"The capitalist economic system is entrenched and even threatens the sovereignty of countries. I work for the government and there is no single day one does not hear warning bells of driving away investment when looking out for the 99%. Workers are paid low wages and in some instances paid with alcohol (dop system). Any introduction of legislation to raise the wages of workers (minimum wages) or improvement of labour laws will drive away investment. This is on the back of executives and shareholders earning supernormal profits. Any transformative efforts to get shared ownership of the resources of the land (mining industry, land appropriation) will drive away investment, so individuals must be taxed instead."
Our students' well-chosen words lead to an answer to the question, "But where do we start to work to achieve a more just distribution and a more ethical use of property?"
In a truly civilized democracy, the citizens choose the right thing to do, as God gives them the light to see the right. They make rational decisions about what to do as science and a free press help them to distinguish facts from fantasies. But in the sorry state of the world we live in, there is what lawyers and judges call a threshold question. It must be asked and answered before questions about justice and feasibility can even be asked. It is: Will it drive away investment? This is a threshold question because most of our employment and most of the satisfaction of our other needs depends on the confidence of investors that their investments will be safe and profitable (and also as Michael Kalecki points out, and as anyone who lived in Chile in 1973 will remember, on investors refraining from deliberately getting together to paralyze production to achieve political aims even when they could, if they wanted to, make money by producing).
The suggested answer to the question "Where do we start?" is: We Start by doing whatever we can to make basic human security independent of the confidence of investors, and especially independent of the global financial system. Argentina's ABC (Abastacimiento Basico Comunitario) program is on the right track. It aims to make every neighbourhood in Argentina as self-reliant as possible in basic necessities. Every Argentine should have basic health care at a neighbourhood clinic, housing, water and food assured whatever happens in the global economy and whether or not Argentina defaults on loans from international financial institutions. There are many other movements today conceived along similar lines: eco-villages, transition towns, taking control of local territories, time banks and other community currencies, permaculture, LETS (Local Economy Trading Systems)...this list could go on forever; it could go back to Gandhi in the 1920s (swaraj and swadeshi); it could go back to Plato and Aristotle who both postulated that a good polis would be a self-sufficient polis.
When the citizens are secure enough, when the danger of frightening away investors is not a danger that threatens many of them with unemployment, precarious low paid employment, scarcity of essential public services, austerity, union-busting, inflation and police brutality, then what Karl Popper called an open society can be for real and not just for pretend. What John Dewey called an experimental society, where every institution is an hypothesis to be judged and revised according to its results, can be for real and not just for pretend.
Creating a truly open and experimental society, able to adjust cultural norms and social structure to changing physical realities like Covid 19, advanced technology simultaneously producing abundance and mass unemployment, and global warming will require a culture shift. Or a series of culture shifts. From bounded to unbounded. From hostile isolation to beloved community. How does one go about facilitating a culture shift? One method is called the growth point method. It consists of four steps.
- Communicable themes. A growth point must be something people understand. If it does not make sense to people, it cannot be the code of the social interaction that constructs new norms (or revives old norms). Growth point themes can be music as well as lyrics; themes can be symbolic acts like dying your hair red, getting a tattoo, or wearing a coat and tie. Paulo Freire often used what he called "hinge themes" to connect what people already understood with what they could easily understand. A bounced check was a hinge used by MLK Jr.: "Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"
- The growth point must attract energy and resources. It can be either a bandwagon already moving to jump on, or an idea whose time has come that moves people to start a new bandwagon. If it is just your personal passion, you will have to look somewhere else to find a growth point. Remember also: building a new win-win world with liberty and justice for all will heal all and wound none. Constructing the four legs of the table of peace is not a fight of them against us. In this light, it is disappointing to see that while in the economic justice area there are multiple reform movements powered by the energy of the privileged (one of them is impact investing -- investing to achieve measurable social good); in the criminal justice area, there is comparatively little energy powering voluntary self-reform among the police themselves. Here "comparatively little" does not mean "none." I know there are police men and women working day and night for social justice, because my own nephew, Tim McGraw, is one of them.
- To count as a growth point, a movement must possess potential for structural transformation. For example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe propose "democracy" as a theme with energy with potential for structural transformation. Political democracy morphs to economic democracy, and then onward to democracy in other human relationships. Starting from religious beliefs and practices, some make a similar case for the potential for structural transformation of "faithfulness."
- The growth point must contribute to transforming the deep structures of modern society such as capitalism, racism, sexism, markets, domination over nature instead of harmony with nature, and others. Because anything that might be said about the deep structures of society can be said in many ways, speaking from many perspectives, and because anything that might be said might be wrong; implementing unbounded organization with the growth point method (or any social change method) implies a lifetime of study, of reflection, and of conversations sharing perspectives with others with points of view different from one's own.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
