Vivat Libertas

Aside from being an anti-capitalist , I'm also an anti-consumerist. People seem to be quite confused about what this entails, or maybe I just live with idiots. It's probably a bit of both, but anyway, I'm going to try and explain why I act the way I do. What's anti-consumerism?  A word I hope I didn't make up, for a start. In a nutshell, I'm against greedily consuming resources I don't actually need. Why are you an anti-consumerist?  Because I don't like taking up resources I don't need when they would be better off in someone else's hands. Because we live in an exploitative capitalist system where pretty much every product is the fruit of somebody else's exploitation, and I for one don't want to exploit people. Because consumerism is not a particularly sustainable practice and I want to reduce the damage I'm doing to this planet. So does that make you a tree-hugging hippie communist?  Maybe. In any case, I don't like hur...

So I'm an anti-capitalist. Worse, I'm an outspoken anti-capitalist. How horrible, especially in a capitalist society! I've been told I'm crazy, stupid, ignorant, spoiled, delusional, and I forget what else now. Nothing good anyway, except from fellow anti-capitalists. Here, then, is an honest look at why I behave the way I do. Capitalism is exploitative.   Speaks for itself really . (So the link goes to an anarchist site. Bite me. The lower levels of capitalism - sweatshops and the like - are most definitely exploitative. The upper ones too, but the constant rhetoric of living in freedom and luxury and the fact that we do have relatively more luxury make the exploitation a little less obvious.) Capitalism is unsustainable.   Or, to put it more precisely, the growth caused by capitalism is unsustainable. Two reasons for this: firstly, left to its own devices, capitalism will consume everything, including itself, because it just wants to blindly accumulate MORE. ...