heal our scars and secure a livable future – will require nothing less than birthing a real global utopia as quickly as humanity can muster – an open-source world designed around The Golden Square.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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