on Flowers and Inequalities

I've sunk into a new phase of over-consciousness. I don't think this is the first time it reaches such extremes, but it's making living an urban life unbearable. Shopping poses the most difficulties. I can hardly bring myself to picking up products from large industrial producers. If I buy these bananas, I take part of the responsibility for eradicating small producers and spreading industrial agriculture, leading to uncontrolled urban exodus while fields are turned into toxic pesticide zones to create the produce the rich world demands.
I look at a pepper from Spain and think of the tons and tons of plastic used up to cover hectares of land with greenhouses around Almeria, the north-African migrant workers exploited by the land owners or business managers, these workers handling pesticides as carefreely as olive oil, promised papers, next year, next year. I try to find an avocado and only find some from Israel, and think of the conflict over water resources waging between Israel and Palestine, Israel benefiting from upstream sources and controlling whatever goes further, producing water intensive goods for export and cash. The simplest products, like green beans or peas, seem to have seen more of the world than me, and as I stare at the origin tag, I see a destructive trail dangling behind them, covering up the shop, the people with environmental poison and social crushing, all for our benefit, all because we want peppers and avocado and bananas and pears and tomatoes, now. And hovering on the other side of the trail, mountains of one use packaging piling up.
On those rare days when I can buy a meal entirely out of local organic products, my soul is at rest, for a brief moment, I can eat without the bitter aftertaste of guilt.

Oh, so you'd rather help Brandenburg farmers than Chilean ones, hu, said Popular R. before disappearing to the kitchen at work yesterday.
The question is, why should Chile, Chile of all places, with all its dry land and deserts, produce the food we want? To hell with David Ricardo and all those "comparative advantage" economic theorists.

Worrying about the consequences of every aspect of your lifestyle can become maddening, which is why few people keep it up. The natural phychological reaction is to block these thoughts off, and think Happy Thoughts.
Examples of Happy Thoughts:
Spring is coming, let's plant some flowers!
Let's stop worrying about life, and get married and have four kids!
Il faut s'occuper de son jardin.*
If you fill your little world with positive energy, it might ripple over to the people around you.
Anybody would care for more wine?

I'm getting to the point where I can't blindfold the thoughts away anymore. I need to act, I need to ensure that I can consume sustainably. When I look for a new place in July, the distance to the next organic co-operative will be top of the list of decisive factors. And this is only a first, necessary step. In the end, it all comes back to the parallel world of revolutions...

However, if I once again glimpsed at the Big Picture, the Universe, Eternity, the Insignificance of Life, I might just slide back into the Flowers for Happiness Philosophy.

(Are those bulbs organic and fair trade?)

*I knew it would be pointed out that Voltaire wasn't exactly the Blindfold Yourself Happy type, but if you keep this last line of Candide as it is, I would argue you can still use it as a proto Happy Thought.

The parallel world of revolutions

Envy, greed, the source of all sins. I'll be cooked up in my own juice for setting up this b-l-o-g. Musically, that will be ok. Ontologically, it might not make any sense. As long as we have epistemology to save us from big words, we'll be fine. Oh no, wait.

Anyway, I find myself stuck in an awkward position, between tons of fascinating books and theories and a total inability to conceive a topic for the 20 to 25 page paper due in 3 (three) days. I don't know if there is such a thing as student's block, an incapacity to come up with suitable research questions. During previous semesters, something always eventually popped up. A question I could carry with my naturally mild conviction, research without too many doubts and write about averagely. This time, I conceived a question, had a convincing and natural outline - and had it all rejected by my teacher. Ok, so it's all the teacher's fault. (I'm glad you see it that way too.)
I wanted to find and conceptualise the universal traits of autonomous resistance throughout the world, using in part German 68-and-beyond theories to recreate the German concept of Außerparlamentarische Opposition (extraparliamentary opposition), dislodge it from its historical context and present limited understanding within (German) academia (mass demonstrations in 1968) and give it its true beauty, as a concept describing autonomous, radical democratic movements attempting to create different political structures independently of the state, parallel to the state, and, to a varying extent, against the state. I wanted to retrieve the movements from their subculture status and analytically store them next to representative democracy, as an alternative. I would then have applied the concept to the Zapatistas, while considering such questions as the role of violence and responses of the state. Which is where it all goes wrong.
My teacher, in a ruthless battle against reductionism, rejected my idea. Applying Agnoli to the Mexican situation would prove inadequate, he said. Agnoli wrote a critique of democracy, and we don't have a real democracy to speak of in mexico, he said. And what about the indigenous component, he said. And the armed fraction, he said. Why do you absolutely want to stick to this concept, extraparliamentary opposition, he said. You should be more open to start with, and decide at the end of your paper how to classify the Zapatistas, he said.
Yes but yes but, I said, as my vocal cords knotted up and my eyes watered at the face of failure. yes. but.
In my utter depression (which has been elegantly labeled Frühjahrsmüdigkeit by my sweet colleague K.), I started to realise that I was applying the hopes of the industrialised new left movement(s) on the zapatistas and refusing to pay any attention to them, their identity, their roots. Bloody political scientists. Zum Glück I found an essay reviewing western intellectuals' limited attempts at explaining and analysing the movement, presenting marxists', an ethnologue's and a few other Latin America enthusiasts' view on the matter.

- It's all about the class struggle, man, struggle against the capital.
- No but look, it's more to do with these marginalised people from various ethnic communities migrating to the jungle and having to recreate community rules.
- Ah no, dear sweetest, if you look at it carefully, you will recognise the signs of a meso-american pan-Mayan movement for the assertion of Mayan identity!
- Bugger off! It's all about the class struggle. Neoliberalism, industrial agriculture, poverty. But in a neo-marxist way, y'know, post-cold war revolution.
- And what about this Subcommandante guy, hu? It's like, there's a marxist who comes to the jungle to start a good old fashioned revolution and shoopdeewoop, he finds out that instead of having to educate the indigenous, he can *learn* from them.
- Oh darling, that is just *sssso* postmodern.

Thank you, thank you. And now what do I do? Do I just rewrite the guy's essay or what? Do I have to take the same research question - what exactly is the zapatista movement? - and fool myself into feeling I'll be coming up with something new, from the comfort of my wifi office, far far away from the Selva Lacandona?
Three more days.