One summer afternoon I started scribbling a diagram on a napkin. I was joking around with the famous “Shining City on a Hill” quote from local history. Boston is on a hill. It shines once in a while, but not nearly enough. Returning to the napkin, I wrote "You" in the middle, and around it I penned in all the biggest, scariest questions in our lives. Among the rays pointing towards us are work, education, utilities, housing, health care, food, natural resources, global interdependence, human rights, arts and entertainment, transportation, infrastructure, security and justice.
The cockeyed bit about all of these critical parts of our lives is that we elect or submit ourselves to others to make the big decisions.
Chances are you’re not particularly happy about how that’s working for you. In the shining city on my pub napkin, you would regain the right and responsibility to make the choices you feel are necessary for your life and your community. So how is it that we can build a new society based on autonomy, equality, self-management, mutual-aid, solidarity, diversity, and participation across all spheres of life? Better still, did you know that those values pretty much sum-up the views of most libertarian socialists and anarchists?
Personal responsibility is a key Gnostic principle, and so if it applies to our spirituality, I see no reason to omit it in my own approach to living. That doesn't mean that if you're a Gnostic, you must also be an anarchist or a Guild Socialist, but it does mean that you need to build and understand your community, and address the pressing issues of our time in the best way that you can. There is much to be addressed.
Let’s begin where you work, if you work.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote that he had “a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.” How many of you would disagree with that? The workplace is seldom a democracy, or even a meritocracy, as it is often sold to us. Despite the misinformation and culture of “leadership” which constantly reminds us of how little we know about our work, there are tens of thousands of successful enterprises that disprove that old myth.
Take Cabot Creamery for example. Since 1919 Cabot has become a 1,200-farm family dairy cooperative with members in New England and upstate New York. As a cooperative, Cabot is proud to value community, quality, democracy and local ownership, as well as emulating the Rochdale Cooperative Principles. According to those principles agreed to by the members of the International Cooperative Alliance, “A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically controlled enterprise.” While cooperatives aren't a panacea, this model and others like it can be extended to encompass every facet of our communities. The point is that it can be, and is being done.
In the United States, more than 29,000 cooperatives operate in every sector of the economy and in every congressional district; Americans hold over 350 million cooperative memberships. (Source: National Cooperative Business Association www.ncba.coop/ncba/about-co-ops/research-economic-impact) These enterprises include utility companies, heavy industries, booksellers, printers, brewers, schools and colleges, hospitals, airlines, famers, bakeries, grocery stores and other retail shops. These examples prove that it is not only possible to take control of where you work, it is already happening all around us. Right now 1 in 4 people living in the states are working for a co-op. But taking control of our future means that we cannot be passive, we must create our shining city on a pub napkin, and then choose an area where we will devote our efforts and talents. Sometimes that might be confronting big business or the government, other times it might mean building a new enterprise or farm.
With all this talk of change, how about starting with my utility bills?
Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Large, publicly-traded energy utilities make decisions on how they produce gas and electric services, and how much they will charge for them. In reality, these resources are not anyone’s “property”, they are made with naturally-existing resources and powered by machinery built, serviced, and used by workers. Why should our electric bill reflect the huge pay increases and dividends paid to investors? The short answer is there is no answer. Although the New Deal-style rural utility co-ops have lost much of their appeal through mismanagement and stagnation, newer, dynamic public utility districts (PUDS) and municipal utility districts (MUDS) have proven to be highly efficient, in the case of MUDS - democratically controlled – and more affordable for the community they serve. How long these PUDS and MUDS will be able to survive the volatile energy market created by gargantuan private and publicly-traded power companies remains to be seen. But again, this is an area which demands action, not passivity – these decisions should and can be made by the people who pay the bills!
From government to governance
Not many people follow the news in Iceland, but they should. According to recent reports, the Icelanders have kicked the bums out, established a new constitution, and rejected (by a referendum question of over 90% approval) the capitalist status quo. No deals, no backing-down from IMF, British or US threats of retaliation. Read more about how the Icelanders have taken their society back from moral, economic and political bankruptcy here.
It’s worth mentioning that the capital city, Reykjavik is now being run by a self-described anarchist, actor, surrealist, musician and comedian Jón Gnarr. After Gnarr, who regularly quotes Bakunin and Tolstoy, was elected to lead the council, he said:
“The human spirit has been crushed by small-minded people playing politics. We have no agenda and are just fully engaged in trying to do our best. We have no party members and no idea about spin or political punchlines. When we don’t know something, we admit ignorance.”
You can read more about Jón Gnarr and the successes of the anarchists in Iceland here
Anarchist, actor, musician and comedian Jón Gnarr
was elected mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland in June 2011
Here in New England cities and towns are struggling to keep basic resources and services like schools and libraries open, and yet they spend millions of dollars every year on useless, self-promoting propaganda – usually in the form of signs which tell us that our tax dollars are being used “wisely.” These signs, which bear the names of mayors and state officials, are posted to prop-up their names for the next election. No community is defined by its own supposed public servants, and for the shining city on my pub napkin, that kind of “government” will end. We are asked to suffer cronyism, corruption, and ineptitude, but vanity and state worship is literally the last straw.
If we look at the reasons why our communities can no longer provide basic services, we're quickly confronted by several culprits which all share a common mother: systemic reliance on drinking the global Kool-Aid known as neo-liberalism - an euphemism for capitalism. Among these expenditures we can include (1.) wars; (2.) tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations, (3.) bail-outs for extremely large corporate interests and financial firms, and (4.) a systemic reliance on paying into corporate schemes ranging from Haliburton and Blackwater for wars, to big oil, big finance, and big agribusiness / pharmaceutical companies. The federal government isn't the enemy of our communities, it is the perpetrator of our suffocation, and therefore it is to be treated as any other criminal. So-called authorities need to be told to step away from public affairs and allow, as they did in Iceland, the people to take the reigns ourselves.
Promoting community and autonomy
We don’t realize that there are organizations out there which are already practicing good, community-based governance. They do exist, and these are the powerful entities which are the foundations of another way of ordering our society and our economy through Guild Socialism.
Some community colleges provide incredibly important resources for their metropolitan areas. Then there are elder services agencies which operate with some public funding, but they are operated by people who actually know what they’re doing: nurses, social workers, nutritionists, and volunteers – not political hacks. For many students, the elderly, and people living with disabilities, choices ranging from home care or institutionalization, to state and local college education, depend on these local organizations which have very few resources. By keeping local students, older people and younger people with disabilities at home and in the community, there are substantial social dividends, as well as tremendous economic savings. While politicians come and go, agencies and schools remain to pick up the pieces. Take home care for the elderly for example. Let’s see how our “leaders” treat the idea of community choices. From Disabled World:
“Senator Barack Obama was a co-sponsor of the Community Choice Act, legislation that would give persons who receive Medicaid the option of receiving equal access to services in their own communities while not forcing them into institutions such as nursing homes. The Obama administration has recently stated that it would not address the issue as a part of its proposed health care reform. The anger from Disability Rights Advocates has been immense.”
Community care and community education make sense. Consider the impact of allowing older adults the freedom to stay in their homes and receive visiting caregivers. In Massachusetts alone, transferring money spent on nursing homes to community care equaled an average savings of $21,518 per enrollee in 2010. This means the program produces an annualized savings of $19,129,502 for the people of the Commonwealth. The reason that politicians are slow to support community-based care is because they are pressured by the well-heeled lobbyists paid for by nursing homes. For the elderly in Massachusetts in 2010, 66% of long term spending was for institutional care, 34% on community care. For younger disabled people, 19% of long term spending for was institutions, and 81% in the community. Two thirds of all long term care spending on seniors was in institutions. For every $1 spent on elderly community care, $1.97 was spent in nursing homes – almost two to one. (Source: Massachusetts Home Care Assoc. Budget Proposal to the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 2011)
Real community choices mean real community-based housing, health care, and educational options.
For students, community-based education can mean the difference between graduating at the expense of outrageous student loans and automatic indebtedness, and being able to begin their working lives with a sound education and an independent footing. It is criminal to subject young people to staggering debts for the sake of a broken system of fees, cushioning reserves and endowments of institutions which are supposedly serving the public.
Wrapping-up the napkin
Communities have and will be the basis of free, independent, caring and compassionate societies. It seems obvious that some things which are claimed to be “owned” by corporations, individuals and the government are patently not the property of these very institutions which create laws to secure their possession.
Our air, fire, water and earth are nobody’s possessions, and by the same token, it seems rather ridiculous to claim that our work as human beings could be “owned.” Each of us gives value to everything that we do. To call the complex, intelligent, life-affirming homo sapiens a “human resource” lays bare for all who care to see the monstrosity that has become of our social and economic relations.
This grotesque state of affairs has developed first from claims of property ownership, when in reality those properties were stolen by force, and protected with the sword. From that barbaric assertion came another: the “efficiency” of the market. Were it a true market filled with the free offerings of our own, that would be something, but a wholesale theft of human and natural value that gives that market its very existence is nothing less than the theft of human dignity and the rape of nature which gives us life.
We need to empower ourselves and our communities to break free from consumerism, corruption, and our reliance on the government, banks and bail-out billionaires to do things for us.
Yes, it was a very big napkin.
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