THIRTEEN: The Death of Capitalism

My sincere apologies to my readers: I have taken the steps necessary to earn money by having ads (“relevant” ads – I can’t wait to see what kind of ads Google thinks are relevant) on my blog site. Why? Frankly, I want to get paid for my writing. I work hard at it and deserve to be paid for my work. As the five novels languishing in my drawer attest, this getting paid business is easier said than done, and I have the feeling that the ads will earn me about two dollars a month. However, the more you, my readers, click on the ads, the more money I make. So, click away, readers, click away.

So, unrepentant communist that I am, I make another compromise with the blood-sucking capitalist system. Yes, I still refer to myself with the “c” word, despite the horrors of Stalin and the collapse of the USSR, “proving” that communism doesn’t “work.”

Of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union proved no such thing. Communism is alive in Cuba, and alive and well in Venezuela. Remember the transition from feudalism to capitalism took 500 years, with all kinds of setbacks and reversals.

Arguably, capitalism collapsed in 1929, and the only thing keeping it going since then is war – the kind of military socialism that has us constantly at war.

To give capitalism its due, the system has engendered enormous technological progress and reduced the general level of human suffering significantly for as much as half the world’s population. The other half remains impoverished, just as they were under previous systems of feudalism, or master-slave systems (Egypt, Rome, Greece).

But when a system believes it has to be at constant war with the still impoverished half of the world, it’s time to retire that system.

Clearly one failure of the Soviet system was its failure to win the hearts and minds of the people. Capitalism is a system based on addiction – its initial development depended on that nifty triangle of slaves-sugar-rum. Now consumerism itself is the addictive engine that keeps the system going.

According to co-counseling, addiction is a distress pattern based on an undischarged early hurt. In other words, addictive behavior is something we engage in order to keep from feeling our feelings. Chemicals – cocaine, heroine, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and Prozac – are a big part of the addiction picture, but so are shopping, pornography, and accumulating money.

The way to overcome addictions in co-counseling is to exchange counseling time with a partner, taking turns intently listening to each other for a couple hours a week. This relationship that develops between co-counselors is not just immensely healing, finally giving us the slack we need to feel our feelings, but it provides a model of the close egalitarianism that we want not just in all our own relationships, but that we want in everyone’s relationships.

Thus, in my view (and this is NOT official co-counseling policy) co-counseling, also called Re-evaluation Counseling (www.rc.org), is an effective way of building socialism, one person at a time.