A Dissenting Desire for the Death of Dumpster Diving

You know I... found a good cake last Wednesday. I think it used to say something on the top, probably con- gratulations or happy cake day or . nice clitoris or something like that, but by the time I got to it and sal- vaged the poor thing, the icing let- ters on top had become somewhat unintelligible.

However, the cake was still quite edible. Very quite edible, yes indeed - and so hand to mouth chomp chew swal- low. Digest, and shit - these are the rules we all have to follow. But you can eat corn more than once you see, that's a fact. But! How many times can you eat it before your digestive system actually breaks it down? Or for how long would one have to eat nothing but corn in order to have a purely re-edible bowel movement? These are the important questions here, don't deny it - but another arti- cle perhaps? Well... sure! Est je suis vulgar mon friendster?

But after meeting, greeting and eating this cake I wonder if it's possible? The human race started off as foragers, and some of us have had the misfortune of devolving into silly capitalists and do you know what silly capitalists do? They throw perfectly good cakes in the trash and that's trash. We can afford to do this, apparently. Do you believe this? What?! Of course. Well, we're all » going to die.

Here in the west our eco- nomic mode of production is super- advanced modern industrial fucking capitalism, in which goods are pro- duced for the market in order to gen- erate money. This money is then used to pay for other necessities - often quite unnecessary necessities, and our work load is lifted ever higher as our consumption patterns rise. With all of this comes environ- mental exploitation in a non-renew-

able fashion, and severe environ- mental degradation. Thus we are lead to the conclusion that capitalism is non-sustainable. But are you sure!?! Dear me.

Neither is it possible that the amount of waste produced through this high level of consumption is

Staton Island, NY.

But what happens when the west runs out of our own raw mate- rials? Well, we exploit some other country's land and ah... - No! war may even be involved? Who'd have thunk it? Certainly this couldn't be relevant to something that just so

good for our environment - we are destroying the very organ- ism with which

Can one forage for materials here in the west?

recently hap- pened? Even Hitler rode a bicycle, ass- hole.

we extract these ah... important, materials from. Interestingly enough, one of the

biggest monuments here in the west is a big fucking heap of garbage, and

it's growing at an alarming rate on eee. |

On the other hand, foraging was the first human mode of production, in which the goods produced simply remain as part of the groups sustenance, and is

surplus. This consisted of fishing, hunting, and gathering all necessary

' materials over a large expanse of

land. So is it possible? Can one for- age for materials here in the west? We must simply look to dumpster diving. The connection is there - but perhaps not all of what can be found these days will be quite as necessary in order to survive.

Brand new black bicycle frame. Forks with shocks. A new tire, rim and rubber tube - fill it up and go. A nice blue collar-shirt, striped, and a sweater. A bonker horn. A whole cake, double-layer chocolate with vanilla icing, see. Lettuce, green and red peppers, onions, and bags and bags of sage. Celery and a pile of non-fuzzy fuzzy peaches. A massive box of bread and a pair of sneakers. Tires for a car. Twenty-some squares of packaged fudge. Loads of wretched heart- wrenching doughnuts. This is just some of what I've collected this summer through simple dumpster diving in the streets form here, to Moncton, to Montreal.

So don't you just love con- sumer capitalism? We waste a glori- ous amount of food and materials while we watch people on the world's other side die of starvation and malnutrition, and a million other things. Dumpster diving is a radical refusal to accept this pattern of over- consumption as our only choice. But surely there is a paradox in all of this: dumpster diving remains dependent upon this extreme waste of capitalism. Neither can diving do anything to actually stop the waste. And to ask an interesting question

‘surrounding the anti-capitalist mind-

set sometimes involved with dump- ster diving... well, one might be anti- capitalist in thought and action, but can anyone continuing to live in the west be non-capitalist in action, as well as thought?