Drink your sorrows away
A few weeks ago I moved into an apartment along with my younger brother, a former drug user.
Lately we have been catching up a lot. He talks a lot about his life back in the working class neighbourhood in Wembley. He talks about many of his experiences with drugs, alcohol and crime.
What I find disturbing is the way he glorifies the life of the lumpenproletariat, the criminal elements of all classes, who suck the life blood of our society.
His fondest memories are of getting high, squatting for a night in public buildings, stealing from businesses, meaningless sex, and fraternizing with other lumpen criminals and drug users.
I would probably sympathize with him if he came from a more underprivileged background, but my brother, like myself, spent most of his life in the middle class of Canadian society. He has never wanted for anything, never went without his basic needs. Truly, my brother aspires to be criminal.
It is in my conversations with Canadian citizens that I glean a lot of my perspectives on the effects of Capitalism. In the case of my brother, he is being affected by several factors:
The consequences of a culture of obsessive individualism, the effects of dealing with a hopeless world and the pressures of capitalist hegemony.
First and foremost, like most others, my brother is a victim of obsessive individual-centric behavior, a by product of the culture of dog-eat-dog capitalist economics forced upon him since birth. Truly, is there anything more selfish than nursing several drug addictions, stealing out of want rather than need, and becoming a criminal for personal gain? This is the logical outcome of a society that above all glorifies the whims of the few, at the price of the many.
Of course, his habitual drug use also has other motivations, that lie in the roots of the system of capitalism itself. Contrary to Capitalism accusing Communism of being a system "without hope", it is capitalism which offers no hope for the overwhelming majority. Like myself, my brother grew up in a utilitarian Northern Albertan town, with a low population, rampant poverty and next to nothing in the way of productive activities for the youth. Under a system, in a part of the world ( Which is experiencing an "economic boom", or so I'm told) where there is no hope, no future, it is quite easy to succumb to the pressures of hopelessness and be broken by it.
Many from my home town coped with this hopelessness in different ways, the most obvious, and preferred, method being drug and alcohol abuse. The only retail business that truly flourishes in my hometown are the liquor merchants, peddlers of apathy as a false solution to the crisis in our system. Of course alcohol and drugs do not fix the crisis of capitalism, but they certainly help one to forget it.
And then there is capitalist hegemony. The media outlets of the bourgeoisie have convinced the alienated youth to idolize criminals and aspire to be drug abusers. In order to serve the dual bourgeoisie need of pacifying the population and turning a profit from the drug industry, legal and otherwise, the bourgeoisie promote drug and alcohol use in their media, especially entertainment. In order to justify the gradual erosion of freedoms and encroaching claws of the capitalist police state, the capitalist class glorifies crimes of all kinds in their media outlets.
From these media sources, the masses, especially the youth, are presented with many a false solution to their problems: Either get rich through crime, or get so drunk/high that you just don't care anymore.
My brother is the youth of today. He has been stripped of culture by hegemonistic mass media, he has been alienated socially by the education institutions of the capitalist state, he has been exploited as labour by the ruthless monopoly capitalists, pushed into drug and alcohol abuse by
capitalist social norms, and processed by the state police forces as "another deviant youth", another young "monster".
To the youth of today, the image of a criminal, who is wealthy, successful and free from the oppression of the police state, is handsome in comparison to their bleak reality.
For this to change, the material and social factors affecting the people of today must be tackled.
A true solution must be offered to all people, a solution to their problems.
As I reminisce, I found my solution a long time ago. When my friends picked up a bottle of rye, I picked up " the manifesto of the communist party."
There is an escape from this world. I truly hope that it will be my brother and his generation who wake up and realize this goal, and that it is his generation that begins to build a new world, a new society, out of the ashes of the old.
Lately we have been catching up a lot. He talks a lot about his life back in the working class neighbourhood in Wembley. He talks about many of his experiences with drugs, alcohol and crime.
What I find disturbing is the way he glorifies the life of the lumpenproletariat, the criminal elements of all classes, who suck the life blood of our society.
His fondest memories are of getting high, squatting for a night in public buildings, stealing from businesses, meaningless sex, and fraternizing with other lumpen criminals and drug users.
I would probably sympathize with him if he came from a more underprivileged background, but my brother, like myself, spent most of his life in the middle class of Canadian society. He has never wanted for anything, never went without his basic needs. Truly, my brother aspires to be criminal.
It is in my conversations with Canadian citizens that I glean a lot of my perspectives on the effects of Capitalism. In the case of my brother, he is being affected by several factors:
The consequences of a culture of obsessive individualism, the effects of dealing with a hopeless world and the pressures of capitalist hegemony.
First and foremost, like most others, my brother is a victim of obsessive individual-centric behavior, a by product of the culture of dog-eat-dog capitalist economics forced upon him since birth. Truly, is there anything more selfish than nursing several drug addictions, stealing out of want rather than need, and becoming a criminal for personal gain? This is the logical outcome of a society that above all glorifies the whims of the few, at the price of the many.
Of course, his habitual drug use also has other motivations, that lie in the roots of the system of capitalism itself. Contrary to Capitalism accusing Communism of being a system "without hope", it is capitalism which offers no hope for the overwhelming majority. Like myself, my brother grew up in a utilitarian Northern Albertan town, with a low population, rampant poverty and next to nothing in the way of productive activities for the youth. Under a system, in a part of the world ( Which is experiencing an "economic boom", or so I'm told) where there is no hope, no future, it is quite easy to succumb to the pressures of hopelessness and be broken by it.
Many from my home town coped with this hopelessness in different ways, the most obvious, and preferred, method being drug and alcohol abuse. The only retail business that truly flourishes in my hometown are the liquor merchants, peddlers of apathy as a false solution to the crisis in our system. Of course alcohol and drugs do not fix the crisis of capitalism, but they certainly help one to forget it.
And then there is capitalist hegemony. The media outlets of the bourgeoisie have convinced the alienated youth to idolize criminals and aspire to be drug abusers. In order to serve the dual bourgeoisie need of pacifying the population and turning a profit from the drug industry, legal and otherwise, the bourgeoisie promote drug and alcohol use in their media, especially entertainment. In order to justify the gradual erosion of freedoms and encroaching claws of the capitalist police state, the capitalist class glorifies crimes of all kinds in their media outlets.
From these media sources, the masses, especially the youth, are presented with many a false solution to their problems: Either get rich through crime, or get so drunk/high that you just don't care anymore.
My brother is the youth of today. He has been stripped of culture by hegemonistic mass media, he has been alienated socially by the education institutions of the capitalist state, he has been exploited as labour by the ruthless monopoly capitalists, pushed into drug and alcohol abuse by
capitalist social norms, and processed by the state police forces as "another deviant youth", another young "monster".
To the youth of today, the image of a criminal, who is wealthy, successful and free from the oppression of the police state, is handsome in comparison to their bleak reality.
For this to change, the material and social factors affecting the people of today must be tackled.
A true solution must be offered to all people, a solution to their problems.
As I reminisce, I found my solution a long time ago. When my friends picked up a bottle of rye, I picked up " the manifesto of the communist party."
There is an escape from this world. I truly hope that it will be my brother and his generation who wake up and realize this goal, and that it is his generation that begins to build a new world, a new society, out of the ashes of the old.
posted by RedJulie at 11:37 PM
1 Comments:
I'm not nescesarily saying that all aspects of drugs are bad. In fact, this post wasn't really about drugs ( My post entitled "Cannabis culture is anti-culture" is.). This post was more about the effects of modern youth aspiring to emmulate the lumpenproletariat, the criminal elements of all classes.
Agreed that culture is a big part of it. I mean, Evo Morales of Bolivia has de-criminalized farmers growing caco-leaves,from which cocain is extracted, because the farmers chew the leaves for energy. Perhaps in the context of cultural norms, drug use is not necesarily detrimental.
Also,there are individuals who can do drugs,and do so in moderation.
Still, if they can manage to keep things together that well on drugs, they could probably do even better without drugs.
I am a Marxist-Leninist, hence I understand the social causes of drug addiction. Consider the Native tribes that used Peyote for religious ceremonies: they were not socially alienated. They were not individual-centric. Henceforth,
Peyote was used for ceremonies, and not used recreationally. Now, consider the modern North American aboriginal, stripped of their culture, alienated from their traditional lifestyle, introduced to drugs alien to their culture, most likely poor, and suceptible to the same individual-centric outlook as everyone else in our society. Here, you will find a staggering increase in recreational drug use, as the social factors have increased.
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