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Post by flyingcarpet46 on Dec 27, 2021 19:22:38 GMT
A selfish argument for making the world a better place.
Hmmmm. No. Our selfishness has led us to have no regard for the non human in our world - physical resources, non-human life forms, our atmosphere and beyond (space junk adding to that polluting our oceans and land).
More and more people are demanding and getting some of the goodies more prosperous people have (Masai herders with mobile phones) but capitalism still rears its head (gig economy, robots replacing workers, not sharing profits with those least able to make them and needing support in our lives....)
I would say we need to direct our ingenuity towards ways of needing less and to sharing more with those who need support in their daily days. But our cleverness and goodies lure us on ?
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Post by Admin on Dec 27, 2021 19:29:57 GMT
A selfish argument for making the world a better place. Hmmmm. No. Our selfishness has led us to have no regard for the non human in our world - physical resources, non-human life forms, our atmosphere and beyond (space junk adding to that polluting our oceans and land). More and more people are demanding and getting some of the goodies more prosperous people have (Masai herders with mobile phones) but capitalism still rears its head (gig economy, robots replacing workers, not sharing profits with those least able to make them and needing support in our lives....) I would say we need to direct our ingenuity towards ways of needing less and to sharing more with those who need support in their daily days. But our cleverness and goodies lure us on ? What do you think of the proposed systemic alternative? The implementation of far better systemic alternatives - Open economy, a resource-based economy, zero marginal cost economy, or movements like the The Free World Charter, The Venus Project, The Zeitgeist Movement, Ubuntu Contributionism, New Earth Nation, The Thrive Movement, or the works of Jeremy Rifkin, Jacque Fresco, R. Buckminster Fuller, Peter Joseph, Michael Tellinger, Colin R. Turner. Countless other people & projects along very similar lines. Debt the first 5 Thousand years - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_YearsFree World Charter - www.freeworldcharter.org/enThe Zeitgeist Movement - thezeitgeistmovementuk.com/about/The Venus Project - www.thevenusproject.com/the-venus-project/aims-and-proposals/The Thrive Movement - www.thrivemovement.com/New Earth Nation - newearthnation.org/Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller www.bfi.org/dymaxion-forum/2016/12/weaponry-livingrywww.designsciencelab.com/resources/HumanitysPath_BF.pdfUN Article 25 - www.sharing.org/information-centre/articles/implementing-article-25-universal-declaration-human-rights-and-basic
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Post by flyingcarpet46 on Dec 27, 2021 19:56:40 GMT
I'm not sufficiently well informed on these to comment but I'm wary of wholesale changes as in Mao Tse Tung's China (peasants not factory workers and others who were not peasants should lead the revolution, the Khymer Rouge (get rid of cities to achieve a self sufficient agrarian society), Russian state communism (the Great Purges)...
But I guess I should take a look at some of your links, see what proposals are around. Though they look rather overwhelming.
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Post by Admin on Dec 31, 2021 14:47:07 GMT
Introducing The Venus Project Integrated Aquaponics System (#TVPIAS) in Kerala, India Posted on December 27, 2021 by The Venus Project In the soil near a small village at the south end of India, there are microscopic colonies tirelessly working. These include bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, earthworms and arthropods, collectively known as soil microbes. They thrive on the fish excreta in the soil, breaking them down into nutrients which, in turn, the plants thrive on. This ecosystem – involving fish, plants and microbes – was designed with specific purposes in mind. It is all happening in the state of Kerala in India (Nanniode in Palakkad district) where The Venus Project has begun a new demonstration project. www.thevenusproject.com/introducing-the-venus-project-integrated-aquaponics-system-tvpias-in-kerala-india/
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Post by Admin on Dec 31, 2021 14:48:27 GMT
I'm not sufficiently well informed on these to comment but I'm wary of wholesale changes as in Mao Tse Tung's China (peasants not factory workers and others who were not peasants should lead the revolution, the Khymer Rouge (get rid of cities to achieve a self sufficient agrarian society), Russian state communism (the Great Purges)... You understand & know Nothing of the areas / projects / ideas outlined - But it's all Communist & will kill millions of people. Yea OK.
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Post by Admin on Jan 1, 2022 18:42:45 GMT
Solar Foods on track to launch air and electricity-based protein by 2023 www.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/solar-foods-on-track-to-launch-air-and-electricity-based-protein-by-2023.html28 Oct 2021 --- Finnish food tech company Solar Foods is making moves to scale its alternative protein – Solein – made out of microbes cultured with electricity and air. Construction of its “Factory 01” has begun, with production anticipated to begin in the first half of 2023. CEO Pasi Vainikka likens the new wave of foodtech becoming commercial to the onset of the digital revolution. Solein’s qualities and its use in different foods have been tested in a pilot factory for nearly two years. The new Factory 01 will enable a new scale of operations, allowing Solar Foods to commercialize Solein and chart its way towards full-scale industrial production. At the facility’s Experience Hub, visitors can learn how Solein is made and how it can be used in a broad variety of foods.
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Post by Admin on Jan 15, 2022 11:05:04 GMT
WE KNOW THE SILVER BULLET TO ENDING POVERTY AND DESTITUTION By Lee Camp, Scheer Post . January 14, 2022 EDUCATE! popularresistance.org/we-know-the-silver-bullet-to-ending-poverty-and-destitution-but-choose-not-to-use-it/But Choose Not To Use It. Basic income has been tried successfully countless times. So why the hell isn’t the U.S. government implementing it? Here’s how the world should operate in simple terms: A certain country or region or city or township or Hobbit hole tries something in order to help their society or group or hovel — if it works, other places then do it. If it doesn’t work, other places don’t do it. It’s like when you were a kid and you saw your brother slide down the banister and rack himself on the newel post — You then thought, “Maybe that activity is not for me.” But if he didn’t nail himself in the jewels, you probably thought, “I think I’ll try that.” That’s how the United States government should work, but it doesn’t. For-profit healthcare, corporate personhood, the drug war, funding terrorists overseas that we call “moderate rebels,” etc. — all of these things have been tried, they fuckin’ suck every time, and we keep doing them. The U.S. continually racks itself on the newel post all day long and then responds, “I think I’ll try that again.” But the reverse should be true also — if a city or country anywhere in the world tries something and it works great, we should do it. This brings me to Universal Basic Income: everybody receiving money from a government simply for being a citizen, no questions asked. It’s high time we try it in the U.S. and see whether it works. Oh wait, I just remembered — it’s been tried countless times and worked every damn time. How do I know that? …Reading. As Rutger Bregman details in his book “Utopia For Realists,” UBI has been tried many times — in Canada, Alaska, Africa, the U.S., Europe, and more. Even backwards lawless lands like North Carolina have experimented with it. There was a study in Britain where 13 men who had lived on the streets for years were given £3,000 each (about $4,500 at the time). Did they use it for hundreds of pricey almond milk lattes, or giant bags of crack, or maybe just wad it up into balls and wipe themselves with them? Nope, turns out they didn’t do any of those things. Eighteen months after receiving the money, over half were no longer homeless, and all of them had improved their lives significantly. As Bregman noted, “Even the Economist had to conclude that ‘the most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’” No! We can’t possibly do that! We here in the U.S. have to take the money meant to help the homeless and launder it through all kinds of plans and incentives and bureaucratic digestive tracts that result in one out of every 100 people in extreme poverty receiving a gift certificate for a free basket of breadsticks at Arby’s. In another program Bregman describes, everybody in a village in Kenya was given $500, about a year’s wages. Several months later, the village had been completely transformed. People had better jobs, sturdier home structures, and healthier kids. “In Namibia figures for malnutrition took a nosedive (from 42% to 10%), as did those for truancy (from 40% to nothing) and crime (down by 42%),” writes Bregman. So basically there’s almost a silver bullet to ending poverty and decreasing crime. Well, we better avoid it like the plague. Let’s go back to giving homeless people a can of soup and a pair of mismatched socks. If they collect enough cans and socks, they can build a house out of them! The point is basic income has been tested numerous times. By 2010, there were income transfer programs for 110 million families in 45 different countries. In North Carolina, in 2001 the Cherokee were getting $6,000 a year per family thanks to a casino they had built. When that started, for most of those families that money took them out of extreme poverty, and the Cherokee children saw drastic changes. Their crime rates, behavioral issues, and alcohol abuse went down significantly. The money literally changed their lives. (And sure, all casinos are based on drunk people spending money they don’t have on machines they don’t know are rigged in hopes of getting money they will never get. But you can’t get mad at the Cherokee because that’s also the basic definition of capitalism. : **Drunk people spending money we don’t have on machines we don’t know are rigged in hopes of getting money we’ll never get.) The University of Manchester summarized many UBI programs in poor African communities. They found, overall, the money was put to good use: Poverty decreased, and while the programs cost less than other so-called solutions, there were myriad long-term benefits that impacted health and safety. How shocking! The thing we know works seems to work! (Hopefully somebody can study this a little more and find out if it works.) Bregman then writes of NGO workers, “So why send over to Africa expensive white folks in SUVs when we can simply hand over their salaries to the poor?” Great point. At the very least, let’s give away the SUVs. The latest basic income “test” reported on last month in Fast Company showed that it worked yet again in Hudson, NY. Despite all of these successful trials, people still argue, “We can’t have basic income because the poor will just use it for beer and cigarettes!” Well, first of all — So what? The world’s on fire. Beer and cigarettes sound like just what the doctor ordered. In fact, I think we’re at the point when we can call alcohol and tobacco survival foods. (I am a longtime supporter of Universal Basic Beer and Cigarettes.) But perhaps more importantly, as Bregman notes, “A major study by the World Bank demonstrated that in 82% of all researched cases in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, alcohol and tobacco consumption actually declined.” Declined? Well, then I have to say these poor people have their priorities completely wrong. Another major argument against UBI is, “It’s not fair. Giving people money for doing nothing simply isn’t fair.” My response to that is twofold. First, it actually is fair because the money would go to literally everyone. Hence the word “universal” in the name. (It would be weird to have something called “Universal Basic Income” that only went to a vintage clothing store clerk named Stanley.) Secondly, who told you fairness mattered in life? Who told you fairness has anything to do with our stupid world? There’s no fairness. In the first three seconds you come out of the womb, life is not fair. You’re covered in blood and mucus, some doctor slaps you on the ass, and you’re told your name is something you’ve never even heard before! Completely unfair. You’re just lying there going, “Chet? My name’s CHET?!” Some people are born rich as shit. Some people are born poor as shit. Some people are born hot as shit. (I mean, not as a baby but… later. You get the point.) Some people are born in wealthy areas with safe streets, good schools and clean water. Some people are born in poverty with crime-ridden streets, terrible schools, and water that has a crispy film on the top like a cancerous crème brulée. In our society, on average, men get paid more than women, white people get paid more than Black people and Native people, and most everyone gets paid more than ugly people. (I’m not even kidding — ugly people earn up to 15% less per hour in the workplace.) Society. Is. Not. Fair. So if I say that universal basic income would solve several of society’s problems and someone responds that UBI’s not fair, they’re being completely illogical. It’s like if I said a law against killing endangered species would save the exotic birds, and you retort, “But we can’t do that because it’s not purple.” Besides, perhaps giving people a better shot at life, a better shot at not struggling day-in and day-out, perhaps that’s actually more fair than this shitstorm we have now. Another argument against UBI is that it will make people lazy. And I would agree with that except… it’s not true. Studies show it doesn’t make people work less and even if it did, I would say, “GOOD!” Under capitalism you are born free, but then you spend the rest of your existence trying to rent back your life from corporate rulers. So if UBI decreases that slavery by a percentage point, that’s a good thing. And the final argument against UBI is that we can’t afford it. Well, as Bregman notes, “Eradicating poverty in the U.S. would cost only $175 billion, less than 1% of the GDP. That’s roughly a quarter of the U.S. military spending.” So not only do we have enough money, but we also would be saving hundreds of billions in the form of services we wouldn’t need anymore. We’d have a more physically and mentally healthy population, decreased crime and abuse, etc. All told, we would save so much more than we would lose. And even if we didn’t — I DON’T CARE! I WANT TO END POVERTY! Anyway, it’s time for universal basic income. Technology advances exponentially. Most jobs will disappear. And instead of demanding more wage slavery, we should work less and have universal basic income. Will UBI solve all the problems of capitalism? Absolutely not. It’s the first of many steps toward helping people realize the capitalistic market economy is a guaranteed death spiral that we have the power to stop.
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Post by Admin on Jan 15, 2022 11:05:48 GMT
A PROGRAM FOR A FUTURE SOCIETY THAT WE WILL BUILD IN THE PRESENT By Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research . January 14, 2022 EDUCATE! popularresistance.org/a-program-for-a-future-society-that-we-will-build-in-the-present/In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021, notably subtitled Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste, and gender. ‘Multidimensional poverty’ is a much more precise measurement of poverty than the international poverty line of $1.90 per day. It looks at ten indicators divided along three axes: health (nutrition, child mortality), education (years of schooling, school attendance), and standard of living (cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets). The team studied multidimensional poverty across 109 countries, looking at the living conditions of 5.9 billion people. They found that 1.3 billion – one in five people – live in multidimensional poverty. The details of their lives are stark: Roughly 644 million or half of these people are children under the age of 18. Almost 85 per cent of them reside in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. One billion of them are exposed to solid cooking fuels (which creates respiratory ailments), inadequate sanitation, and substandard housing. 568 million people lack access to proper drinking water within a 30-minute round trip walk. 788 million multidimensionally poor people have at least one undernourished person in their home. Nearly 66 per cent of them live in households where no one has completed at least six years of schooling. 678 million people have no access to electricity. 550 million people lack seven of eight assets identified in the study (a radio, television, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorcycle, or refrigerator). They also do not own a car. The absolute numbers in the UNDP report are consistently lower than figures calculated by other researchers. Take their number of those with no access to electricity (678 million), for example. World Bank data shows that in 2019, 90 per cent of the world’s population had access to electricity, which means that 1.2 billion people had none. An important study from 2020 demonstrates that 3.5 billion people lack ‘reasonably reliable access’ to electricity. This is far more than the absolute numbers in the UNDP report, but, regardless of the specific figures, the trend lines are nonetheless horrific. We live on a planet with greatly increasing disparities. For the first time, the UNDP has focused attention on the more granular aspects of these disparities, shining a light on ethnic, race, and caste hierarchies. Nothing is as wretched as social hierarchies, inheritances of the past that continue to sharply assault human dignity. Looking at the data from 41 countries, the UNDP found that multidimensional poverty disproportionately impacts those who face social discrimination. In India, for instance, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (‘scheduled’ because the government regards them as officially designated groups) face the brunt of terrible poverty and discrimination, which in turn exacerbates their impoverishment. Five out of six people who struggle with multidimensional poverty are from Scheduled Castes and Tribes. A study from 2010 showed that each year, at least 63 million people in India fall below the poverty line because of out-of-pocket health care costs (that’s two people per second). During the COVID-19 pandemic, these numbers increased, though exact figures have not been easy to collect. Regardless, the five out of six people who are in multidimensional poverty – many of them from Scheduled Castes and Tribes – do not have any access to health care and are therefore not even included in that data. They exist largely outside formal health care systems, which has been catastrophic for these communities during the pandemic. Last year, the secretary general of ALBA-TCP (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty), Sacha Llorenti, asked Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Instituto Simón Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela to start an international discussion responding to the broad crises of our times. We brought together twenty-six research institutes from around the world whose work has now culminated in a report called A Plan to Save the Planet. This plan is reproduced with a longer introduction in dossier no. 48 (January 2022). We looked carefully at two kinds of texts: first, a range of plans produced by conservative and liberal think tanks around the world, from the World Economic Forum to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism; second, a set of demands from trade unions, left-wing political parties, and social movements. We drew from the latter to better understand the limitations of the former. For instance, we found that the liberal and conservative texts ignored the fact that during the pandemic, central banks – mostly in the Global North – raised $16 trillion to sustain a faltering capitalist system. Though money is available that could have gone towards the social good, it largely went to shore up the financial sector and industry instead. If money can be made available for those purposes, it can certainly be used to fully fund a robust public health system in every country and a fair transition from non-renewable fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, for example. The plan covers twelve areas, from ‘democracy and the world order’ to ‘the digital world’. To give you a sense of the kinds of claims made in the plan, here are the recommendations in the section on education: De-commodify education, which includes strengthening public education and preventing the privatisation of education. Promote the role of teachers in the management of educational institutions. Ensure that underprivileged sectors of society are trained to become teachers. Bridge the electricity and digital divides. Build publicly financed and publicly controlled high-speed broadband internet systems. Ensure that all school children have access to all the elements of the educational process, including extra-curricular activities. Develop channels through which students participate in decision-making processes in all forms of higher education. Make education a lifelong experience, allowing people at every stage of life to enjoy the practice of learning in various kinds of institutions. This will foster the value that education is not only about building a career, but about building a society that supports the continuing growth and development of the mind and of the community. Subsidise higher education and vocational courses for workers of all ages in areas related to their occupation. Make education, including higher education, available to all in their spoken languages; ensure that governments take responsibility for providing educational materials in the spoken languages in their country through translations and other means. Establish management educational institutes that cater to the needs of cooperatives in industrial, agricultural, and service sectors. A Plan to Save the Planet is rooted in the principles of the United Nations Charter (1945), the document with the highest level of consensus in the world (193 member states of the UN have signed this binding treaty). We hope that you will read the plan and the dossier carefully. They have been produced for discussion and debate and are to be argued with and elaborated on. If you have any suggestions or ideas or would like to let us know how you were able to use the plan, please write to us at plan@thetricontinental.org. Study has been a key instrument for the growth of working-class struggle, as shown by the impact of working-class newspapers, journals, and literature on the expansion of popular imaginations. In 1928, Tina Modotti photographed Mexican revolutionary farmers reading El Machete, the newspaper of their communist party. Modotti, one of the most luminous revolutionary photographers, reflected the sincere commitment of Mexican revolutionaries, of the Weimar Left, and of fighters in the Spanish Civil War. The farmers reading El Machete and the peasant organiser in India reading the Turkish communist poet Nâzim Hikmet in a hut during the great Bengal famine of 1943 depicted in the woodcut by Chittaprosad suggest places where we hope the plan will be discussed. We hope this plan will be used not merely as a critique of the present, but as a programme for a future society that we will build in the present.
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Post by Admin on Jan 17, 2022 18:42:17 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 21, 2022 12:56:43 GMT
netplanetaryvalue.wordpress.com/Considering the chaos and disorder in the world – both outwardly and inwardly – seeing all this misery, starvation, war, hatred, brutality – many of us have asked what one can do … One feels one must be committed … When you commit yourself, you are committed to a part and therefore the part becomes important and that creates division. Whereas, when one is involved completely, totally with the whole problem of living, action is entirely different. Then action is not only inward, but also outward; it is in relationship with the whole problem of life. – Jiddu Krishnamurti What we are going through at the present time is not just an economic-financial crisis, but a crisis of humanity. It seems that for the first time in human history several crises converge to simultaneously reach their maximum level of tension. The dominant economic model is to a great degree responsible for the world’s collision course. – Manfred Max-Neef (2010) The world is in crisis on every front. There are environmental, social and political problems all underpinned by an economic system that skews the distribution of wealth toward the already wealthy while depriving the majority. That system is itself in meltdown and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot seem to figure out how to put it back together again. Alternative ideas put forward under the banner of ecological economics attempt to address one aspect or other of the problem but do not alter substantially the system. Tinkering around the edges is not enough to bring about a transformation of people’s relationship to the environment and to each other. Since the experts seem not to have a clue it’s anyone’s guess and fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Without any background or training in economics and little facility with figures, i venture to offer these musings on a possible scenario. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki (1973) maintains that being unburdened with expertise, offers a distinct advantage – in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. Bearing in mind also the dictum attributed to Einstein that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler, let us strip matters down to their essence and go from there. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. – Wendell Berry New Planetary Economy To replace the irrational, inequitable and inefficient monetary economic system which prevails, a new rational, self-regulating system is necessary to meet current and projected global realities. The present model is ultimately based on the barter mechanism which grew into trade and digital exchange. Units of exchange came to be standardized to facilitate trade but the issuing of these units is strictly controlled, creating an artificial scarcity, and converting the currency into a tradeable commodity itself. These units are further hoarded and manipulated in such a way as to create debt, inequity and poverty. ASSUMPTIONS The planet can sustain all life on it, though not at the level of consumption that obtains in developed countries. Everyone and everything has value. The sum of all unit values is Net Planetary Value (NPV) tabulated in the Planetary Index (PI). Value is potential until triggered into manifestation by activity. People realize value by accessing goods and services. MECHANISM Each entity – individual, corporate, municipal, national, bioregional – is assigned an index relative to its contribution to NPV, which index determines its level of access to goods and services. Particular elements or activities may be indexed positively or negatively as it affects populations, infrastructure or the environment. Indices are computed algorithmically from a matrix of nine criteria: ethical, social and environmental qualified by a time dimension that embeds past provenance, present utility and future impact. Entities acknowledge each transaction by digital and/or biometric means. Data is transmitted to a distributed network which continuously updates all indices using algorithms in a self-regulating feedback loop. Built-in checks and balances adjust indices to mitigate excesses, waste and abuse. IMPLEMENTATION Since it is not dependent or contingent upon monetary values, NPV can be implemented by any functioning economic unit. It will run parallel to the monetary system until that system strangles itself with its own contortions or belief in it is withdrawn, whichever comes first. Increased parity and efficiency are realized with the accession of each additional entity until universal inclusion is achieved. Each person is automatically assigned an index that gives access to food, housing, education and healthcare. Personal index is increased by life stage, training, skills and accomplishments, affording access to levels beyond basic needs. EFFECTS There are no monetary limits. No budgets, no debt, no banks, no inflation, no price distortions. There will be less government, less corruption, less crime. Land ownership will revert eventually to occupancy rights. With basic needs guaranteed, many will no longer work at jobs. Traditional jobs are becoming obsolete anyway. People will choose vocations. It is a means to advance their indices. Every service rendered is rewarded. Each corporate entity likewise is assigned a base index that allows access to infrastructure and services. All corporate entities are by definition non-profit. Businesses compete and prosper by offering superior goods and services thereby increasing their corporate index with concomitant access to higher levels of goods and services. Everyone counts. Everything is counted.
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Post by Admin on Jan 22, 2022 12:44:03 GMT
Ursula Le Guin’s Radical Utopias Still Resonate Today BY NICK HUBBLE Ursula K. Le Guin was born on this day in 1929. She used science fiction to explore the failures of capitalist society — and the alternative worlds we could build in its place. www.jacobinmag.com/2021/10/ursula-le-guin-science-fiction-utopia-capitalism-socialism-anarchism“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.” This is the core of the message that the anarchist Shevek proclaims to a mass demonstration of syndicalist and socialist workers gathered in Capitol Square in the city of Nio Esseia on the planet of Urras in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic 1974 utopian novel The Disposessed. In my opinion, rather than attempting to unpick the blend of anarchism, Taoism, and feminism that permeates Le Guin’s worldview, it’s best to start with this passage of direct address to the reader if we want to think about Le Guin’s ongoing relevance to socialists. The emphasis here is not just on personal moral responsibility, although this is a constant feature of Le Guin’s philosophy, but on the imperative need to integrate individual and collective values by refusing easy binaries and hierarchies of thought. Far from a celebration of Shevek’s anarchist homeworld of Anarres, The Dispossessed is what the critic Tom Moylan called a “critical utopia,” which explores both the possibilities and the limitations of such a society. One of the ways in which the novel is able to expand its frame of reference beyond an internal investigation of one possible model of anarchist society is through the parallel plot of Shevek’s trip to Urras. When Shevek asks the socialists of Nio Esseia what Anarres, which they see as their “moon,” means to them, they respond that every time they look up at the night sky, they are reminded that a society with no government, no police, and no economic exploitation exists and cannot be dismissed as merely a utopian fantasy. In other words, both Shevek and Le Guin’s readers come to realize that politics does not just revolve around adopting the correct practices but is also dependent on symbolic meaning to others. Le Guin had a long career, and all her work repays reading, but the books that cemented her reputation were written between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, during a period of Cold War anxiety and acute social and cultural crisis within Western societies. Within these contexts, novels such as The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) gained immediate recognition for the clarity of the vision by which they diagnosed the ills of the age and offered up visions of alternative values and societies that seemed achievable through hard work and earnest self-examination. They were quickly established as classics of the genre, but that is not necessarily an advantage from today’s perspective. In his introduction to a recent reissue of The Left Hand of Darkness, China Miéville notes “The unluckiest books are those ignored or forgotten. But spare a thought too for those fated to become classics. A classic is too often a volume that everyone thinks they know.” Is there any greater disincentive to read a book than the knowledge that it is seen as a worthy and important, groundbreaking work for the time? For Miéville, the novel’s defamiliarization of gender makes it unquestionably a precursor of the gender queerness and sexual fluidity of our twenty-first-century present, but that still leaves open the thought that one might be better off reading more recent books. In any case, as he acknowledges, The Left Hand of Darkness was not always seen in such a radical light. Le Guin’s use of universal male pronouns to denote a society without a permanent sexual divide and therefore without a gender division led to Joanna Russ, among others, criticizing the novel for only containing men in practice. For many years, the idea persisted that Le Guin’s novels were earnest and well-meaning, but not at the radical cutting edge of the field. One way to challenge this residual perception of Le Guin as the writer of worthy-but-dull classics is to consider a less celebrated novel of hers from the same period, The Lathe of Heaven (1971). Rather than the nuanced, measured approach for which she is generally known, this book is structured in the unfettered madcap style of Philip K. Dick as a wild ride through a sequence of collapsing realities. The resonantly named protagonist of The Lathe, George Orr, has unwanted dreams that change reality. His psychiatrist, William Haber, doesn’t attempt to cure him, instead setting out to use this power by proxy to transform the world for the benefit of humankind. Of course, every attempted change for the good is always accompanied by some unexpected monstrous consequence. For example, when, in seeking to solve overpopulation, Haber instructs Orr to dream about a world full of room to move around in, the latter dreams of a pandemic and wakes up to find that he has “reduced” the world population by six billion lives. As Haber comes to realize, Orr can only dream “cheap utopian concepts, or cynical anti-utopian concepts perhaps.” On one level, this is a joke at the expense of Orr’s namesake, George Orwell: In one of the book’s many alternate histories, the US Constitution is rewritten in 1984 to form a police state. However, there is also something valuable in Orr’s resistance to Haber’s will to power. When the latter demands world peace, Orr dreams that aliens have landed on the moon, thus uniting the people of Earth in opposition. Then, when commanded to dream that the aliens leave the moon, Orr dreams that they invade Earth. The telepathic aliens teach Orr that “everything dreams,” even rocks, and therefore that the only way to live in harmony with what would otherwise be chaos is consciously to attune oneself with the whole. The novel ends with a resolution worthy of Dick, in which Orr, no longer plagued by effective dreams, is now happy working for an alien designing kitchenware. It is difficult not to see this ending as a play on the idea of “alienated labor”: It would be a kind of “negation of the negation” if labor was conducted for mutual benefit with aliens with whom the worker was telepathically in tune. The Lathe of Heaven illustrates the importance of thinking about books aesthetically as well as judging them ideologically. As the critic Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the novel might be read as expressing liberal anxiety in the face of revolutionary transformation, but, aesthetically, it is concerned with its own process of production. This is to say that Orr’s unsuccessful attempts to dream utopia mirror Le Guin’s attempts to write utopia, a process that is thereby acknowledged as impossible. However, in the very manner by which the novel explores the contradictions of trying to produce a utopia, the narrative gets written — and a version of utopia is somehow nonetheless produced. While neither The Dispossessed nor The Left Hand of Darkness are intended simply as playful satires, comparing them to The Lathe of Heaven opens up some possibilities for thinking about them as more than just classics of their time. For example, we might see the seemingly incongruous use of universal male pronouns in The Left Hand of Darkness as a deliberate exposure of the impossibility of narrating gender outside the binary to which our language has often limited us. In a similar way, The Dispossessed specifically foregrounds the temporal impossibility of thinking the future from within the mindset of the present. In another key moment of second-person address that speaks directly to the reader, Shevek tells the Terran ambassador to Urras, “You don’t understand what time is.” What we experience as the present is not real or stable: It is the product of constant change. Only the reality of the past and the future, held within human memory and intention, makes the present real. Not only does Le Guin’s fiction symbolize the possibility of change for socialist readers, then; it also gives some idea of the sheer degree of the mental work required for us to comprehend the radical difference that would be entailed by that change.
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Post by Admin on Jan 22, 2022 14:14:16 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 26, 2022 20:35:57 GMT
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Post by Admin on Feb 4, 2022 15:59:33 GMT
“Earth is abundant with resources. Our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counterproductive to the well-being of people.” – Jacque Fresco “Eventually, with artificial intelligence, money may become irrelevant, particularly in… #TheVenusProject #TVP #ResourceBasedEconomy #RBE #JacqueFresco #RoxanneMeadows #Money #Currency #MonetarySystem #Incentive Money Is An Interference www.thevenusproject.com/multimedia/money_is_an_interference/
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Post by Admin on Feb 6, 2022 10:01:19 GMT
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