Though I am answering in this thread subject, my answer covers three threads: Cozier economics and a (quieter list), Another Response to Thomas Lunde and Tor Forde's Town and Countryside. Richard Moschelle wrote: Is it possible, as Ed suggests, to develop a shared understanding of the 'real' world from an ideologically uncontaminated viewpoint? Is it possible to do so within the terms of the ideologically-saturated and contaminated language which we have inherited? Is it possible to talk about the 'reality', for example, of 'unemployment', as fact, without falling for the ontological and epistemological deception inherent in the language game associated with the prevailing 'work/non-work' dichotomy? I would answer "yes" if you stick to only factual statements and do not have any opinions, for instance: On CBC TV News Magazine last night there was a 20 minute segment on the very theme that started this whole series of disjointed threads generated by my reply to the author Richard Douthwaite and offering him an anecdote of my perception of my childhood in a rural economy of the 1950's. It brought out these "facts". Fact 1 Since 1980, over 2,000,000 million people have left rural Canada Fact 2 Over 40% of agricultural land has returned to bush or is unfarmed. Fact 3 Governments have deregulated many agricultural standards. Fact 4 Government services have been reduced in many rural communities. Fact 5 The government's reduction in Medicare has caused many rural hospitals to close. These facts stand alone and anyone can make of them what they want. However as soon as you start to use these facts, you start moving into an ideological stance because the reader has to chose a viewpoint to make sense of these isolated bits of truth. For example: ( I must mention the most obvious arithmetic, if those 2,000,000, probably representing 500,000 workers had not moved into urban areas, then unemployment in the cities would be less, and there would be at least 500,000 more employed people plus the 1,500,000 who would still be living within their communities. These 500,000 employed people (given that work could be found or developed in their rural community,) would have greatly reduced our unemployment rate over the years and probably returned the same amount of benefit to deficit reduction as government cutbacks and low interest rates did. Surely we would have been a healthier country having little or no unemployment, healthy rural communities and dynamic urban communities.) It was because of the perceived need to lower a budget deficit that certain services have been cut and changed, such as Medicare, deregulation and centralization. This was done by a neo conservative agenda that used the need to lower costs and bring the deficit into line and they felt that privatization, deregulation, and reduction of services and personnel would achieve the lowering of spending giving Canadians a balanced budget. Unforeseen in this agenda was the massive transfer of people into urban centers. The withdrawal of government services, (which was in effect a money transfer back to communities,) was wealth that had been taken out in the form of raw materials and replaced with high cost finished goods that were needed within these communities. As people have left rural communities, they have lowered the value of land, often let the bank take back their mortgages, created local unemployment, in many cases as high as 60%, caused immense stress in individuals which is reflected in increased alcohol and drug abuse, family violence and increased costs for incarceration. They have increased the competition for jobs in the large urban areas, put stress on urban tax bases, caused a "welfare" problem because there is not enough urban employment to go around, destroyed communities both within urban areas and within the communities in which people have left. There has been a massive skill loss as these loggers, miners and agricultural workers try to become pizza delivery people, taxi drivers or clerks in a convenience store at minimum or in some cases less than minimum wages. Because of mismanagement in the private sector (caused by their focus on individual profit rather than community health) and under the mantra of efficiency and lack of effective laws and regulation in the government sector, we have primary industries, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast in which our fisheries have been decimated. In logging, private enterprise has not seen fit to upgrade it's sawmills and pulp and paper mills to compete with mills in third world countries so that now we have an old manufacturing complex that will take billions to make competitive again. We have overcut our sustainable timber reserves and sold that resource at competitive market value when the market was low, now that shortages may start happening and driving up prices, we no longer have a resource to sell. The mineral commodity market which is constantly seeking the lowest price has trashed the Canadian mineral resource market again and again, we have sold some of our richest and most accessible resources at bargain basement prices and at some time in the future, we will be buying back copper, nickel and a host of other metals at higher prices. The greatest damage is in petroleum as we are into maximum exploration, drilling and production plus major investments in heavy oil sands plants and offshore drilling. With oil currently at $16 (since I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, the price has dropped to $13 a barrel,) this is a joke and we should just refuse to sell. It would be better to give every employee in the oil industry a basic wage, plus free skill and technical training and wait until energy reaches a fair market value. In Ontario last week we were told that our gasoline has had the highest sulfphur content of any in Canada because our refineries are the oldest and it would cost too much to upgrade them with scrubbers - the end result is that the most industrialized area of Canada uses the highest polluting fuel. The efficiencies of the market are such that it is unprofitable for them to change even if it degrades the environment for the majority. What's even worse is that we are locked into NAFTA by our politicians - (who promised us they would renegotiate or get out) - to an energy exchange clause that is extremely detrimental to our receiving fair market value in the future for this resource. Because of these effects, we see a degradation of our infrastructure in roads and bridges that taxpayers invested in, school and government buildings that have been abandoned due to the exodus of the population to the cities with the increasing expense of building new schools and government buildings with expensive labour on expensive land. A reduced tax base, high unemployment, a societal fabric under siege, international agreements that cause us to exploit our country more for less - a price we will be passing on to our children. So this is what you get, when you take some "facts" and make them ideological. Otherwise, those facts just sit on the kitchen table doing nothing - is that what you want of facts? Ed Weick wrote: > > We cannot avoid theorizing about social issues or what is best for the > world. However, in putting theory to practice, we should be very careful to > get the sequence right. We must not let theory put ideological blinders on > us. In using theory, we must recognize it for what it is. We must first try > to understand the real world in all its complexity and only then refer to > our theoretical tool-kit to see if it can help us. Ideologues are inclined > to proceed the other way; to go to the tool-kit first and then limit the > complexity of the world to fit what they have found. I would argue with Ed, that ideologues, of which I am often one, take a certain set of facts and analyze them. I then theorize or speculate on what might happen if we used a different set of theories. Without an interpretation of facts, they stand there like pimples of acne on the face of reality, conveying nothing more than they exist and that they are not nice. To me, different ideologies are viewpoints of interlocking ideas that produce results. If the results are not what you want, then it may be time to change ideologies so that different results start happening. I started this essay several weeks ago, how time flies. I reread it today and it still contains things I want to say and so here it goes into the ether, void, virtual space or eyeballs attached to brains which have been programmed by education to identifying these squiggles as phonetic sounds we call words which are the containers of meanings which when combined make up ideas over we can argue and discuss Ed Weick wrote: Failure to recognize this can have tragic consequences. In Marxist theory, the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist occurs in a market economy. Marxist ideologues typically assumed that a planned, non-market economy was needed in order to do away with exploitation. The result, at least in the Soviet Union, was a monstrosity which crushed millions of people and ultimately collapsed of its own weight. I get awfully tired of this old canard of the US's. Communism collapsed because it was a fascist dictatorship. Period - end of story. Nowhere in Marx can you find the former USSR. That was the result of Lenin and Stalin and those who followed. I agree with the other comments that you made about capitalism Ed, so this is not a trashing of all your ideas. You further wrote: Some on this list have idealized a world fragmented into a very large number of 'local economies'. They suggest that this is the world to which we must repair if we are to avoid social disaster. Undoubtedly, there are theoretical constructs which support such fragmentation, including models which predict that the economic world as it now exists must implode. But would we really want to live in a world in which the span of our thoughts and actions would be no more than a hundred miles? Could we be stuffed into so small a space? If you will go back and read my original post in Alternative Investment Code, you will note that my argument was very simple. That capital has flowed to the cities from the rural areas and in a following post, I extrapolated that idea to the coming shortage of fuel that would spark a reversal of that trend. I did not say that humans would be limited to 100 mile radius, but that markets would be local rather than global. As far as information goes, it will stay global as it is now developing and there may even be a global moving of people as in vacations and job transfers. However the hard goods, food, products, materials would not be able to operate globally but would be restricted to local areas. Tom Walker wrote: What both Charles and Ed are talking about sounds to me a lot like 'hubris'. Hubris is a widespread character trait (or behaviour) affecting members of this list and the general population of ranters and railers alike. But, taking a cue from the Greeks, it is the hubris of the rulers that inflicts a plague on society. Tom makes the point that some of us and I proudly accept the title "ranter and railer", (I have the hubris of my own opinions,) exist on this list. However, I take note that the concluding sentence of the above quote is summation of Tom's thought and it is to that hubris I constantly rail. Tor Forde wrote: It is in fact everywhere going on a struggle between countryside and city about the resources of society, and where this is not visible it is because one of the sides are being suppressed so much that it cannot articulate itself. And among the weapons being used in this struggle is the trick of stamping/marking one side/way of life as inferior to the other, or as old fashioned/prehistoric etc... This point was one of the most significant brought out on the CBC News Magazine. That all the power in terms of politics, head offices, money, education, transportation exist in cities and that when you live 4 or 5 hundred miles from the small town or area in question, it is awfully hard to spend resources there when there seems to be a real need closer to home, especially if you can redefine their needs as "inferior, old fashioned/prehistoric etc..." The frustration in small communities has almost reached the level of violence the program stated because they can't get their problems listened too or addressed and this was given as one of the reasons for the ultra right Reform Party's ability to gain so many members, as they talk about redressing some of these inequalities. (whether they will is highly dubious in my opinion) Keith Hudson wrote regarding trade: It depends on what is meant by "limited". In the sense that the number of their products was very small compared with today, and also in the sense that trade was relatively infrequent, countryside tribes did indeed trade in a limited way. I would maintain that much primitive trade was not for profit as we think about it but as a need for someone to take what was available and plentiful in one area to what would be scarce in another area in terms of use rather than as a means of capital accumulation. That kind of trade is a far cry from what our current definitions are which are supported by massive amounts of capital, advertising, sales and promotion strategies and stock market promotion. It certainly did not exist as the current imbalance between trading partners such as the rural and urban exchange of the recent past. Ed Weick wrote: The most basic characteristic of the world we now live in is change, and, very often, change that is rapid, unpredictable and uncontrollable. To me it seems a little fruitless to look for people to blame for this change. In one way or another, we are all to blame. The paramount requirement, it seems to me, is to learn how to live with change, how to respond to it and protect those who are most vulnerable to it, because you can bet that change will be with us for a very long time. But Ed, that is the point, a very small number of people are to blame for this. Capitalists who have no other consideration than personal wealth. Change should be more - not totally - controllable - more predictable - not totally predictable. It is the system of capitalism - which is a growth system - not a sustainable system - not a fair and equitable system, not a non exploitative system which has unleashed the chaos of change upon us and that if we want to control the rate of change, then we are going to have to make some changes in our basic economic system. Tor Forde wrote: But when this industry became rich and prosperous the king gave his friends the Monopoly of owning sawmills, and police forces closed down the sawmills of the farmers who (had) created this rich industry and the new bourgeois who got that (became) a (strong) monopoly and (wealth) was created by that monopoly (and they) built the towns by concentrating the sawmills around the mouth of rivers. The idea of monopoly (which was practiced by brigands who came to be called soldiers and police) that set the standards for the installation of monopoly that was developed through economic capitalism. In this sense, our departed friend Charles Mueller was as right as anyone in identifying a core problem. One which, though it's face has changed, is still with us in capitalism, there are many transnational and global companies who seek monopoly positions so that can set prices in their favour. Ed Weick wrote: The reason that trade takes place is because someone else, in another region, can make something more cheaply than we can. It makes sense to buy it from him even after transport costs are added on. This to me is the wrong reason for trade. It should not happen because of price, but because of need. Canada does not have the climate for coffee. Canadians feel they need coffee as a hot stimulating drink in our cold climate. That to me, is a good reason for trade. Making children work in dirty hovels in India and Pakistan and Iraq to make carpets that are cheap is the wrong reason for trade. This neo-con mantra of efficiency and lower prices is a reason under which many atrocities are committed. The idea of trade should be benefit for both parties, not the exploitation of someone by a capitalist to make profit. Now, I can hear the argument that because those children can work, at least they can survive. Well, the truth is they were surviving 50 years ago in families and communities that now do not exist because the small agricultural and local industries have been westernized to mass production which does not consider families and communities when making an investment decision. Well, enough of this, it has been a good thread. I will be off line till Sunday, I look forward to all of your comments. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde
