Ed,
Your post is a useful counterpart to mine. I was tempted to go into
the area you've described below, but that would have lengthened my
piece too much and I kept to considering what may happen via young
highly educated individuals within what I call the 20-class. But
there are, of course, huge potentialities of young people in the
80-class itself. Considering the immense productivities that are
still available to the poor (the existence of electricity, for
example), the ubiquity of the smartphone/PCs we could see the revival
of all sorts of monitor-taught schools, learning institutes, savings
groups, medical schemes and cooperative moments that were starting to
bubble forth in the later decades of the 19th century but quickly
captured by state intervention on the one hand and rampant
consumerism on the other. By not mentioning 80-class potentialities I
wasn't denying the possibilities here.
Keith
At 14:23 12/07/2012, you wrote:
Interesting, Keith. One form of business organization that has
considerable potential for improvement in depressed times is the
co-operative. A few years ago I spent a month in central Costa Rica
working with a co-op that distributed electricity to a large rural
area. It was one of several co-ops in the Los Santos area. Others
ground coffee, undertook banking, provided health services, ran
retail shops, etc. It seemed to me that, at a fundamental level,
the co-ops were doing two things -- providing essential services and
keeping people employed. These things would have happened to some
extent without the co-ops, but not at the high level of quality and
satisfaction that were apparent.
I spent a lot my time in the Los Santos area wondering just what was
going on. Why were people so inclined to help each other? My
conclusion was that it had a firm ethical base. At the center of
each of the major communities stood a huge Catholic church where,
probably, people were taught to "love thy neighbor as thyself". In
reading up on the co-op movement, I found that the largest co-op
system existed in the Basque country of Spain. It had been founded
by a Catholic Priest. In Canada, people important to the co-op
movement of the 1930s included Tommy Douglas, a Baptist minister and
founder of our health care system, working in Saskatchewan, and
Father Coady, a Catholic Priest working in the Maritimes.
I'm not saying that one has to be religious to be part of the
co-operative movement. What I am saying is the co-operatives, to
function and thrive, do have to have a firm ethical
foundation. Robert Owen, a Welshman, who is said to have founded
the co-operative movement, was not especially religious, but held a
deeply ethical view that people should be put into an environment,
"co-operative villages", where they could be assured of a relatively good life.
Much of what we encounter in contemporary thought suggests that
economic action is based on greed, that people will only do things
in their self-interest. Having spent that month in Costa Rica and
having done almost a lifetime of work with our northern aboriginal
people, I don't think that is the case at all. We can be better than that.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>Keith Hudson
To: <mailto:[email protected]>RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME
DISTRIBUTION, ,EDUCATION
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2012 4:12 AM
Subject: [Futurework] Vacant spaces of power
As we sink deeper into a 1930s-type depression and growing
unemployment, particularly of the young, what Western governments
ought to fear more than anything else is subversion from within, not
riots, marches or street occupations. If the latter become too
extreme or untidy they can be dealt with by rubber bullets and water
cannons (or even armoured cars and light tanks, such as those Prime
Minister Tony Blair caused to be parked menacingly at Heathrow
Airport only a few years ago after a fit of paranoia).
No, what's to be feared are conspiracies by young individuals with a
deep and genuine concern for the unemployed who proceed over years
to penetrate the highest levels of the power elites. In the 1930s,
there was, apparently, a ready-made solution in the form of Russian
communism, so there were communist spy cells in all the Western
countries. In England we had intellectuals such as Blunt, Philby,
Maclean, Burgess and Cairncross (the "Cambridge Five") and, in
America, there were Greenglass, Fuchs, Hiss, White, Silvermaster,
Browder and the Rosenbergs. In Europe, the communist parties of
various countries became very powerful and, after WWII, some became
voluntarily enfolded within the Soviet system while others, such as
Italy and France, came close to voting for independent communist governments.
Communism of the former totalitarian, top-down, highly centralized
nature of the former Soviet Union or Chinese Republic doesn't seem
to have found favour so far with young intellectuals today, although
there was a brief flurry of excitement some years ago about a
vaguely similar ideological movement that was known under the
ponderous name of communitarianism. But this was, and remains, such
a Liquorish Allsorts type of movement without any political
consensus between its proponents that it has little direct influence.
But there are stirrings of something similar to Marxism rising again
in the Western world. The name of Marx is beginning to be mentioned
a little more frequently than, say, ten years ago. Despite the
predominant philosophy of the last 20/30 years that "Greed is OK"
and the increasing corruption of politicians, officials and the
banking sector there is still something about the ideas of communism
or socialism that resonates. And, of course, this is likely to be
the case. Millions of years of living on the African savanna have,
for maximum efficiency and survival, shaped our species into living
in small social groups and our genes into giving us quite detailed
physiological and psychological specifications. As to the latter we
are generally altruistic rather than tyrannical, although strong
social stratification came to the fore at times when adolescent boys
became too boisterous or if a neighbouring group tried to invade our
food gathering territory or steal our pubescent daughters.
This, and a great deal more about human nature, is now known by a
still microscopically small proportion of evolutionary
biologists. In order to describe ourselves realistically we no
longer need the sort of philosophical debate of the last few
thousand years, or the political ideologies of the last hundred
years or so as highly centralized nation-states came into existence
as byproducts of mass warfare (internal or external).
I am not, of course, suggesting that "cells" of evolutionary
scientists are going to secretly invade the various centres of
political and business power within the elite, or what I term the
20-class, in order to carry out some form of coup-d'etat. But the
children of this class, rather than the state-educated 80-class
(increasingly innumerate and illiterate), educated in private
schools (each competing for quality) are going to be the first to
absorb the more realistic notions concerning our evolution, and thus
best governance. Indeed, the more successful modern corporations are
already paying attention. Able to recruit the creme-de-la-creme of
the elite universities, they no longer pride themselves on massive
multi-tiered organization charts but are learning to lateralize into
smaller specialized groups.
However, the new "movement", if it is not a conspiracy in the
old-fashioned sense, will still keep a low profile for some time
yet. Political correctness, which has rapidly advanced since WWII,
is still too deep, pervasive and governmentally imposed, to be
overcome directly. As always with defunct institutions, the old
culture has to start breaking down first. But as almost all advanced
governments are already technically bankrupt with no financial
solution to hand, save yet more money-printing, we can assume that
only those with realistic ideas will be drawn into the vacant spaces.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
----------
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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