Ed, I agree with what you said about the Market being the provider of resources. It takes a whole network of human tools to run a society. My culture teaches me that it begins with the individual knowing themselves in seven ways. They are called the "Stepping Stones" of existence. I was taught them aurally but given the way that the dominant society has driven our teachings into the ground through the use of the market, I'm just grateful to have them. It was illegal to practice this before the Freedom of Religion Act for American Indians in 1978 passed by the Congress and signed by Jimmy Carter. That was also when they made it illegal to sterilize Indian women without their knowledge at the Indian Health Service.
What the stones teach us is that there are seven foundations of Culture. I imagine them like concentric circles around the core of spirituality which returns to the core relationship with one's mother and ancestors. The second foundation stone or domain is the seven perceptions (yes seven, not five) The third is business or negotiation between individuals and groups or the market. The fourth foundation stone is Education and the Fifth is Government. The sixth is Indigenous Science or organized knowledge (knowledge is the root of generosity) and the seventh is Public Health or personal psycho-physical balance. They function as the core domains or the foundation stones that all cultural life is built upon. The people of this philosophy were the same people that Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were consulting, on the sly, at the Constitutional Convention. In 1883, the U.S. government through the "American Indian Religious Crimes Codes," made it illegal to teach or even talk about these things and they were hidden away and taught in the back country. Only Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter was able to restore freedom of religion to our people and bring these things out to our average Indian person. I know there are people who have done the same in Canada. People who only speak their language and so monolingual citizens speaking English have no idea such philosophies exist. To learn, one has to speak their language and approach them in the proper manner with the proper agreements. As for the USSR, I was never a communist nor did Idealize them. I had my own family and our own beliefs about community, state and nation. But I was taught not to lie about the world. That we gain nothing by a lie but you do create a reality that the Lifegiver never created nor intended. The truth is that the Russian technicians, artists and people in general come here and they don't need help nor are they ignorant. In fact they are magnificently prepared to live here. They don't take welfare and they know how to work the system for grants to preserve their culture here, far better than the average American. They use their language as a secret communication to create good for their own and the Soviet Union taught them to speak English far better than most other immigrants. Not idealizing them, this is just data from my experience. You know I don't like them taking jobs from American artists. When we look at other countries in the first seventy years of existence, there is often atrocities and horrible events that amount to birth pangs for the nation. The Russian serf was far less educated than the European educated (by the Aristocracy) American immigrants here and for the first seventy years of America's existence we had genocide, raciest science and the invention of Eugenics, slavery and until 1954 Apartheid and 1978 religious oppression of minorities. Voter suppression is arising again in the Sunbelt just as it existed prior to the Civil Rights act except this time is against poor people. The Soviet Union is rumored to have had 20% poverty. Today the latest figures here are double that and our prisons ARE gulags except with terrible gang rule and the largest prison population in the world. We spend more money on the military than the rest of the world combined. I don't see that Americans or Canadians are less provincial than the Russians I know and work with. The Russian generation that matched my grandfather's generation here, were abject serfs. If you want to compare the cultural development of poverty through the state versus what my parents had to go through in the depression only to be rescued by Pearl Harbor then you can but I don't see it. Yes I know about 11 million kulaks. We were taught all about them as the state of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma non-Indians were sticking it to the Indian people and killing them for oil. The only difference was in the number. Oklahomans are notorious liars about such things as the murder of the wealthy Osage or the Black "Wall Street" in Greenwood, Tulsa. We were far fewer than the Kulaks. But the excuses from the mass of non-Indians who tolerated it weren't much different from Stalin's excuses. The rule was that we were supposed to disappear and they pushed at every opportunity. "The moon drops low that once soared high, As an eagle soars in the morning sky: And the deep dark lies like a death web spun "Twist the setting moon and the rising sun." Our glory set like the striking moon; The Red Man's race shall be perished soon. Our fee shall trip where the web is spun, For no dawn shall be ours, and no rising sun. Not written by an Indian but by a European woman for a European composer Charles Cadman setting European harmonies to Omaha Nation melodies. Steal the melody and write about how we are going to die. This genre was everywhere. Even the great Charles Ives set one of them. They were praying for our demise but we "marked" their prayers. So the Soviet Union had less poverty than the US, no thieving rich people but they did have an over class of corrupt politicians who are now the rich thieves (Did you see MSNBC's list of millionaires in the US Congress?), but they also took the most abject serfs and trained them bringing them into the 20th century so well that no matter where they go they excel. Of course if you believe the meaning of life is ownership and that freedom means that your land is protected then you have a whole different myth. I see the slimy side to both. I believe competence frees you. Freedom is a state of mind. There is a basic difference of opinion here. Some of the most brilliant and free people on the planet have been in the Catholic Church as simple priests. Friar Martini for example who trained a whole generation of the greatest musicians in the Western world including Mozart. Or as one Cherokee Elder told me years ago: "You can get a lot done if you are willing not to get credit for it." Now that's real power. I also don't see that America or Canada has, in their first seventy years of existence, come any further than the Soviets did in allocating their funds to education and development of their people's rise from extreme ignorance and servitude. Anna Netrebco was a maid but was still trained so well that when she arranged for the audition she was one of the best singers in the world. Not a gift of God but hard work. Dimitri Hvorostovski was from Siberia. Obviously they had opera in Siberia. Of course Sam Ramey, Robert Dean Smith and James King were all from Kansas. But Hvorostovski made his debut at the state opera house at Krasnoyarsk. Would you like to compare that to Tulsa Opera or the Wichita Opera company? Here, they don't even believe that Art is work or a product. If they were deaf, blind, incapable of feeling, smelling, tasting, touching or moving, would they be alive? Of course but would they have consciousness? It follows that the cultivation of the human instrument through the sensorium is the way that we know things. Knowing things gives us the freedom to change and change our environment which makes us able to buy things or not and to make choices. Aesthetics, or the development of the patterning skills of the senses, defines our ability to know the world. Aesthetics develops our psycho-physical instrument that we use to know things with. Knowledge is freedom. Property is just property. The market is one way we negotiate our choices in the world. But the key here is not any one system of marketing but the Art of negotiation and being responsible for its results down to the seventh generation. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 12:07 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Keynes again from 1933 OK, no further argument from me. On the USSR though, when I was young, about 18 to 22, my leanings were distinctly communist. I subscribed to a magazine called "The USSR Today" put out by the Soviet Union. It showed healthy, even glowing, people working in factories or taking their holidays at a Black Sea resort. It showed people being housed properly, fed properly etc. What lie, what an unwarranted reification of something black and ugly. But I guess it paid off at the time. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Arthur Cordell <mailto:[email protected]> To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 11:33 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Keynes again from 1933 Ed, I said that capitalism solves the production problem but seems incapable of solving the distribution problem. I didn't say anything about the quality of what was distributed by the communist govts. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 11:25 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Keynes again from 1933 I think that we have to be careful about communism solving the distribution problem. Yes indeed, everyone may have had something to eat and a place to sleep in the USSR, but in millions of cases that consisted of a very cold bed and mouldy bread in the Gulag. Take a look at Anne Applebaum's "Gulag, a history" for examples of what distribution meant under Stalin. And I don't think capitalism should be expected to solve the distribution problem. It's job is to be efficient and productive. Government's job is to siphon off as much income as possible from the productive process and undertake distribution as necessary. And Sally, I don't think the economy is a good place to try to find meaning in one's life. Meaning has to be found elsewhere, in the arts for example, or in spirituality and religion, or in working for the good of your fellow man. The economy should be seen as a place that provides you with the resources to do meaningful things, nothing more. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sally Lerner" < <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]> To: "RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION" < <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]> Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 9:00 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Keynes again from 1933 Can part of the problem be that vast numbers of people find so little meaningful in their lives? Of course, if so, what to do about that and, most important, how to recognize and avoid the dangers inherent in the yearning for meaning. Sally ________________________________________ From: <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Arthur Cordell [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2011 9:13 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Keynes again from 1933 The tragic irony is that communism solved the distribution problem but couldn't solve the production problem while the reverse holds true for capitalism: production problem solved but can't solve the distribution problem. arthur From: <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of michael gurstein Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2011 8:53 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Keynes again from 1933 It seems that as a civilization we have resolved the production problems but can't figure out how to make the distribution work in any decent and humane way. M -----Original Message----- From: <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2011 5:29 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' Subject: [Futurework] Keynes again from 1933 The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war(one) is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed. * National self-sufficiency (1933)< <http://www.panarchy.org/keynes/national.1933.html> http://www.panarchy.org/keynes/national.1933.html> Section 3, republished in Collected Writings Vol. 11 (1982). _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework> https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _____ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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