Molochian shitshow. She took the word away from me again.
Call it what it is, Helena said: a global empire of banks and corporations. Capitalism, neoliberalism, Moloch, all too vague, and all of them framed as if the thing were ours. It is not ours. A small group traded globally in our labour and our land, out of reach, and has grown into something that is extinguishing species as we speak. Then she caught herself. I say we. It is not us. It is a system we are allowing.
Vastly less than one percent of humanity. That was her answer to the question I left on the table last time: how do a thousand groups of twenty become something that can face a government. You start by drawing the enemy to scale.
She has talked to taxi drivers for fifty years and has yet to meet one who thinks corporations and banks have too little power. Ask anyone, left or right, whether their taxes should support local farmers and housing for local people rather than returns for outside investors, and you get the same answer. Via Campesina speaks for some two hundred million farmers. Permaculture. The ecovillages, which in France, she had just learned, cover the whole map. The caring movement in all its colours, much of it led by women.
It is invisible. Not because it is small. In her words, the corporations own the avenues to knowledge. The algorithms that polarise us also decide which critics get through, and the rule is simple: you may sound as radical as you like about Monsanto or Bill Gates, as long as you carry no systemic analysis that could bring people together against the system. Her own page was shadow-banned in 2016, she says. The loudest green voices, people she loves, do the empire’s work for free: bioregional instead of local, and a recent warning from George Monbiot that land-based localism is what the fascists were about.
Where the movement is visible, it is a farmers’ market. Conservative farmers who could not sell diversity to the supermarket find left-leaning customers who want nothing else. The chemicals drop because the land prefers it. The customers organise a sliding scale for the neighbours who cannot pay. Prisoners, torture victims, and above all the depressed come to grow something and find that a seed asks for specific care and gives back a miracle. Tree planting is good work, but it does not shift the system. Food does. Three times a day, every person on earth.
Everything else she has watched fail. The Bristol Pound. Local currencies, which she herself once promoted. The gift economy, which Charles Eisenstein preached until people came to him in tears because it did not work. I said of course it does not work inside this paradigm. The first gift is the infrastructure for the gift economy. She gave me Ladakh in return: it was barter there, not gift, but barter inside a community becomes reciprocity, and reciprocity is what gift means.
I asked how any of this reaches the woman at the supermarket till, with a second job and a child the school is conditioning into empire. If she were emperor, she said, and decreed that everyone live off their local economy tomorrow, the rich countries would be worst off. We are the impoverished ones: a mother alone with a baby that evolution meant to be carried by five or ten pairs of hands, folded into a nuclear romance that two people cannot bear. They need to teach us. I told her that is why the full name of our project in Kenya is Learning from the Motherland, and that the repair we owe begins with the sentence we fucked up, pardon the French. She said she was falling in love with me. She had thought her people were the only ones saying it.
Then the hardest thing I know. A friend spent forty-five minutes walking someone through how empire extracts, centralises, separates. The person followed, asked good questions, understood. Then a reset, back to the first question. The second time round my friend watched the pupils dilate. An immune reaction, I think, because to accept the picture you have to negate your whole life inside it.
She does not buy it. It is simpler and worse. Men say to her: Helena, I agree with you, but I do not want to be marginalised. A billionaire: maybe later. A kind, wise CEO to John Fullerton: I cannot go there, John. Not an immune system. Fear.
So the work is what she calls big picture activism: build the local, and at the same time say in public what the dominant system is. Nobody funds the second half. The people with billions each build their own model and will not pay to get a message out, while corporations spend more on promotion than on production.
That what we pick up next time: what a campaign costs and who pays. She wants a day. Everyone out of the house, phone in hand, one sentence: we do not consent. Not to the data centres. Not to the handover. After that, only leadership that turns the other way.
Capitalism will not do as a word for it. Neither will Moloch.
Name it.
Listen to the full conversation above.
