By JASON RHODE, Salon

We all belong. Whether we know it or not.

Yet the technocrats of the capitalist world tell us we are interchangeable, identical consumers. This is a lie. We are all contingent; we are all someone's child. We are born in a specific place at a specific time. Even before we are named, we are rooted. Each and every one of us is bound up in a history. We are the result of tribes, clans, villages; every one of us is the cumulative result of thousands upon thousands of years of migrations, wars, alliances,

We are rooted creatures. In the old days, we knew this: we kept our ancestries in Bibles, in Torahs, and in oral tradition. To know our past meant to know ourselves.

Nowadays, modernity asks us to believe a different story. Under the regime of late capitalism, identity is determined not by your community, but by your choice of brands. A community, a political cause, a church, a nation, a tribe, a family: these are all threats to the supremacy of capital. They are its rivals.

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