Currently in the middle of polishing a short story for a compilation, working on my first post of Polytheist.com, editing the pieces for Your Face is a Forest, and enjoying the visiting presence of my furry lover for the month. So, a bit slow on posting stuff here.
That being said, here’s two short and pretty damn good essays from others that are highly worth your attention. Also, fun–they’re both by Druids!
Lisha Sterling: De-Colonizing Ourselves So We Can Help Others
My fellow A Sense of Place writer and occasional forest and tea-and-pie companion has written a succinct discussion about industrialization in poorer countries. She brings up a particularly important point about the connection between industrialization elsewhere and consumption here. Capitalist industry has been displaced to other countries so that we in “the West” do not actually directly experience the damage caused by our consumption. If you’ve got an iPhone, for instance, it was made in a factory in China. Chinese workers therefore endure the poor working conditions and extreme environmental damage which are unseen by the end-consumer of said device. We can have clean air and higher standards of living here because poorer countries experience it on our behalf.
John Beckett: The Commodification of Humanity
While I hold a slight disagreement with John regarding the value of Usury (specifically, the “time-value of money”–money technically doesn’t increase in value until used to make more money, which is why Capital is so insidious. ), he’s quite (fantastically) right, otherwise. The abstraction of humans into something to be bought, sold, traded–that is, used, is the continuation of the same process which causes us to see the natural world as something to be bought and sold. I ascribe this to the necessity of modern materialist (Capitalist) logic; others might ascribe it to our divorce from traditional ways of life (including Animist and Ancestral traditions). I think the difference in this matter is merely which direction from which you’re facing the matter. Capitalist commodification destroys Animist and traditional relations to the natural world; the destruction of such traditions allows Capitalism to replicate itself. Which is first? I don’t think it always matters.
Rhyd Wildermuth 
When conservative friends are shocked to hear me describe myself as anti-capitalist I always tell them I’m really anti-materialist- because state socialism is just as materialist as capitalism is. Seeing every “Thou” as an “It” is the essence of both.
Agreed. It’s sometimes tiring to explain that being anti-capitalist doesn’t make you a communist–it’s like telling someone you don’t drink Coke and so they assume you drink Pepsi!
70 years of propaganda and “education” in America is hard to counter-act.
It’s also true you can be a libertarian communist even. It’s really very convenient for those benefiting from the current state of things(at least until total collapse) that the wider anti-capitalist tradition(which includes some of the most fervent and passionate defenses of a genuine free(d) market one can imagine) is totally ignored and the false dichotomy of state socialism vs corporate capitalism is seen as the end of the debate, with it being automatically assumed you’re somewhere in the ‘sliding scale’ between them.