For All the People
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22534
For All the People
September 08, 2009 By John Curl
John Curl, author of For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History
of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (PM
Press, 2009) interviewed by Gabriel Kuhn. (September 2009)
PM Press Book Page
http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php?story=johncurl
Internationally, US society is often associated with rampant
individualism. Your book portrays an impressive number of cooperative
and communal projects throughout the country's history. Can you sum up
the most important chapters of this legacy?
The collectivity of North American Indians remains our deepest legacy,
followed by the cooperative settlements and structures of the early
colonists, and of every wave of immigrants to America from around the
world. Communalism played an important role in the movement for social
equity that arose in response to the industrial revolution, and also in
the Abolitionist movement that ended slavery. Worker cooperatives were a
key element in early labor unions, and grew into a national movement in
the later 19th century. Between 1865 and 1888, there were at least 529
worker cooperatives in the US, in almost every region coast to coast.
The Knights of Labor, the greatest American worker organization of the
time, organized a chain of approximately 200 worker cooperatives that
they planned to form the structure of an alternative economic system
they called the Cooperative Commonwealth, based on workplace democracy,
where they would abolish what they called "wage slavery." The Knights at
their peak approached a million members, making them the largest worker
organization in the world. At the same time, small farmers were
organizing an infrastructure of cooperatives through the Grange and
later the Farmers Alliance. An historian called the Farmers Alliance
cooperatives "the most ambitious counter-institutions ever undertaken by
an American protest movement." The Farmers Alliance had over 5 million
members, including one and a quarter million African Americans. The
Knights and the Farmers Alliance worked together. Decades later in
response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Self-Help movement
organized mutual aid and barter outside the failed financial system,
involving over half a million people in different parts of the country.
In the 1960s and '70s a new generation reinvented collectivity,
communalism, and worker cooperatives and called them the counterculture,
which was a spontaneous grassroots movement involving millions of
people. The current revival forms the latest and hopefully the most
important chapter.
How do these experiments relate to US individualism? Are we looking at
two distinct historical trajectories here, or is there less of a
contradiction than many might think?
When you join a cooperative or an intentional community you don't
surrender your individuality. On the contrary, cooperatives by their
democratic nature empower individuals and strengthen their ability to
pursue individual creativity. American small farmers have always been
highly individualistic, yet in many parts of the US typically also
belong to several cooperatives. Worker cooperative members are their own
boss, and the economic independence this brings is the staff of
individualism. Cooperatives are based on people power, which empowers
each member individually. As the old Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW) anthem said, "the union makes us strong." Capitalist propaganda
tries to link that economic system with the concepts of freedom,
democracy, and individualism, but in truth capitalism is about
funnelling wealth and power into the hands of a small elite, and
disempowering everyone else. The official historians of capitalism
glorify the entrepreneur -- the businessman -- and claim that the
greatest community benefits derive from this. But the wage system is
actually geared to making the community weak, and thereby less
individualistic. The personification of the myth of the rugged American
individual is the ruthless "robber baron" of the 19th century, who
amasses his wealth from the blood of factory workers and later poses as
a philanthropist dispensing gifts and largesse to charities and cultural
institutions. In contrast, the historical trajectory of the American
working people is paved with cooperation and collectivity, which for
generations formed the material base for movements opposing the
domination of capital and increasing freedom and democracy. It is
through this activist opposition and their cooperative institutions that
working peoples' individualism expressed itself.
How do you distinguish cooperation from communalism? From a radical
perspective, is one more important than the other?
Cooperatives are integrally intertwined in their larger communities.
Communalism is the form of cooperation that includes residence, and
therefore often involves an element of separation. Cooperatives are
everywhere in civil society, which has its base in free association.
Cooperatives are democratic associations organized to manage particular
jobs or functions. Their ubiquity gives cooperatives greater power than
intentional communities in terms of their potential as levers for broad
radical social change. It is primarily worker cooperatives and related
social enterprises that are at the core of this radical potential. They
challenge the wage system, since cooperative members own and manage
their businesses. People are integral to the cooperative, and not just
labor that can be replaced by a machine or a different employee.
Another factor is that cooperatives are easier to join than intentional
communities, since to become a member a person does not have to change
residence, habits or behavior beyond the limited parameters of the
cooperative. Mass society today is of course based on the single-family
unit. If mass society were tribal, then intentional communities would be
indistinguishable from the dominant social fabric. A cooperative on the
other hand can be almost any association, business, organization
providing goods or services, a music group, a neighborhood watch, a
preschool play group, or any of millions of other possibilities. Many
cooperatives have a low public profile, which can be seen as a weakness,
but which also gives them power in that they are often flying entirely
below the radar and wearing a cloak of invisibility.
Communalism and cooperation both offer microcosmic utopian visions that
demonstrate the viability of the concepts. They embody critiques of
society. Yet as a strategy of social transformation, communalism has
demonstrated more fatal flaws than cooperatives. Back in the 1820s,
1840s, and 1960s, communal movements tried to transform society by
attempting to organize networks of intentional cooperative communities.
The idea that mass society could be transformed by everybody dropping
out of it and into the new world quickly revealed its limitations. Only
a comparatively small number ever joined an intentional community, while
in some periods almost the entire population of a region belonged to
cooperatives.
Have the cooperative and communal traditions in the US ever posed a
serious threat to the dominant political order and to capitalism? Were
they met with strong political repression?
That happened several times.
The first time was in the late 19th century, and it changed the course
of American history. The counter-institutions of the Knights of Labor
and Farmers Alliance, which I already mentioned, were destroyed by the
reaction of the old system. The Knights cooperatives were put out of
business during the nationwide crackdown in the wake of the
organization's involvement in the May Day national strike for the 8-hour
day in 1886 that ended in the Haymarket police riot. The destruction of
the Knights and their cooperatives marked the triumph of industrial
capitalism in the US. As an historian wrote, "American industrial
relations and labor politics are exceptional because in 1886 and 1887
employers won the class struggle." The Farmers Alliance cooperatives
were destroyed economically a few years later by a combination of
bankers and financiers, and that pushed the FA into organizing the
Populist Party, which staged the most serious assault on the two-party
electoral system in American history. The Populist Party was violently
attacked by racists and vigilantes in many parts of the South.
In the early 20th century the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) took
up the cause to create a new cooperative economic system, but instead of
organizing worker cooperatives like the fallen Knights, they planned to
take over the existing industries through industrial unionism. The IWW
was destroyed by police repression focused around their opposition to
World War I.
The Self-Help Movement of the 1930s was destroyed by the government but
not by government repression. It was undercut by New Deal work programs
like the WPA, which offered a cash income to almost anybody at a time
when the money system was stopped, while the co-ops offered only barter.
The Roosevelt administration starved the Self-Help co-ops to death by
refusing to qualify work in them as WPA work, and refusing any financial
help to co-ops which sold the products they produced rather than barter
them or make them for self use. The New Deal helped numerous rural
cooperatives of different types, but few urban co-ops, and drew the line
at worker cooperatives, which threatened the wage system.
The Peoples Food Systems of San Francisco and Minneapolis of the 1970s
were victims of the last chapter of government repression -- or I should
say probably victims, because government guilt has never been
definitively proven. In those cities and in others around the country,
food-related cooperatives and collectives came together to try to set up
an alternative system. The Food Systems could be seen as the culmination
of the spontaneous movement known as the '60s counterculture. As they
became larger and more successful, they met the fate of many progressive
groups in that period: they were disrupted and destabilized by
individuals and small groups within their system. Although it has never
been proven that the Food Systems were victims of government agents such
as the Nixon administration's Cointelpro which destroyed numerous
progressive groups, many participants, particularly in San Francisco,
were convinced that was the case.
What is the situation today? Your book mentions how many cooperatives
have entered the mainstream. Do radical cooperative and communal
potentials remain?
The world is entering into a visionary period. People all over the
planet are creatively reinvisioning the world economic system. The
potential of radical cooperative and communal movements is greater now
than at any time in history. Because the world economic system needs
cooperatives to fill in the gaps, the movement is starting to become
mainstream in some places; but that also embodies a new threat to the
movement's integrity and ability to fulfil its mission. Economic
collapse, climate change, and population explosion have jolted many
people into the realization that the current economic system is not
geared to handle the upcoming crises of the 21st century. Unless we
change, by all predictions the near future will include vast
unemployment and marginalization, huge population movements, and
devastation of numerous local economies. Unless we reinvent the world
system, we will suffer catastrophes of a global magnitude. That has
already been recognized by the United Nations, which in 2002 called on
governments to form an alliance with the cooperative movement to grow
the worker cooperative sector in every country to a magnitude where it
can become a key mechanism in solving the worldwide problems of
unemployment and poverty. The cooperative movement (which includes
communalism) needs to cautiously welcome that alliance with government.
Welcome because government is a counterweight to the private and
corporate sector's ability to generate resources, which the movement
sorely needs. Most of the world's wealth and resources, which embody the
ability to shape the world, have been privatized. The movement needs to
accept access to resources from government cautiously, without being
dominated by it. The movement must retain its independence to really
affect social change, because government will not do it. Government
support involves paternalism, and paternalism strangles and destroys
mutual aid. The movement must deal with governments from a position of
strength. Fortunately there is another counterbalance in civil society:
nonprofits, NGOs, community groups, spiritually-based organizations, and
similar institutions. There already is a growing alliance between the
cooperative movement and many of these organizations, and they are
increasingly including support of social enterprises in their missions.
The International Labour Organization (ILO), representing the labor
movements of the world, has joined the coalition. While much of the
labor movement in the last century was hostile to worker cooperatives
because they blur the line between employer and employee, now the ILO is
promoting worker cooperatives, because labor unions as we have known
them have been marginalized. The overarching goal of the labor movement
has always been to improve the lives of the community of working people,
but that has been limited by a narrow focus on increasing their members'
salaries and benefits. By supporting worker cooperatives and other
social enterprises, labor unions are returning to their original mission
of struggling for broad social equity. As unions increasingly support
the larger working population, the community should in turn increasingly
support labor struggles, as they did in the 1930s. Worker cooperatives
are strong in small industries and businesses, but organizing larger
firms is out of reach of the meagre resources that the movement can
gather, so the union movement is integral to the larger struggle for
workplace democracy.
What is the future role of cooperative and communal projects in radical
politics? What are the prospects?
Radical politics is not defined by elections or demonstrations. It
involves innumerable everyday interactions. Governments and elections
make up only a small fraction of politics, which are part of all human
group activities. Politics are the processes by which groups make
decisions. The dominant political form of today's society is hierarchy:
authoritarian command structures of power elites. Cooperation,
collectivity, and communalism in contrast are based on free association
of equals in unhierarchical democratic structures. They embody the
opposition to the dominant paradigm, and mirror the ends they're working
toward. The internal structures and methods of all truly radical
organizations need to reflect their ends if they ever really want to
reach them. The idea that radical organizations must take on
hierarchical structures in order to effectively oppose the hierarchy of
society, is a sham and a delusion. Any apparent success of such an
organization is hollow and sets the real movement back. The
counter-institutions built through radical politics always have to
reflect the goals of social justice and equity. Cooperatives,
collectives, and intentional communities do this by extending democracy
to the economic sphere. They are a conscience to radical politics, and
help to keep it focused on its long-term mission instead of getting
sidetracked by short-term apparent gains. Radical groups organized
according to the structures of collective democracy are cooperatives
themselves. Radical politics by its very nature is a cooperative project.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We�rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_
J.H.Boersema
An important question is: why haven't they won, we won.
From a theoretical perspective there are some ideas that might serve
as blind hypotheses:
- Not enough people joined, not enough people `saw the light,' through
faults on their side (moral, intellectual, cowardice, etc).
- The workplaces where run incompetently, thus they destroyed
themselves from the inside out.
- They where destroyed from the outside by the wider capitalist powers.
- Combinations of the above.
If they where destroyed from the outside:
- Violence (such as happened against the Red Indians).
- Economic warfare, like super-over-funding competitors in the market,
blockading cooperative products/services etc.
- Propaganda war.
If they where destroyed from the inside out, incompetence:
- Lack of structure, lack of protocol.
- Inadequate social system (no structure, or a bad structure).
- Inadequate economic system (no structure, no ability to punish
lazyness effectively and reward hard and competent work).
- Amateurism in general, general lack of intelligence.
- Social problems between members.
My guess is that somewhere between those possibilities the reasons can
be identified.
If I had to speculate I think the following issues are the problem:
- Inadequate economic system.
- Using a "total plan economic" system, which is a non-system. Without
an economic system, everything hangs from the social system. When
the unit is small, say 30 persons or less, then the lack of economic
system is probably already starting to hurt that cooperative (not
so much with the Red Indians, we are talking about the white man,
who'se moral and mental behavior is a lot worse then that of the
Red Indians, IMHO, a lot worse.)
- Not allowing for a certain competitive element in a market system,
thus being economically unable to select and reward competence and
work, while being socially unable and morally unwilling to punish
incompetence.
- Not using a land-individual distributive system, thus again
undermining that platform for individual economic life, self reward
for self competence.
- Not using your own high strength (difficult to attack / counterfit)
money system, not being a sovereign country really. Which is
practically impossible unless you are with millions upon millions
in one area already. But that something is difficult to achieve
and people can't be faulted for not doing it, that doesn't mean
that not having achieved that kind of set up (sovereignty) hasn't
been a cause for collapse.
- Inadequate social / Governance system.
- In general people start with a relatively small group, and protocols
are then not a big issue, not even having a proper economic system
is an issue. It would both only be a big drag. But with more
numbers, it becomes more and more important. However, once the
cooperative has become used to doing things a certain way, the laws
become more or less a fixation of how things are going (how they
are ideally going, but still following past practice).
This means the practice was first and the laws are merely a shadow
of "best practices." This means laws are secondary, and practices
tend to be primary. That is a weak kind of set-up.
Example: say 5 senior members are very competent and social, they
gain 40 more members, but it is always these 5 persons that know
nearly everything. One day they decide to write a Constitution.
It says: "the 5 oldest serving members run the cooperative from
day to day, in the service to everyone." Sounds typical, because
the emphasis is on vague moral standards, not strict protocol.
Say people tend to get together in a grand meeting every month, so
that also becomes a law. Then 4 senior members die but the next
4: they are not good enough to do that job. But now they got power,
and they want to run things their way for a change ... So down the
cooperative goes, down the tubes. Practice was good while it lasted,
laws flowed from practice and where basically nothing but a written
record of practice. The laws worked only when the special
circumstances that made practice work lasted. Then the special
conditions changed, all became depending on the quality of the law,
but that quality was bad.
I am fantasizing of course, but it seems relatively natural
things would go this way. It is the laws of the Red Indians
that you can readily find on the I'net, because they are
Grandiose. Not the laws of many communes / cooperatives, maybe
they weren't so grandiose, then. I never really heard about
co-operatives that had a grandiose protocolized abstract law
that would work in any condition using any social make up of
the group. A great example of cooperative law is the Great Peace
Law of the Haudenosaunee (Red Indians, now NY area.)
This is why I think these cooperative movements tend not to survive
their own success. The bigger they become, the more they become
dependent on their own laws rather then their unique structure.
With 40 members, the 5 senior members could still manage. They where
the real idealists, the hard core socialists. But with 40.000 members,
they could not have, unless they wrote a good set of abstract laws that
would work when they where gone. Extending the law to make it
"the senior 5%" would not work, because those 5 had a unique practical
competence to them, not replicated in the additions afterwards.
With 40.000 people you start to need a real economy, with power to
start up businesses, with some competition for competence, and you need
the rest and quiet that a real functional Constitution affords.
You need a real state system. Real money, and you even need a real
prison, and so on. Things get very real all of a sudden, amateurism
doesn't work anymore. Some people get sick, life threatening
conditions, children need to go to school, etc etc. It becomes a real
country. I think that is more serious then most white idealistic people
are even prepared to deal with. They want "a nice little social
corner," but the reality is you have to be your own complete country,
with everything there is to something like that - and that is bigger
then anyone can keep in their heads in real time. The answer is law
and protocol.
40.000 Red Indians, without a state structure, without an economic
system ? I foresee no problem. They will have a state system before
the year is over. In any case, they'll revert to the oldest and wisest
for the moment. What will they do: install laws, for some reason they
have been able to do that kind of thing.
40.000 White man ? Must be some very unique white man then, or else.
I doubt they'll end the year with a good state system; when has the
white man ever set up a proper state system, ever in all of history ?
Never ! Never ! Oyoyoyoyoy .... The USA Constitution ?! Not good, has
some good points but overall it is not real democracy. The declaration
of les droit humaine, or the Communist manifesto: doesn't contain a
state system, only a set of principles. Might be good principles, but
that isn't a state system yet. The Torah then, the Constitution of
Israel ? Most famous law system in the world. Oy, not even that contains
a state system. The jews decided that a hunk of metal was their state
system, and then that they wanted a King, so that is just nothing then.
As a state system at least. Torah still has a correct economic system
though, and is unique in the world in that respect.
As far as I'm aware there is only one functional state system that
has functioned on Earth: the Great Peace Law of the Haudenosaunee. The
rest is just cobbled together from actual practice. It will only work
while it lasts and in any case it does not work properly even then.
It doesn't work well now, it hasn't worked well in the past, and in the
future it doesn't seem it is going to work either. Still infinitely
better then absolute rule by a King though, at least a relative
success then.
So, what do we need ....
- We need to have our own high strength money.
- WE NEED OUR OWN PROPERLY FUNCTIONING STATE SYSTEM.
- We need the RULE OF LAW in these cooperatives or should I say: states.
- That means we need judges and police, at least those functions must
be present and active, and they most rule the day every day.
- We need a real economy, trade, free trade, freedom of initiative.
Extremely important long term. It is also good for the lazy, because
they will be forced to work and become more competent. The lazy of
yesterday are the good happy workes of tomorrow.
- We need distributed land ownership, because we are farmers. We are
farmers and we are craftsmen and machine operators now, that means
permanent land usage, and that means distribution. Hunter gatherers
do not need land distribution, but we do. We are in a different kind
of society. I suppose that's why the law of the Haudenosaunee had it
easier, because they didn't use land the way we do now, the simpler
economy meant it could manage with simpler rules. Also the group size
of the Haudenosaunee is much smaller, and that makes everything
greatly more simple. The spacial distribution of the Red Indians in
relatively small isolated groups makes it possible to have local
sovereignty, and this also is much easier. Things are now more
difficult: more total use of the land, we control the whole land,
and we are with millions upon millions in small areas. I don't say
management becomes impossible, if people are orderly it is possible.
But the human factor is bigger then it was.
- Needless to say a certain moral minimum would do the society a lot of
good indeed. Not murdering, raping, stealing, and so on.
By the way, I don't think we can or should just adapt the Red Indian
state models, although there might very well be some models that are
pretty good indeed. The Red Indian model requires a certain high level
behavior from their chiefs; I don't see any white man capable of doing
that. So what we need is to duplicate the total of the people
as perfectly as possible into the state, with all the competence and
incompetence, with all the wisdom and idiocy, 1:1. That is also the
most pure model, in that sense better and more future ready then having
high level chiefs servicing the communities.
What this all boils down to is: we need a law system that describes
all these things, from the economy to the state system.
Such a Constitution can be found here: www.socialism.nl
I don' think such a Constitution can be found anywhere else, nobody
has devised a serious (239 law) Constitution flowing from these principles
for a farming and industrial people (AFAIK). I think the Red Indian
are probably the only ones who could manage this world with their own
laws, because if they say "the factory is owned by all who work there,"
then I'm sure they will actually do that. Other peoples, maybe a little,
until it collapses, right ? Too much anger and infighting. The Red
Indians know what is justice when they see something, no other people
can do that. Certainly their respected chiefs and elders and their
councils are pretty good indeed. They can correct their injustices
immediately when they see them, other peoples can not (AFAIK). Red
Indians: USA & Canada areas, not lower.
Capitalist law: capitalist law is also pretty much actual practice
then codified in law. Just look at the money system: fractional reserve
banking is an old goldsmidth scam ! It is now the law ! Crime invented
after the middle ages rules the world ! Absurd ! The democratic
system we have: there where many "movements" who formed organizations,
this became the multi-party democratic state. While it lasts, while
the conditions of having the people be separated into "movements"
lasts ... When that ends, the system mutates and each party comes out
with a bundle of opinions, you can then vote for bundles of opinions.
My opinion can not be found in any of those bundles. The `socialist
party,' is ultimately capitalist and I'm anti-capitalist, the `New
Communist Party Netherlands' is for the total-plan economy and I'm
pro free market. Then downgrade to a single issue party like Democrats
1966, who at least officially want to install the binding state
Referendum (since 1966! still no success...) ... I can't trust them,
and they are the most extreme pro-EU party, and I am extremely against
the EU. Then downgrade to basically non-political single issue party:
`The Party for the Animals,' ... while social justice is my top priority
then maybe I can vote for animal rights ... Isn't that sad. Can't
vote for `Green-Left' either, because they are pro-capitalist system
and very pro-EU also. Basically all the parties are pro-capitalism.
Maybe that is because we are really not a country ruled by movements
anymore, but a country ruled by investment capital dominated mass
media, who will not tolerate any anti-capitalist movements or parties.
The multi-party system is losing steam, it does not conform much to
the social / political reality of society anymore like it once did.
This means dissatisfaction within the people about the political
process. That means destabilization of the political process, and
that means things could change rapidly and in bad anti-democratic ways.
We now have 3 right wing populist attempts to jump into this
dissatisfaction, who knows what these right wing populists will do
once they gain real power ...
The question is quite urgent now: how to upgrade or change the system,
so that the demands of the dissatisfaction are met.
That is a question of ... electing good people or electing the proper
movement, finally ? Finally we find that one movement that will save us
all ? No: it is a question of installing better state law and protocol.
The will of the people will have to be met, constantly, every day.
A benevolent ruler, he/she dies one day, and a not so benevolent ruler
will one day rule and cause suffering. The question is: how to get the
opinion of the people into the pen that writes down the decisions and
laws. It is a question of how to do that, how to structure that in law.
Not: let's go out and find the most moral leader who we can trust.
That has little future.
But: should we go and have meetings all over the country, tens of
thousands of meetings, to debate things and conclude things, and
have those opinions form and rule the day. That sounds like it could
capture the actual will of the people, and refine that will within
the people through debates that the people have with themselves.
I think that is thinking in the correct direction toward a solution.
The question then quickly becomes very practical, and that's exactly
what we need: where are those meetings going to take place, who is
going to be in them, how many, how regular will they be held, who
will chair them and why, how do we make sure it becomes an opinion
forming platform and not a pre-formed top-opinion ratification excuse ...
How to give such a model actual power, how to give it the power to
break down top people that stand in its way.
That is thinking about law and protocol, rather then what holy boss
man we are going to subjugate ourselves to next. Or what string of
marginal political issues we are going to get behind next.
*
Why has capitalism been relatively stable (as in "it survived until
now more or less as the dominant force"), it has probably been a good
survivor because it is a free market system. Note that Indian tribes
also traded between themselves. It is an anonymity problem that you
need trade, and secondly it works economically. Within that model is
a parasite: landed nobility and/or investors. The problem is that
this parasitic class is constantly re-emerging in the functioning
market economy, because of the mistakes of that model. We have a
stabilizing market system, which because of its inadequate system in the
area of land and money constantly re-creates the parasite classes. That
appears to be "stable," then but it is a dynamic stability. The free
market is the best thing and most stable but every time again the
parasite emerges into it. The free market keeps society going,
and the emerging parasite makes it into "exploitive capitalism," or
"exploitive feudalism," or both.
Take out the parasite by correcting the system in the area of land
and money, and you have the stability of the free market, but without
the parasite(s). That means different laws for money investment and
land ownership, those are the most important economic problems. If
you want to go for an even stronger form of stability: deal with the
issue of company ownership in a democratic way. If you do that, I
don't think the system can be sunk, it'll be too strong for corruption
to overcome - unless corruption and subjugation is the endemic way
of a people (but even then, long term it could right itself, it
probably would).
The questions to build a law system are:
* How can we take /land/ out of the free market, without creating other
(perhaps more serious) problems.
* How can we take /business investment credit/ out of the free market,
without creating other (perhaps more serious) problems. How can we
properly restructure the money system, so that it will function
properly for its usual and natural tasks: trade, taxation, business
credit, consumption credit, mortgages. This is actually quite a simple
matter.
* How can we set up a state system that would work under any conditions
that might socially arise in the people.
Whether the people happen to be divided into movements or not.
How can we learn from the Red Indians, the Haudenosaunee in
particular, how to do this. How can the white idealists get away from
their exclusive focus on "individual moral behavior as the answer to
everything," and get these people to understand the value of law and
protocol. Note that the Red Indian neither rely on individual moral
behavior as the answer to everything, and neither did ancient Israel.
I guess this also shows a problem with the white man: they focus
only on individual moral behavior, because they know it is not good.
Because they still haven't solved that problem, they still aren't
ready to solve the problems of a society at large.
Recently I talked to someone from Asia, and he said that if the people
believed in something, they'd get behind it. And that's just the way
things go: someone is correctly upset about problems, voices opposition.
Eventually people join, offer their help, ask what should they do.
Then some kind of natural leadership emerges in that "movement." All
is well and fine, because the original leader happens to be a moral and
great person, it was not for no reason he was upset and others where
not upset. But then he dies some day. Maybe he leaves a movement,
maybe he has made it to be a big leader in his country. The question
is: did he leave that movement or country with absract laws that
describe how the power is to flow in that society ? So that things
would survive properly, the corruption can be defeated constantly ?
Was he a great peacemaker, like the Red Indians have had, that installed
a peace law when he had the chance ? The great peacemaker still rules
the Red Indians even though he is dead for many centuries, because he
presented them good laws, rules that function to this day (to the
degree possible under USA opression.)
The Great Law of Peace, or the Great Binding Law starts like this:
1. I am Dekanawidah and with the Five Nations' Confederate Lords
I plant the Tree of Great Peace. I plant it in your territory,
Adodarhoh, and the Onondaga Nation, in the territory of you who
are Firekeepers. I name the tree the Tree of the Great Long Leaves.
Under the shade of this Tree of the Great Peace we spread the soft
white feathery down of the globe thistle as seats for you, Adodarhoh,
and your cousin Lords. We place you upon those seats, spread soft
with the feathery down of the globe thistle, there beneath the shade
of the spreading branches of the Tree of Peace. There shall you sit
and watch the Council Fire of the Confederacy of the Five Nations,
and all the affairs of the Five Nations shall be transacted at this
place before you, Adodarhoh, and your cousin Lords, by the Confederate
Lords of the Five Nations.
2. Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace, one to
the north, one to the east, one to the south and one to the west.
The name of these roots is The Great White Roots and their nature is
Peace and Strength. If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations
shall obey the laws of the Great Peace and make known their disposition
[end quote]
Note the word "laws." The peace is laws. When will the white man
understand ? Laws are nearly everything.
Ever since before the days of the Roman Empire, AFAIK German tribes
would elect their top leader, their King. Democracy ? It is a level
of democracy. Ever since it has never been enough, has peace ruled ?
Unfortunately this is still how the people perceive democracy:
selecting the top bosses, and then subjugating themselves to them. If
not in thought, then in practice. In the USA this is very bad indeed,
it is truly a "barbarian" (a name the Romans gave those German
tribes because of their language) type of democracy, where it is all
about the top-boss, the King. What do the "movements" that are behind
political parties do ? They usually have meetings with members and
officially these meetings are the power. They select leaders, and even
tend to demand certain policies to be carried out. Then these leaders
stand for general elections, and then the various movements leaders
that make it have to cooperate with eachother to form a cooperative
agreement based on which they will rule together the next 4 years. When
you hear it you think "will that work ?!" To a degree it does,
convulated and stepped as it is. It certainly is better then having
these movements take up arms to decide who really is the majority.
It is better then being ruled by absolute Kings for life.
It is not enough. Something is lacking ... something gets forgotten
along the long line ... the will of the people ? In this system,
which also involves the failed capitalist economy which does a lot of
damage to this political process, the will of the people - it seems -
is often not being carried out. It is always dangerous to say something
like that, because maybe the will of the people is being carried out,
it just not being my will. But AFAIK the general sentiment among the
people is that the politicians do not do the will of the people.
Hence: you could call the present day system as having a level of
democracy, like the democracy of the "barbarians" could be called
having a level of democracy. But it is not good enough, which means
it needs to change. The question is: to what should it be changed.
A people deserving such change is a people which is pre-occupied
with this question day and night.
It will, for sure, be a tremendous change for society, to change it
from an essentially top-down run "barbarian" democracy, into a true
people's participatory democracy. That would mean people who haven't
been allowed to even express their will in a meaningful way for
centuries and millenia, all of a sudden they will be able to. The
country will depend on them. Because it would be so new and unusual,
this will require a serious social, psychological, and mental adaptation
period.
Perhaps it is not a bad idea to first ask whether the Grand Governing
Council of the Haudenosaunee would sanction this program, and what their
comments would be.
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