Is A-49 good for the economy? What is the economy by the way?

One of the biggest arguments, if not the only one, for sustaining the idea of the construction of a new highway in Hessen is that it is good for the „economy“, that it will bring working places to the region,…

It might be true that logistic centers will bring employment, that corporations will settle here using the area to expand their profits, that short term goals in that direction might be achieved and it might seem that „wealth“ is coming to this land in form of consumption capacity. It might seem strange if you have never thought it through, but all those things are the ones I oppose and fight against. We can talk about the danger to the forests, the farmlands and the water protected areas, but we should not miss the fact that that‘s just the surface of bigger and deeper problems that affect us all.

What the project of the A-49 highway is actually bringing is more of the same we already know. It is a continuation of the way of living where humans and nature are exploited and dominated for one simple purpose: power; represented in capitalist economic terms by private property‘s goal of achieving profit, private profit. Worldwide society as a whole (excluding hopeful exceptions) is organized for the sake of private profit after the alarm clock rings on monday. But also on weekends and spare times, here in the privileged northern part of the world, where consumerism fills the gap with the other flip of the coin necessary for capital to take back the profit out of its productive investments. People‘s and nature‘s venture is not so important after all,…

But Economy is, and will always be, something that can not be separated from society and its ecosystem. One of the most accepted definitions of Economy is (after my bad translation to English) the way of organization in order to satisfy needs. „Economy“, dressed up as a formal science, covers normality up to make it appear as the only way possible, as the better one indeed, pretending there are natural laws that make it as it is, as if getting to know more of them helps unraveling the mysteries of the „economy“. Sure they want to rule over us ignorant plebs. But fucking hell NO. Economy is social in its roots. It can not be separated from the people, and therefore, from Politics either. What capital does, what private property does, is giving the owner the capacity to decide upon it, and therefore the capacity to decide on behalf of those who don‘t own the means of production, the dispossesed. And coming back to the broad definition of Economy I used before, capital decides over the way society is organized and over which needs to look after. For sure, its own needs of growth, to maintain or increase the power in its competition race with others. So the capital, using the mask of the „economy“, is stealing from society the capacity to decide, it is stealing the Politics. In other words, the capital, controling WHAT WE DO (Economy), take away from us the debate and decision making process of WHAT DO WE NEED, WHAT DO WE WANT (Politics).

And here it comes the A-49 again, as a little example of the much bigger and deeper problem (If you need more examples, just think it through). So A-49 comes again as the continuation of the imposition of a way of living, a way of understanding ourselves, our relations with others and our environment. It buries, deep in our imaginaries, the chances of another huge range of possibilities, people, organizing ourselves, could choose as a way of living. Possible ways of living where collaboration replaces competition, where the common good and ecological relations replace private profit as the goal society pursues, where we become aware that we depend one on each other and on our ecosystem to live, that we do nothing without them.

And this is not a fairy tail, or a bedtime story, it is HERE and NOW, during our livetimes, past present and future of our decisions as a human being, decisions that define ourselves.

So here is where I stand up now and say NO. I stand up here in Dannenröder Wald, as I do in other many other situations of normality, trying to change it. There is the need to put limits, there is the need for rebellion, there is the need for change, conscious change. A change that started in me. A change that starts in you. And we are not alone. A change that restarts itself at every moment. We have chances. We have our living.

See you out there =)