If I had all the money in the world, I would spend it on not being advertised to. Perhaps it’s just the price of being on the internet these days, but I think that the constant presence of banners, advertisements, and boosted posts is directly harmful to everyone.

A Close Read of Ecology of Freedom, Part 4

If our fantasies are simply reflections of our subconscious drives, of the things that we want and hunger for, then the horizon of human life is more limited. If these fantasies are not, then to reduce them to mere reflections is a violence, and to allow this same violence to be perpetrated upon our future is similarly horrific and something that must be struggled against.

Close Reading, Written by: CameronCameron SummersSeptember 7, 2022Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of FreedomComment

Your Desires Have Been Captured: A Discourse on the Mutilated User and the Alienated Worker

There is no individual solution to the situation we find ourselves in. To say, though, that there are no individual components is a mistake. Every collective action is made up of individual actions: it requires that we all consider our situation and broadly take actions – individually and in coordination – that point in roughly the proper direction.

A Close Read of The Ecology of Freedom, Part 3

This isn’t simply a finger-wagging moralizing, though: it’s not simply that you want bad things – on a similar level to the “carrot” of the fulfillment of our propagandized desires, there’s also the limitations forced on us by everything else. Look: not everyone who eats fast food is under the impression that it’s something good or at least neutral – someone may be utterly convinced that it’s poison and still feed it to their kids every day because they have no other option.

Freedom against Liberty, Liberty against Freedom: a Discourse on Rights

A right is a particularized (and reified) liberty or freedom. By “particularized,” I mean that your freedom of speech doesn’t give you freedom of movement or freedom of worship. Each one is a specific thing. By “reified”, I mean that it is an immaterial thing that’s treated as a discrete object that one is able to possess: presumably, we’re endowed with these rights at a certain time (by our creator, or at age of majority.) It’s specifically, in my opinion, the reification that’s the problem with “rights” as a concept – it’s something conceived of as separate from the person, rather than as an attribute of the person.