A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [124]
There you have it. The needs of mass production—a tunneling of resources toward producers—is in opposition to the needs of the community—a siphoning of resources toward the poor. In one sentence the failure of egalitarian dreams. So long as we value production over relationship, and in fact over life, so long shall we follow our current path of ever-increasing immiseration for the ever-increasing majority.
Recall that the primary feature Ruth Benedict observed as leading to a "good" culture, one that is peaceful, and one in which the members are almost invariably "nice," is that members of these cultures have set up a "siphon system" to shuttle wealth from rich to poor. This "siphon system" is antithetical to the primacy of private (from the same root as deprive, remember) property. Even those revolutions claiming to dispose of private property—Marxist revolutions, for example, which in any case do not even purport to dispose of rigid hierarchy—continue in this insoluble contradiction between the needs of mass production and the needs of human beings.
It really is very simple. What you value is what you create. This is true whether we speak of motorcycles, interstate highways, nuclear power plants, napalm, and indoor sports arenas, or harmonious familial and communal relationships and harmonious relationships between ourselves and our nonhuman neighbors. The inverse is true as well: by looking at what we or anyone else creates, we can determine much more accurately than with words alone what is deemed valuable.
By not questioning the primacy of production, and therefore the valuing of private property over (human and nonhuman) relationships, most revolutionaries guarantee their revolutions won't change fundamental power structures. For it doesn't matter whether capitalists, the Supreme Soviet, proletariats, the Church, or intellectuals control the means of production, the truth is that this group—fill in the blank—then controls the means of production. The property is just as private whether the owners claim to be capitalists, communists, "horny-handed workers," or anarchists. Wealth funnels toward the producers and away from the community as a whole. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
If we wish to do away with bosses, we need to do away with the primacy of production. We need to learn from egalitarian religious and especially extant indigenous groups that the emphasis of our society must be on process: not on the creation of things and the accumulation of monetary or political power, but on the acknowledgment and maintenance of relationships, on both personal and grand scales.
How a group that has as its foundation the maintenance of relationships can stand up in direct conflict to a group based on production is a question to which I don't yet have an answer. It is, however, a question that needs to be asked, and answered, and soon.
It should be apparent that what plays out in intrahuman relationships plays out more broadly in our relationships with the rest of the world. A culture that values production over life values the wrong thing, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise. And it will destroy its ecosystemic base. To argue over whether the Trilateral Commission, Weyerhaeuser, Bill Gates and Microsoft, the Bolsheviks, or a small band of Maoists should control production as the world burns seems a wee bit absurd, and more than a little pathetic.
I'm not saying that Dave's condition as a wage slave is the same as the condition of a woman about to be shot by a Nazi police officer. Nor am I saying that to grow up in a violent household is the same as to be murdered and mutilated by a United States Cavalry trooper. Nor am I saying that the Holocaust is the same as the destruction of indigenous peoples, nor am I saying that clearcuts are the same as rape. To make any of these claims would be absurd. Underlying the different forms of coercion is a unifying factor: Silence.