In this Dispatch we're discussing imagination, specifically how it's been strangled in a capitalist society and what we can do to reclaim it.
First, some quick housekeeping, then let's get into it!
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Easy Actions to Take
📣 Boycott Alert!
- BDS Movement has renewed calls for a boycott against Marvel’s new movie Captain America: Brave New World for its revival of the offensive character Sabra.
Why: The BBC posted an article highlighting the “gaunt” of a recently released Israeli hostage while leaving out any mention of the starvation forced upon the Gaza Strip. The BBC is funded by UK license payers and therefore must answer to the public for perpetuating such a misleading narrative.
Why: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created after the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from abuses by large finance institutions. Since its creation it has returned hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from Americans due to frauds, scams, pyramid schemes, and more. It remains an important tool in stopping abuses by those with capital.
Why: Trump’s mass deportation campaigns are starting all over the United States and there are already hundreds of reports of peoples rights being violated, citizens and immigrants alike. It is the duty of the community to combat these violations by arming ourselves and our neighbors with the knowledge necessary to protect ourselves.
Little (Movement) Wins
- Target stock has taken a steep hit since the boycott against them started on 2/1 and shareholders have launched a class-action lawsuit against Target for defrauding them on DEI policies.
- Tilda Swinton honors the BDS Movement when accepting her award at the Berlinale Festival, a festival many are boycotting for its complicity with genocide.
The 3,000 Year-old Solutions to Modern Problems
Revealing History
Diné musician, scholar, and cultural historian, Lyla June, gives an incredibly hopeful and inspiring talk about the 4 ways Southwestern Native Americans lived in harmony with their land in order to create symbiotic relationships that lasted thousands of years.
How could these practices look today, and what would our cities look like if we employed them? Share your thoughts in the #IMAGINE channel in our Discord!
How Capitalism Killed Our Imagination
Connecting the Dots
It can be easy to miss but there have been a lot of protests around the world lately:
- Massive anti-corruption protests have been going on in Serbia after a railway station collapsed. Serbians have staged massive strikes and blocked key infrastructure, and are even inspiring students in nearby Bosnia.
- There have been protests for weeks all over the United States against Trump’s mass deportation policies, including hundreds of students in Los Angeles walking out of school for an entire week straight.
- Nearly 100,000 Belgians have protested proposed plans to cut social services by the new center-right government.
- Panamanian workers are clashing with police as they try to protect their social security and prevent the privatization of their healthcare.
- Thousands in Germany have protested the rise of the far-right ahead of their elections next week.
- Residents in central India are protesting the government’s mishandling and disposal of toxic waste in their villages.
There are many more examples (too many for one newsletter) and many that weren’t even covered by any news outlet. It may not seem like it, but there is global mass resistance to the rise in authoritarianism across the world happening now. It’s no surprise that these acts of resistance often go underreported, if reported at all; it could inspire larger uprisings. In past articles, we’ve talked at length about the ways the ruling class can shape our perception of reality by controlling the mainstream media. What we want to dig into in this issue is how the ruling capitalist class limits not just our reality, but our imagination too.
Philosopher Frederic Jameson has once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, which definitely feels true at times. It’s often pretty clear what we are rallying against, but what’s not quite as clear to many is what we’re building instead. Whether we like it or not, right-wing authoritarians and tech-oligarchs have a clear, if twisted, vision for what they want that has managed to inspire many people. If the left (or more accurately, the global working class) ever hope to prevail, we’ll need to come up with something just as compelling.
The vision is clearer for people in Global Majority countries who have a legacy of resisting colonialism, but in the West our imaginations have been strangled by decades of neoliberal politics and propaganda to the point that we struggle to imagine anything other than capitalism. If you aren’t familiar with neoliberalism, this is a good podcast episode about the topic in our modern context. Very briefly though, it can be be summed up as the political philosophy that puts the free-market principles of capitalism above all else and believes the central role of a government is to help sustain the market first and foremost. It gained dominance in the West in the late 1900s and has remained the primary political ideology of our leaders since then. Margaret Thatcher, former UK Prime Minister, has been famously quoted saying, “There is no alternative” - meaning that global capitalism was the only and best way for modern societies to develop. Capitalism has somehow become the baseline for modern society, nearly any alternative is unthinkable.
This belief that capitalism is the only viable option for modern society is described by philosopher Mark Fisher as capitalist realism (also this issue’s dictionary word) and it is pervasive throughout our society after decades of programming through our media. While corporate news media is often used to shape our perception reality, mainstream entertainment media is used to limit our imaginations.
Because the vast majority of our media, including entertainment, is controlled by a handful of multi-national conglomerate shareholders, the ruling capitalist class can control what their societies see and don’t see. As such, what we do see is meant to instill us with the core values capitalist society requires: individualism, consumerism, competition, instant-gratification, and the belief that we live in a classless meritocratic society. Entertainment is often exported abroad too, which further reinforces global capitalism.
A few ways that we see capitalist values pop up in entertainment:
- Many of the most popular children’s TV shows from the 90s, like Transformers or GI Joe, were produced specifically to boost toy sales. Americans who grew up during that time are more likely able to recognize their favorite brand’s logo or jingle before their town’s native plant species.
- Today video games serve as the main tool to socialize children into good consumers. They are taught the ways of capitalism early through in-game micro-transactions and become addicted into dopamine hijacking feedback loops once reserved for casino slot-machines. Not for nothing, major video games like Call of Duty are developed in collaboration with the US military and serve as recruitment and training tools for potential soldiers.
- Action/Adventure movies, one of the most popular movie genres, generally exalt the singular hero who will save the day by any means necessary, usually with a healthy dose of violence. These movies shape our perception of rebellion by depicting to us acceptable uses of violence (ie: state-sanctioned violence) while relegating armed resistance to the realms of fantasy or science fiction. Action movies have only gotten more and more violent over time, normalizing extreme acts of violence just as we witness more and more real violence abroad through social media.
- Contemporary art, once a key tool for activism and storytelling, has been co-opted by the ruling class to turn artwork into an elite status symbol at best, and a tool for money laundering at worst. Valuable pieces by artists like Picasso are held by the rich as collateral in case the economy gets worse, acting as a tool to store and protect capital. The pieces that are most often sold for the highest prices often offer very little commentary on current issues so we are taught that the best art is apolitical and the product of singular geniuses.
- Genres of music that are rooted in struggle, such as Hip-Hop or House, have been captured by the elite as they repackage symbols of resistance and themes of rebellion and sell them back to us. Massive corporate raves and sold-out stadium shows allow us to feel like a part of a larger progressive community without real political action, all while the capitalist machine still operates as planned.
Capitalist realism takes hold because rarely, if ever, is it ever suggested or depicted what an alternative system could be. At most, capitalism is depicted as flawed but fixable and certainly better than anything else out there. Even when a piece of media seems to critique capitalism, the problem is nearly always a bad actor within the system, never the system itself.
It’s worth noting that art & entertainment is a huge category. This is a multi-layered issue and much of our critique is targeted squarely at corporate mass media. There are thousands, probably millions, of artists trying to speak their truth and imagine differently while also navigating a capitalist system. The issue is that the gatekeepers (i.e. the ruling class) rarely allow these messages into the mainstream if they can help it. There’s also nothing inherently wrong with engaging with mainstream media, but it’s worth being mindful of exactly what you’re consuming. Much of what we are presented with in mainstream entertainment is meant to condition us to be good consumers and workers, not necessarily critical thinkers.
If we want to change this system, we have to regain our collective imagination. But how? By looking both back in time and into the future again. The good news here is that there is plenty of work already being done.
- Indigenous communities around the world have come up with thousands of unique ways of sharing power that were able to sustain for centuries, long before capitalism was ever conceived, such as the reciprocal economies and land management practices of Native Americans.
- There is a growing science-fiction subgenre called solarpunk which imagines what civilization could look like if humans lived in harmony with the planet.
- There is a growing movement to build solidarity economies around the world - community based economic systems built on the shared values of cooperation, democracy, social and racial justice, environmental sustainability, and mutualism.
These are just a few things to explore, but keep scrolling to the bottom where we share additional resources on how to jumpstart your imagination for the collective good. Creativity is a core part of human nature and all forms of art can be world-building and mobilizing. Perhaps the most important part takeaway is spreading these ideas so they can begin to challenge the mainstream. Whether that’s online or in person, we have to talk to each other and imagine together, because this is a deeply communal (and hopefully joyful) process. We create culture when we stop consuming and start conversing.
📗 Learn More
“History is a narrative; it’s a collection of stories sanctioned by the ruling power, and reinforced through words and images that suit them. That was the whole point of taking on history painting: to authorize these moments that have been swept under the rug for generations.”
–Kent Monkman, Canadian First Nations Artist
The People's Dictionary: Capitalist Realism
Widely regarded as Mark Fisher's most influential idea, capitalist realism is an ideological framework for viewing capitalism and its effects on politics, economics, and public thought. Capitalist realism is loosely defined as the predominant conception that capitalism is the only viable economic system, and thus there can be no imaginable alternative. Fisher likens capitalist realism to a "pervasive atmosphere" that affects areas of cultural production, political-economic activity, and general thought.
Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.
- Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
📗 Learn More
Check out Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? If you want a quicker summary, this is a good video on the subject.
Artists Confronting Inequalities
Check out this little video about Brenna Quinlan, an Austrailian-based illustrator, sustainability educator, and homesteader using her life and creativity to design a better world. We’ve been inspired by her illustrations of what a more circular world can look like and think she sets a great example of how we can channel our creativity for the benefit of all and live our life as a work of art.
Resources & Tools
Please share these links with anyone that might find them helpful:
- Solidarity Economy Principles | Learn about an alternative economy the global collective is building and find a Solidarity Economy near you.
- How Artistic Activism Can Move Us Toward a Better Future | An in-depth review of the book "The Art of Activism."
- The Center for Story-Based Strategy | Learn strategic storytelling techniques to help you harness your creative power.
- Beautiful Trouble’s Activist Campaign Toolbox | A compilation of tools and examples for the creative activist, sorted by Tactics, Theories, Principles, Practitioners and Case Studies, all written by a variety of experienced organizers.
- Actipedia | A creative activism database with examples of how activists and artists are using creative tactics and strategies to challenge power and offer visions of a better society.
- The Info-Activism How-To Guide | Creative strategies, tools, tips, and guides for creating your own effective digital advocacy campaign.
- Seeds for Change | A collection of articles about campaign skills, consensus decision making, facilitation, skills for working in groups, resources for co-ops and running workshops with various translations available.
For more resources, View the Full Directory
In Solidarity,
Elisa & Ray
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About Little Wins
Little Wins is a Los Angeles-based creative studio using the power of visual design & storytelling to raise our collective consciousness, connect communities across cultures and classes, and motivate others to improve our world. We do this because we want to see a more engaged, liberated, and regenerative world where all people have access to the knowledge and tools needed to thrive.
