You Practical Utopians

[Jill the Pill]

A Practical Utopian's Guide to the Coming Collaps
David Graeber
The Baffler

I know this article is TLDR, but read it anyway.  I'd love to hear your opinions.  (Don't get too sidetracked by the Iraq war paragraphs; it's not the point of the article.)

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide

Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.

What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace.

What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the economy” (a concept that didn’t even exist three hundred years ago), but the fact that we are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation.

The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.

[Bigote]

As someone with a seven figure position in government debt it's hard for me to get on board.   Seems to me the better revolution would be for everyone to start living simply, below their means, and turn off their television sets.   Become mustachian, in a word.

It also has the advantage that it doesn't require waiting for universal adoption of the idea - each can implement it on his own.