Chapter 27: Capitalism and Tourism

Few things are as destructive and disruptive to the life of a community or even a whole region than tourism in its current form.

On the surface, tourism appears to be a benefit. It brings in tourists with money to spend and opens up niches for a range of businesses: restaurants, tours, curio and souvenir shops, shuttles and buses, taxicabs, car rentals, entertainments and shows of local culture, bars, clothing shops, and more. It also generates new jobs: retail and wholesale positions, drivers, cooks and waitpersons, cashiers, tour guides, rental agents, bellhops, maids and janitors, maintenance and customer service agents, technicians and others. At first glance it looks like a boon to the community.

Upon deeper examination, however, its effects are devastating, for a number of reasons and in a variety of ways.

Consider for example that in most cases tourism takes up a lot of space. There are exceptions of course, but a typical luxury hotel, golf course, or resort displaces hundreds or thousands of residents of the impacted area. This usually happens in developing nations where those residents have no voice and no way to defend their interests. Often they are simply and literally forced to leave when bulldozers blaze a trail of destruction through their homes, fields and businesses. This is not mentioned in any travel brochures.

Similarly, the damage to the local environment and biosphere cannot be ignored. In order to create the kind of environment required to support a tourist resort, massive changes must be imposed on a large geographical area. The entire local biome is razed to the ground except in small, contained spaces retained to give patrons a token taste of the local environment. This affects not only the site of the devastation, but also migration routes, mating grounds, watersheds, pollen and seed distribution, micro-habitats, and a host of delicate, complex natural balances that ripples through a much wider area. The very complexity of such systems is far too great for any impact study to realistically analyze.

The impact on the local economy is also complex. One almost universal result, after the initial displacement of the local population and destruction of the local biome, is the stratification of the local population into a rigid and oppressive caste system: a pyramid in which the lofty upper reaches are populated by the tourists who are typically wealthy beyond imagination relative to the local population. All resources and efforts are devoted to servicing and catering to them. The impact on the lives of local people is not taken into account in any meaningful way.

The deleterious effects of tourism on the native population in tourist areas are most severely felt in less developed countries but make no mistake, they affect all touristic areas. At the time of this writing, the long-time tourist city of Firenze (Florence), Italy, has passed laws banning residents from sitting down in certain high volume areas, fining them hundreds or thousands of Euros if they do. Tourism has made it so crowded that there is no room. This is clearly a case where profits are placed above even the simplest rights of human beings. Tourists bring in big money. The fact that the daily quality of life suffers is considered irrelevant. More remote tourist areas such as Machu Picchu in Peru and even the summit of Mt. Everest are frequently jammed beyond capacity with an unending line of people during the climbing season.

The local economy adjusts to operate based on what the tourist overclass wants and can afford, driving the cost of living upwards beyond reach of local residents. This effect ripples outwards to an area much larger than the vicinity of the resort itself.

Below the tourists in this pyramid, there forms a secondary overclass of locals who work directly with the tourists: a select few, local entrepreneurs who fulfill the tourists' needs and desires. This stratum of the pyramid is far below the tourists economically and in terms of rights and the respect they are afforded, yet its occupants are able to live orders of magnitude above the economic and social status and quality of life experienced by the vast majority of their countrymen.

While constantly subservient to tourists and the owners of the resort (who themselves are always inevitably either ultra-wealthy individuals or corporations from other places), this local over-class typically lords it over their former peers who now find themselves beneath this new over-class who with harsh enthusiasm makes sure to constantly remind all around them of their "place" in the hierarchy. Thus they distance themselves from the memory of their previous lesser status.

The vast majority of the local population becomes a permanent underclass of servants to the tourists and local over-class: maids, bellhops, chauffeurs, cooks and kitchen staff, cleaning staff, receptionists, tour bus/boat/plane/helicopter pilots and drivers, tour guides, waitpersons, booking agents, and more. Most of these workers are paid far below living wages while working long hours under oppressive conditions, all the while being constantly demeaned and reminded that they are less than, that they are inferior and as such have crushing obligations with few or no rights.

Occupations that for generations sustained the population: farming, local businesses, crafts, fishing and more, are gone. They are completely displaced, being incompatible with the dominant business interests of the resort and tourists. The economy becomes almost exclusively centered on the resort and its patrons. Those who do not or cannot find a niche in this structure are unable to remain in the area and survive.

A host of parasitical industries inevitably develops around the resort and its guests: prostitution including children, drug sales and other illegal industries as well as souvenir sales of manufactured facsimiles of local artifacts, poached animal products, clothing, knick-knacks, curios, smaller hotels, restaurants, spas, massage parlors, tours and recreations such as horse or helicopter tours, parasailing, golf courses that displace even more local people and businesses, banks, and more. All of these follow the same socio-economic pattern described above.

As we can see, tourism is to a local population and economy as amphetamines are to students: it produces results that on the surface appear constructive but which upon closer examination prove to be fatally damaging. Even if the resort were to shut down at a later time, the damage is often irreversible.

Tourism as we have known it has no place in the post-Transition communities engineered lovingly and painstakingly to empower each and every member to actualize their full potential, to fulfill their dreams and aspirations.

Yet it is natural and beneficial for people to want to travel, expand their horizons, interact with diverse people and cultures, exchange ideas, customs, perspectives, skills, art-forms, languages etc. Paradoxically, tourism in most of its current forms does not truly accomplish this, since tourist resorts naturally adjust to their patrons' tastes and expectations. A luxury resort in New York is not much different from one in Tokyo, Moscow, Mumbai or Rio De Janeiro. Tourists frequenting such places only experience a very superficial, artificial, stylized, watered down abstracted facsimile of the reality of the people, culture and natural environment of the host country.

How then can we encourage and support travel and cross-cultural sharing? Some already established models already exist that work very well as a starting point.

The kibbutzim and moshavim of Israel have volunteer programs in which foreigners can come for a time in a kibbutz or moshav at no cost in exchange for working in kibbutz agriculture, industry, and services. Kibbutzim provide volunteers with a place to live, food, necessities and amenities plus a stipend. Volunteers are welcome to participate in the social and cultural life of the kibbutz, travel on days off, and experience the kibbutz way of life. To a large degree, volunteers participate in the life of the community that strives to make them comfortable without bowing or scraping to them. Their presence is for the most part mutually beneficial and does not disrupt or degrade the natural life of kibbutz or moshav residents or the surrounding towns and cities.

The Venceremos Brigades in Cuba work along similar lines.

There are also programs like the American Peace Corps, Doctors Without Borders, Vista and other similar programs which afford participants the opportunity to involve themselves in other countries and cultures in a context that is at least theoretically intended to benefit the people of the host country rather than disrupt or profit off of them.

Tourism can be re-cast and developed into a powerful avenue of intercourse between peoples, cultures, individuals, ideas and knowledge worldwide, if re-worked in a form that fosters symbiotic, authentic real experience, participation and interaction rather than a show put on for profit.

In emerging post-Transition cultures, entire new paradigms and models for tourism will also develop. The challenges will be considerable, since any country whose people embark on this kind of transition will find themselves in the position of having to interact with other countries which still use a money economy and practice the current form of tourism.

We will need to develop socio-economic interfaces and protocols for interacting with such countries, both as a society/country and as individuals. We will not be able to change how other countries implement their tourist industries, we can expect that curiosity will ultimately motivate people from around the world to want to visit once they realize that it is safe. When they do, they will enjoy a very different experience as tourists, an experience in which they interact authentically and directly with the people and the environment. Instead of luxury and being catered to in an artificially stylized representation of the local culture amidst a host of businesses enticing them to spend their money on objects, entertainments and experiences, they will encounter sincere hospitality, dialogue, unrestricted free access to all cultural and recreational events and activities, easy and free travel within the host country, a warm and welcoming reception by the people of a free, empowered, highly-self-actualized and mutually symbiotic community. In other words, they will experience the new Paradigm directly.

The most valuable souvenir that tourists will take home will be exposure to the post-transitionary society with the inevitable realization that the paradigm is not only viable, but that its citizens overall are happier, healthier, more vibrant and robust than in their own pre-Transitionary societies. Tourism in the post-Transition community will be an important organic mode of sewing the seeds for similar transitions in other countries.

In the days and months immediately after the Transition it is to be expected that the rest of the world will not know what to think or expect. Since almost every revolution that people know about has come with bloodshed, warfare and sometimes a wave of "purging" as the new regime rounds up denizens of the former regime for "justice" or revenge (justified or not). There will be understandable hesitation and uncertainty.

Some revolutions have brought about a more humane and free society; some have done the opposite. There will naturally be a massive campaign of negative propaganda from the ultra-wealthy and their corporations who will lose a lot of their income and all of their dominion, control and influence. They will probably experience public relations nightmares as the post-Transitionary community publishes to the world all corporations' crimes, secret dealings and abuses when formerly hidden corporate records will be made public. Thus, between fear of the unknown and the expected torrent of negative pro-Capitalist propaganda, people around the world will understandably not know what to think and will be tainted by some degree of apprehension.

As time passes and the new paradigm community settles in, works out its kinks and increasingly shifts from reconstruction and reorganization back to normal living, it will become increasingly apparent to the observing world that the new society is not belligerent or a threat to anybody, that it is a free, open, transparent and stable community/society.

In that context, the new modes of tourism will serve to create ambassadors of goodwill as tourists experience the reality of the new Paradigm first-hand. In time, their direct, personal experiences will put to rest all natural but unfounded fears based on overthrows in other places and times. A tourist returning from a post-Transition community will provide abundant, factual, positive pictures and impressions of the reality of life in the new Paradigm.

Our dealings with other countries will reflect the new sets of priorities and principles. This will relieve some parties on the world stage while worrying and angering others as it becomes clear that this country will no longer be a source of profitable opportunities to be exploited and will no longer engage in exploiting other countries and peoples for profit.

Around the world, it will become clear that the Post-Transition society is a safe and sane place and that it is not dangerous to visit there. The experiences of those who do, will fuel further curiosity among their friends and families. We can therefore expect that tourism will grow and increasingly flourish as curiosity of the new and novel out-creates fear of the unknown.

One more question must be answered before moving on to other topics: How do citizens of the post-Transition society travel to other countries? As citizens of a country where all forms of currency are obsolete and discontinued in everyday life, how will we travel to and within countries that are still under various implementations of the Capitalist paradigm?

A complete solution will require careful in-depth study, observation of events as they unfold, and possibly the negotiation of new kinds of trade agreements with other countries which are mutually beneficial in new ways.

In the beginning, however, a simple expedient might be to maintain currency in greatly-altered limited-scope banks in various denominations around the country. When a citizen travels abroad, an account can be created in their name with an appropriate amount of funds for their expected travel needs, thus enabling them to pass smoothly through a Capitalist society as needed.

Of course, airlines and all other modes of travel in the post-Transition society will be free, though measures will have to be taken to make sure that we are not overwhelmed beyond capacity by foreign travelers who will understandably wish to avail themselves of free travel. Perhaps post-Transition international airlines may have to be accessible only to citizens and their families, or perhaps they can be free for citizens but priced at the low end of international travel industry standards for foreign nationals, with the funds so generated kept in reserve as funding in the above-mentioned limited banks for home-country travelers when they travel abroad.

In short, tourism in the post-Transitionary society will have to undergo a host of fundamental changes, yet will remain an important avenue for encouraging international and intercultural discourse, trade, cross-fertilization, goodwill, and for planting the seeds for future similar Transitions worldwide.

PART 2: TREATMENT