Un-Growth.....?

De-growth is a growing movement! A counter culture of slow food, family values and alternative pico economic systems.

The Bristol pound is just a perfect example of this : stop international capital sucking out the value from local communities, and it is possible and indeed most practical on a regional city basis.

Really it is time for it to be cool again to "turn on, tune in, and drop out" while having an aim far removed from smoking pot in Goa. The new aims are to have a good, normal life with materialism and consumerism deconstructed to allow family values to prevail over 12 hour days as a wage-slave with the trinkets of materialism as shallow status symbols.

This coolness is going to happen amongst sections of the community and the message is going exponential through social media. The De-growth concept and other values around spending more time on qaulity personal value creating activities with family, personal creativity and the community is going to have the power of many consumerist brands thrown together.

The impetus for this comes from that capitalism has stopped keeping most of the people happy most of the time. Capitalism has sold consumerism as the route to happiness, when it is just a cheap substute to throw 12 hours a day as a wage slave into the capitalist system. Less demand for property and international high value brands means less value floods upwards to capital.

 Capitalism as a system has shown it's hollow promise and marginalised a large enough section of most western societies and enslaved enough of the eastern tiger populations into the slave chain that the time is ripe for de-globalisation as an organic growth movement.

Economics are a cultural activity and capitalism and socialism are faiths, not activities in them selves. They both spawn wastefulness in activity: they in fact demand that you personnaly waste your life on the belief that something other than that which is to be found in your family, your friends, your local community and your own creativity is better. A promise of a life after life in effect- one day you will keep up with the jones, one day you will have a large villa, one day you will have a BMW.