On Despair (to the folks at "World in Common")

>united by our opposition to capitalism and the state and by our search for practical >alternatives.

As long as there is hope in your minds and an outlet for your thoughts, your project can never be considered a failure.

I am just projecting my personal disappointment because my attempt, which I put a lot of work into, to develop practical alternatives to Capitalism have turned out to be not practical at all.

I am cynical about the prospects for the human race. Don't let my cycnicicm get you down. If you see there is positive work to be done, then by all means do it, and please share it with me because having even the tiniest shred of hope feels better than complete and utter despair.

It makes me feel better to write this note. Here in Eugene, OR, USA, the population is totally atomized. There is no hope, only despair in the culture. People just drive around all day (consuming?, looking for work?, joy riding?), and others on the street are really down, if not out. That's how I feel down, if not out. The economic culture is impossible and it is collapsing, one person at a time. There are no productive facilities for the workers to take over, everything is made somewhere else. They have created a consumer culture, which is now failing, and I see no avenue out of that failure. I treied to devise and organize, but I have failed and I don't see a magical coalescence of free socialism on the horizon. Such would be nice, very nice, but the chances of it happening are nil, or to keep hope alive, next to nil.

Workers here work almost exclusively in distribution. They are so alienated by the environment of their work that they have no desire to own those means of distribution. Even if they did desire such, their understanding of the economic hiearchy under which they are marginalized, precludes in their minds any hope for such worker ownership to ever take place.

You see, there is a lot more to the economy, especially one whic is so globalized than owning the means of production. Even if that were to be the goal for workers, it would not benefit the local workers here. Owning the means of distribution in a fair trade arrangement with worker owned means of production would take a massive organizing effort. Workers are not even the slightest bit organized, nor does it seem likely that they could be made interested and believe that such could be successful.

Even by the far-fetched possibility that it could, we would still be creating market socialism. Just how we would go that additional giant step to free socialism has never been made clear, at least not to me.

Thank you WIC for trying. I hope that I can find the felicity to keep trying, as well.


Most sincerely,

Mike Morin