Living in a shared apartment is a curious mix of personal and communal space. Here at Haraldsgade 54 we have a great deal of the latter and less of the former. There’s lots of space for hanging out in ‘public’ and people sit around reading books, studying or watching television. We do this on our own, together or sometimes with other friends and there are very few uncomfortable breaches of interaction bubbles. When we need some time alone there are always our bedrooms; full of personal trinkets and laundry bags. I image this is pretty much like shared accommodation everywhere. However, we haven’t yet mentioned the universal exception to this stable sanctity.

The kitchen is where boundaries are established, borders are erected and names are scrawled on packs of butter. Resident’s supplies are hoarded away behind cupboard doors and tidied from the work surfaces. But even this falls short of the true communal horror… the fridge.

This glossy, chilled box is the front line of shared living, where notes and bills are posted and war rages inside. It’s a head on crash of irrational ownership emotions. Classification by shelves is an obvious but flawed approach, which holds up only until personal ration quantities become uneven. Encroachment tactics are deployed and soon enough there’s a wide spread labelling and level-monitoring epidemic. Oh for the casual ambiance of the living room and its naive social transparencies!

After debating this for a while at a recent house meeting, we hit upon two great discoveries. Firstly that everyone spent around the same amount of money on food each week, and secondly people were sad to wake up on a Sunday to find their cupboards bare and all supermarkets shut(*).

So, Haraldsgade 54 decided to launch the Grocery Liberation Experiment, in order to purge all mental guards and instilled social norms from the kitchen area. After the uprising, foodstuffs were brought out of their isolated cells, categorised and then put back on to appropriate shelves with their new friends.

The results were visibly stunning, particularly as the duplicates started piling up: six half-full margarine pots, five opened jars of pesto and enough stock cubes to flood the streets with bouillon. Boosted by this iron curtain collapse, we declared a free state under the following constitution:

1. A weekly shop for listed essentials will be performed by house members in turn from a money pool.
2. All personally purchased food lies in the public domain by default.
3. Teaming up at meal times is encouraged and leftovers should remain on the stove.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Personal grievances are nearly always irrational and so everyone just has to focus on keeping theirs in check for the greater good.

Initial feedback is that this evening I wanted a leek for my soup and there was one waiting for me in the fridge. I’m now going for ice cream I didn’t know I had, while trying not to mind that hunk of cheese that’s missing from ‘my’ block.

(*) Danish trading laws

The inevitable conclusion of capitalism is a fragmented population sorted into the intelligent and the foolish, the lucky and the unfortunate, the opportunistic and the meek, the healthy and the sick and so on. One variable that may affect the rate at which this effective sorting process occurs, is the cultural values a society possesses and retains. A blunt way of expressing this is that capitalism is an inherently inhumane outlook, that is successful when self-moderated by a population with common goals.

If we start with a historically unifying event such as World War II and plot the USA’s capitalistic divide since, we might see the following:

We can think of the central axis as representing the degradation of a shared sociological perspective over time. That is to say, a common outlook based on history, culture, religion and tradition that is shared by the majority of a population. It’s important here to note that I am referring to an ingrained, ‘evolved’ culture built up incrementally by many generations of a population. We can also consider the central axis to be a kind of magnetised core that pulls the two opposing results of capitalism towards the centre. As this force becomes weaker, so the graph splits further.

Here we consider the generalised capitalist fragmentation of the United Kingdom and Denmark:

Capitalism brought about huge benefits during its initial and mid-phases, propelling society forward at a rate biological evolution could only ‘dream’ of, but the unavoidable endgame is where the system breaks down. In order for an ideology with this kind of exponential decay to maintain its success, the left hand side of the graph must be regularly truncated and discarded thus resetting the unifying point. However in the world-views of most people and some governments, this is rather tricky to consider.

There are many factors that cause historical, incrementally-built, shared cultural values to become ‘broken’. Globalisation and the resulting mass-migration cannot be ignored as a primary cause. No matter whether the incoming population is viewed as scrounging, violent, rich, benevolent, humourless, wonderful or odd, there will always be a clash between them and established ways of life. This is something that a capitalist system can not tolerate. Anything that weakens the unity axis hastens the end game, whether it’s “damn yuppies buying up rural cottages”, “damn freeloaders taking advantage of welfare cheques” or “damn advertisers targeting new markets”.

Mass population migration only causes problems because current economic systems can’t cope with it. Remember they were doomed anyway, this is just accelerating the failure. Capitalism has given the world fantastic opportunities at a rampant pace, but it’s about time we started planning something that will fit for the future instead of persisting with something that’s looking more and more fragile. National capitalism is no longer capable of empowering a globalised world at once. Shared historical and religious values are no longer enough to keep the unity axis powered up. We need to shift to a whole new economic system that offers tomorrow’s society a single, positive trajectory.

DISCLAIMER: This is vague, philosophical speculation based on non-scientific observation and expressed using coloured pens. It is not meant to form a foundation for your revolution.

The immigration policies of countries around the world are fast becoming the approved knee-jerk method to evaluate how that place stands in global moral and social order. From the racist to the paranoid to the odd, countries that impose new border tightening measures tend to attract scorn from the rest of the ‘free’ world, while being generally accepted by the occupying ‘native’ population.

At one time immigration policies seem to have been drawn up by governments keen on expanding their skilled workforce and/or their cheap labour and were dutifully accepted by voters on this premise. Without these economical issues to guide ‘free-thinking’ thought, would cultural migration have come anywhere near as far as it has? Some people think not, leaving us with the concept that world markets have actually contributed to emotional-society in a positive manner? Hmm.

Anyway, even in countries with supposedly forward thinking policies, things seem far from harmonious. Where has mass generational migration of a culture ever really resulted in workable, lasting integration? Maybe the single, global understanding we are all supposed to strive for is being driven at a speed dictated by the economy’s lust for a generic consumer, instead of by something more in tune with its delicate nature?

Two extreme examples of culture mixing could be: the marginalisation of Native American and Aboriginal cultures (newcomers destroying culture), and immigrant quarters/enclaves (newcomers living outside of national culture through choice or society-imposed segregation). Neither of these methods are championed by the collective conscious, but why is this result so common in practise?