On the environment and responsible Individualism

**Thanas Django** · 01-09-2020, 04:15 PM

Meat-free-burger, bike-riding, recycled coke cans individualism is akin to a magic ideology which transmutes capitalist excesses into individual responsibility and transposes consumerism onto man himself who is then imagined as a slithery conscious parasite sucking the life out of the planet.

A capitalist excess in this case would be for a corporation to buy timber harvested from the Amazon forest instead of buying the pennies on the dollar more expensive timber from Lithuania which is obtained from sustainable forestry because of a projected 0.00345231% capital gain per annum in the next ten years. In Indonesia, as long as child labour is cheaper than machines the factory owners will simply continue employing 9 and 10-year-old children instead of buying the machines (this was also happening in pre-war Europe).

Still, both in the timber case I imagined and in Indonesian shoe factories, where do I see or feel my supposed “individual responsibility” manifesting itself? Put in the terms of responsible ecological individualism, at what point during the sorting of my coke cans do I force the factory owners to take a hit on their expected profits and buy the machines and leave the 9 and 10-year-old children go to school? How many kilometres do I have to register on my bike before the corporation is suddenly illuminated by holy light and decides to make a deal with sustainable forestry instead of making refugees out of monkeys.

When the city dweller, in his small apartment cage in his block of flats, switches on his masturbation and propaganda box, he can easily confuse himself (whilst using it) into thinking that he is somehow apart from and not a part of nature, that buying and consuming products and hedonistically enjoying oneself into perversion is all there is. It’s all a trick and a cover for the impotence and laziness of a mentally and spiritually and psychologically castrated people.

Man is an organic part of nature and a participant in a community which he forms with other people through social relations not an individualist in a block-of-flats battery cage who purchases commodities. The alien parasite is not man himself but the system which reduces him to the latter state. The only path forward, the only way to see what is instead of what appears, the only method to differentiate oneself from the mass-produced individualists on their repurposed forklift palette Ikea sofas is struggle.