(To read Pt. 1, courtesy of Scruggs)
Building Invisible Comic Community Through Interdimensional Travel, Part 2
Inspector Lohmann
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Economics, as a distinct "science" that studies the "production and distribution of goods", is a branch of knowledge comparable to theology in that its object of study is the phenomenology of a particular consensual reality and nothing more. (Of course this is not to say that studying phantasms doesn't have real-life effects: many have been slaughtered in the name of long dead gods.) [For the sake of being more precise, here is Pierre Bourdieu, at the beginning of his sociological extension of Polanyi: "The science called 'economics' is based on an intial act of abstraction that consists in dissociating a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from the social order in which all human practice is immersed." I have shorthanded this notion via a metaphoric parity that equates economics with theology.] Economics, in this light, is a religion of money, one with its own version of transubstantiation: it magically transmogrifies people's lives, and nature itself, into commodities with dollar figures. The side effect of such magic creates wondrously bizarre things, like the creation of a priest class entire professions dedicated to determining, for example, things like "morbidity" and "mortality rates" to help investors determine how to derive maximum profit from people's illness or life expectancies (eg: investing in pension funds), institutionalized bookies helping investors gamble on the lifespan of whole classes of people. This produces horrendous conflict-of-interest travesties: for example, many families find themselves in a tortuous trap between extending the money-draining life of a loved one versus the anticipation of the windfall that will arrive on the loved one's demise. Is this how life should be lived? Is this not the ultimate mockery of the bullshit transubstantiation of life into a commodity, one that gives the lie to a society that professes to value life? Is this not on the same scale as investors who amassed fortunes from the industries behind the building and running of the concentration camps?
Instead of (or, for those doubly-trapped, in addition to) serving God, we are cogs in the service of money — or, more accurately, we are cogs in the service of the monolithic institutions responsible for keeping the market mechanisms running. The Market is a tremendous fiction of religious proportions wherein our entire lives are a form of ritual worship to the system in which we find ourselves.
It wasn't always so. Polanyi provides many examples of cultures in which the economic sphere was an organically integrated part of the everyday life of the community, where traditions and mechanisms of gift-giving, reciprocity, and spoils-sharing form the bonds of community through channels of cooperation, one where status was derived from one's generosity. In fact stigmas and taboos developed towards those who were competitive and horded their riches, since such behavior was a threat to one's community because it put the selfish interest of The One above the common good.
There are other ways of living than under the thumb of Wealth Bondage, but they all involve new economic strategies. Hence the vital importance, when forming new invisible communities, in addressing economic issues in devising strategies of community formation. In fact, the need to do so is incumbent upon those who understand the importance of the situation as our system prepares to wind violently down: the sooner we find ways to form strong communal bonds the more of a chance we have to see ourselves through the coming conflapression.
Simply, the more we rely on us to take care of ourselves, the less we need to rely on them and their fictional, self-destructing institutions.
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As McKenzie Wark reminds us in the epigraph to this article, there is no one strategy, no one right way. Perhaps the one thing that is required is the leap of faith that will permit us to adopt a variety of strategies, which in itself requires new ways of thinking and new ways of being. Adopting such strategies will alter our everyday lives, which, because change is scary, will be daunting. But isn't a new kind of everyday life the goal? The formation of Community is simultaneously the manifestation and the means by people can control their own lives; and this occurs in proportion to which thriving, viable local economies are made possible — not in the sense of The Market, but in the communal production and exchange of goods.
This means seeking ways to create our own ventures with each other's assistance, whether locally or over great distances. We learn to seek each other's help through our ever-growing chains of trust, making use of our unique abilities and expertise. We must learn to train ourselves to seek each other out as our first option, rather than look elsewhere for what we need; we learn to seek what we need through our own community first. There's a reason all those xtian dove logos showed up in ads and yellow pages a generation ago — it was a sign that identified themselves to their community, and community members learned to seek out their own for what they needed.
We don't seek official accreditation, official credentialization (unless doing so provides needed cover). We accredit and credentialize each other. We start our own art galleries for our own artists, our own publishing ventures for our own authors; we develop our own business plans, production strategies, distribution networks; develop our own accounting strategies; become our own postal carriers.
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