Recently, we saw the news that Amazon is buying Whole Foods for 13 billion dollars. Or more exactly 13.7 billion dollars. We can read about this on The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos (personally worth $80 billion) who is also CEO of Amazon (worth $400 billion) or Google it (Google, worth somewhere in the vicinity of a $100 billion but soon enough...a trillion dollars? ).
Is this what we want our future to look like, with more and more of our world being handed over to a smaller and smaller number of corporations dedicated to efficiently extracting the wealth of the many into the hands of the few?
What recourse does our political system provide for those who aren't happy with this outcome? It's more than clear that in the US the political sphere has been captured by big money and Democrats and Republicans are tweedledee and tweedledum - two sides of the same coin with the shared goal of serving their corporate masters. And political third parties who don't take corporate money have been unable to gain any significant traction. The problem is not limited to the US of course, the neo-liberal system has provided a means of wealth extraction for global elites like nothing but the colonial system that preceded it.
A few years ago, for a brief moment following the 2008 crash, there was a world-wide wave of angry emotion. And here in the US this engendered a movement called Occupy which spread quickly through the country. That powerful emotional surge frightened the elites. And Occupy was quickly and effectively quashed to be sure it couldn't metastasize into anything lasting or inspire any actual challenges to power.
So we survey the battlefield where political avenues of change are blocked by big money and unrest in the street is blocked by the raw power of the state. What other means of effecting revolutionary change remain to us?
To fight power we need to understand its roots. Let's be clear, it is our own consumerism and nothing else that is fueling the rapacious predatory capitalist system and all its seemingly overwhelming strength. This consumerism is a predictable outcome of the capitalist system itself which creates the demand it needs to fuel its own growth. Every one of us, with the possible exception of a happy few who are able to live off the grid, is complicit in our own powerlessness. We either willingly or begrudgingly feed our dollars into this system, but either way, we do it every single day.
But we can take back our own consumerism...and like economic ju-jitsu use our own weakness as a strength to develop a quiet and profound revolution - a revolution which unlike that in the streets can develop almost invisibly to those in power - invisible until it has developed enough power to withstand the inevitable backlash that will come.
It may not be immediately obvious how our spending can be an act as revolutionary as a physical occupation of the commons. But an economic revolution grabs for power right at the roots. Riot police can't prevent it or disperse it. It can use its acquired economic power to promote political support that it will need to maintain itself. Or to put it more cynically, but perhaps realistically, it can purchase its own politicians or political parties who would otherwise be influenced to act against it.
What might this mean concretely? Can we start by imagining the idea of a people's Silicon Valley...a crowd funded power center that fuels cooperative alternatives to each of the increasingly monopolistic power centers - Google, Facebook, Amazon and all the other Titans of our tech world. Our consumerism and nothing else grants them their monopolistic mandate. Likewise, it is our consumerism that can take it back.
We can start with a crowdfunded seed, a commons fund that can fuel democratically managed companies that continue to cater to our material reality. And this crowdfunded seed can spawn a virtuous cycle...where consumer dollars no longer feed the extractive corporations and begin instead to fuel democratically managed and communally owned enterprises. We have practical examples on how this can be managed, such as Mondragon in Spain and like any good revolutionaries we can also learn by studying our opponents - starting with the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley.
This fund can nurture an ecosystem of cooperatives, all democratically owned and managed who do business with each other. We can make this choice to create a genuinely people's Amazon, a genuinely people's Google. We don't have to settle for the falsely labeled sharing economy of an Uber or an AirBnb which force us into the Faustian bargain of accepting a useful service in exchange for handing over the last bits of our public spaces. We can have genuine people's versions of the same thing. It's not too late for us to make this choice. No need in this case for Lenin's 'revolutionary vanguard' which in the end only brings in new masters to replace the old. As consumers who vote with our dollars, or euros or other currencies we can choose to have our money flow into this new ecosystem. Worker owned coops, on a global not just a local scale can flourish and we would be both their customers and their owners. No masters needed.
What would the first steps of this revolution look like? Only one part of that is clear, it would need to be a collective effort of brainstorming and engagement. Perhaps those who have the technical skills need to get together to begin a process of developing alternatives to existing services. But these alternatives can only be developed if people commit to supporting them. Some of these alternatives already exist, but they fight an uphill battle to gain any recognition which would enable them to grow on a scale that can compete with the Titans. Perhaps, in the model of Silicon Valley there needs to be some process for a presentation of these ideas and a mechanism for gaining commitments of support from the community. Crowdfunding can support fledgling projects of all types, why not a system of crowdfunding specifically for cooperative enterprises who begin with a certain set of baseline characteristics - democratic ownership and management, transparency and democratically decided allocation of surpluses? In this crowdfunding venue presentations are made and the crowd decides. The filtering process of crowdfunding works in other contexts, why not here where we need it the most?