• A Transcript of Ben Mcleash's speech on common objections to a resource based economy : Part 1
• Alright, I’m Ben McLeish and as Harvey Milk would say, "I'm here to change your mind." Who here... Hands up whoever, at this point, can understand and agrees with what our movement is about and would describe themselves as on board. Who would say that maybe in principle they understand the idea, they understand the logic behind it, but they have some questions and they are not quite sure? And who here thinks it's an Utopianist culture with plans for world domination . We kind of cover that already. But here are some common objections and responses to a resource-based economy.
• First off, it’s not a Utopia as Tom said.
• There's no such things as Utopia. We aren’t under the illusion that we can create a perfect world. There is no such thing as “perfect” in a practical world. What we are proposing, however, is a whole lot better than what we have now. There will always be problems. But a global emergent system, where innovation, change and development is put centre-stage, rather than being hamstrung by the profit mechanisms and interestsof established power structures of any kind, is going to be more able to meet and solve these problems than our current so-called “established” societies.
• This is not communism, or socialism, or any of the "isms" out there. Quite apart from the fact that no two people here will agree what "communism" is, since it is a high-order abstraction with no real-life referents, and with mutliple varied real-world “versions,” even the most boiled-down version of Karl Marx's philosphy was still based on money, differential advantage, profit, earnings, various degrees of qualities of life and thus, social stratification was built into its foundations. Communism also pre-supposes property. Property, if you remember, is an outgrowth of scarcity. Because there may not be enough to go round, you need to “own” things to deter their use by others, to reserve, essentially, or guarantee, the things you need and are now conditioned to want.
• Communism also didn’t have access to the technologies to create abundance, or certainly didn't envision or strive for a world of deliberate abundance, and didn’t imagine a world where all labour was automated, all necessities were supplied free of charge and where the structure of society is a global integrated system. Marx never considered a global economy based on resources. It's just a monetary system with slightly more or less government control coupled with varying degrees of romanticism of labour or the labour class, which ironically, they didn't want to get rid off. The fundamentals are the same as any other monetary system. What we propose and advocate lies outside the logical referents of this box of monetary-ism. The box itself, we feel, is structurally unsound.
• Well, if it’s not communism, it sounds like a commune!
• Well, again, a commune is defined by the deliberate artificial separation that we are trying to get past. We cannot simply separate ourselves from society and build a resource-based economy. The logic of living according to planetary resources and total efficiency cannot be anything other than global, all-encompassing operation - one system. The logic of efficiency demands it; multiple societies attempting to operate separately would require duplication of effort, resources and waste, as we see in the current system. It would also create competition, which would ultimately create war, as we fight for resources, space and so on. And you know what else? Everything that divides us, whether be race, religion, or national identity, political affiliations, social classes, are false divisions invented or promoted by our respective societies to get you to buy in and not defect from that country or society you have to be in. Why? It's about maintaining a group economy. Stability. In the face of scarcity, real or artificial. Even geographic boundaries, which are at least based in spatial reality, are fading fast as we improve transport technologies.
• We are, and always have been, one global human race. We must live as such to ensure our survival at the maximum quality of life possible. Climbing into a forest, shedding all the benefits of technological advances and reviving esoteric English witchcraft religions isn't going to do anything except devolve us, and only temporarily, before necessity forces that separatist society back into long-term contact with other human civilizations. There really isn’t anywhere left in the world for people to be able to do that anyway. Life on this planet tends towards complexity and sophistication. Communes are artificial, isolated, unsustainable and achieve nothing but to stave off large-scale social interactions for brief periods, mostly due to protest or divisionary beliefs based on inherited notions. Perhaps you think that competition would be a better ideology to base society on. That competition somehow speeds up innovation, makes pricing fair, provides choice and so on, and it's generally a good thing. The concept of the resource-based economy is based on the same logic as the human body, as Jacque said on that video. Were your brain to decide tomorrow that it is the most important organ in the body, and demanded more of the resources, oxygen, than the liver, or the left lung is more important than the right and demanded most of the resources itself, you'd rot away in a month.
• Animals live in harmony with their surroundings, not in competition with them. Nature has examples of competition within it, but in areas where food and resources are abundant for animals, you find they don’t fight over food. Nature is symbiotic. We must become symbiotic too. To be in competition with each other and attempting to “dominate” nature or each other, is to ensure our own demise. Nature, however, will carry on just fine without us.
• One question I hear all the time and it's in fact a question, is: What would I do in a resource-based economy? Where's no traditional work or money, what would I do?
• It's a valid question, as we can only presume to imagine a massive void of inertia where once a 9-5 stood in its place. Oddly, I am actually asked this by friends of mine who work in the arts, or who have expensive, time-consuming or unusual hobbies. Or cab drivers who are amateur scientists. Why do you work in the arts? Why do you have hobbies? Why do you do favours for others? Why do you give to charity? Why did you come here tonight? Why do you do all of these things? You did all of these things absent the desire to make money. Especially if you work in the arts. How much more could you do without the monetary restrictions you have now? In low-power countries where people walk for hours to get water, one could imagine them thinking, "Well if I could just turn a tap and get water instantly and not spend 4-5 hours a day getting it, what would I do with the spare time?" That's the same kind of logic that people can't seem to make that jump. It’s a little like being in a cell all your life. Offering a prisoner a way out of his or her cell, they then turn to you and say, “Well, what do I do now?” A related point; what about motivation to do anything if you aren’t essentially forced by economic pressures, as we are now? What will motivate us? Your motivation to recycle is not profit driven, in fact, it's far the opposite; it costs you money and time, when you only factor in the drive to the bottle bank.
• Nikola Tesla’s motivation to create free energy the world over was certainly not profit driven. In fact, JP Morgan, his backer, had to shut it down because of the impact it would have on the ability to profit from this. And what about this? The world has written a continually growing, emergent encyclopaedia of 15 million articles in 272 languages in 9 years. Money has nothing to do with it, except for when they run out of it, periodically, and have to ask you for more. Imagine what Wikipedia looked like if they didnt have moneraty restrictions to do it, if money were literally no object. Imagine what the world would look like if money were no object. We are already have a motivation, and it's more than money. What we are suggesting is a world where this place the centre-stage.
• Let's stick with the Wikipedia example. Who runs the societal infrastructure in a resource-based economy? And could they take it over? Two big ones I get a lot, and valid questions aswell, speaking about the world being dominated, although is quite ironical we live in this system now where we clearly are dominated, and we're kind of worry that we wouldn't be, but it's okay. It feels a little sinicial today. At its core, a resource-based economy's systems, very much like Wikipedia, would need very few people to service any parts of the system that are not already self-repairing. Essentially systems maintenance. Are those people more powerful than those who live and thrive on the system without directed linking to those kind of interfaces? Could they take it over? Well, are the individuals who run Wikipedia powerful? Could they "take over" Wikipedia? There's nothing to gain by attempting to own or control Wikipedia. It's a social system, run in spite of the profit mechanisms. What benefits us all, including those who maintain aspects of its infrastructure, would only hinder everyone including the maintainers, were it compromised. The question of people “taking over” a society seems a rather moot point. Right now we live in the kind of society that can be taken over, and is regularly taken over by corporate interests, political powers and groups of wealthy people. And it is this precise mechanism of dominance that is absent from a resource-based economy in the same way that it's absent from Wikipedia or any similar non-monetary resource.