Chapter 42: The Transition from Capitalism to the New Paradigm: More Thoughts

On Business

In Capitalist societies, “Business” is often used to justify decisions, actions, policies, practices and attitudes that hurt or destroy the quality of human life, or even destroy human life itself and the environment in which it unfolds. "It's just business, nothing personal," is all too often given as the reason and justification for actions that deprive people or even whole communities, countries or towns of livelihood, reduce or eliminate safeguards and needed support or benefits for employees and consumers, impose arbitrary rules that restrict or hamper people, make life more difficult for employees and customers, damage the environment, freeze or lower wages, raise prices, and all other manner of harm.

In Capitalist societies, "Business" is accepted as a legitimate reason for causing harm, even as religion is accepted as a legitimate reason to cause harm in theocratic societies. That is a measure of just how deeply these attitudes are ingrained in cultures dominated by Capitalist paradigms. One has to ask one's self, if "Business" is something that necessitates degrading, disempowering, suppressing, oppressing, attacking, enslaving, abusing and otherwise damaging human lives, then isn't it a reasonable conclusion that just maybe "Business" is something inherently harmful that must be eliminated as quickly as possible? If the word “heroin” or “cocaine” were substituted for “business,” most people anywhere would instantly see the contradiction.

To make an analogy, if there were a form of entertainment that routinely involved the mutilation and death of most participants and spectators and the destruction of homes or neighborhoods, the public uproar would be deafening and the practice would be banned. Imagine the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain replaced with a high-speed army-tank race through the city center at rush hour. Thus is the effect of Capitalism upon the human and natural world.

On Strikes

To review: strikes are no longer as effective as they once were because of a number of factors.

1) One factor is the fact that many labor unions have devolved into establishments whose existence has taken on a life of its own, separate and detached from their original mission to safeguard and advance the well-being and fair treatment of workers and employees. Many unions have lost touch with their purpose and become corrupt and self-serving, leading to disillusionment and cynicism among rank and file members.

Such corruption has even gone so far that labor unions have been engaged to suppress other emerging labor unions. A well-known instance of this was when the Teamsters were used by big growers to intimidate the United Farm Workers when they were in the initial stages of organizing.

2) Many large employers have found legal ways to circumvent unions, such as hiring workers at just under the number of hours per week than would entitle them to Union membership, hiring workers as "contractors," which makes them legally not employees and so not entitled to Union representation, employee benefits or unemployment. Mega-corporations and the neo-Feudal lords at their helm relentlessly lobby legislators in government to pass laws that weaken labor unions, deny the right to strike by defining it as a crime, and pass so-called “at-will employment” laws. The mainstream media are often used to portray unions as exploiters of workers while painting employers as looking after workers' interests in the face of bad unions.

Nowadays strikers are commonly painted as hooligans trying to disrupt normal life, while employers are portrayed as the beleaguered heroes striving to keep things running. This lopsided and carefully staged propaganda, when skillfully applied, creates a public attitude hostile to employees and labor unions. Forceful, peaceful employee takeover as outlined in Transition strategy is the most viable mode of effecting redesign and repair of the broken and deeply flawed Capitalist paradigm in all of its variations.

On Corporations

After the Transition, corporations will cease to exist; but it is likely that those running them and those who serve them will resist being disbanded. It will be important to seize Corporate offices, headquarters, and other business centers, assets and resources immediately, in an orderly, forceful but nonviolent way and open all of their records for public scrutiny.

Those defending corporations and neo-Feudal lords will have to be overpowered but not harmed if at all possible. While they may give us no choice but to fight them, their humanity must not be violated or disrespected.

In many cases, corporations will be found to have engaged in price gouging, suppression of scientific studies potentially damaging to their profits, dumping toxic waste and otherwise destroying the environment, knowingly doing business with entities using sweatshop and other exploitative labor practices or engaging in these practices themselves, abusing employees, clients, customers or business partners, manipulating resources, production, and economics to enhance corporate or personal profits, stock value, or other interests and agendas in ways harmful to human beings and/or the environment. In such cases, the individuals responsible will be held accountable just as with any other criminals against humanity.

Depending on whether the harmful effects are only within their one country, or extend beyond its borders, they will stand trial for their actions either nationally or in The Hague. All details of their abuses and crimes will be made public. This will help to dispel and deconstruct Capitalist myths depicting corporations as benevolent and worthy of respect. The humanity and equanimity which perpetrators will be tried and treated will show the true benevolent nature of the post-Transitionary community.

Where their trial is national, emphasis should be not on revenge or making them suffer, but rather on exposing their crimes and abuses, holding them responsible, ensuring that they will never again be in a position to perpetrate similar actions, and making sure they give back to those who were harmed by their decisions and actions. This is more about healing than about punishment.

The Norwegian prison system might be a good model for housing and containing such criminals and indeed all criminals. They should be offered therapy and rehabilitation during their quarantine and incarceration.

Inventions, technologies and innovations that were suppressed or withheld will of course be made fully and freely available to all. Corporate and billionaire moneys in foreign and offshore accounts will be seized and converted into resources to benefit the People. Domestic bank accounts will be irrelevant because currency will be obsolete and serve no function. Nobody will need to take the former Feudal Lord's money from them. They will be free to take it from the bank to fill their garages or paper their walls, since it will have no more value than Monopoly money or pieces of newspaper. Cash would probably make decent insulation. It is, however, poor fuel since the ink is toxic when burned.

On Family

Under Capitalist paradigms, with the constant, unrelenting, pervasive reinforcers for making money and the threat of absolute negation of one's existence if one fails, it is no surprise that many people take finances into account in selecting their mates. All too many will choose to marry someone who offers a better financial situation and standard of living, rather than someone they love and have a better relationship with who is likely to remain poor. Some even select a mate solely or primarily for their wealth or the power and level of respect or deference that comes with it in such societies.

It is also not surprising that financial stresses are one of the biggest causes of failed domestic partnerships, friendships and other relationships. When both or all partners are putting forth their best efforts yet continue to be poor and running short, they can easily begin over time to feel inadequate or blame each other. The Capitalist system benefits from this situation because it keeps the people fragmented, divided, conquered, and unlikely to unite to fight against the real source of the problem, which is the capitalist paradigm itself.

After the Transition, there will be no financial stress whatsoever, no motivations or reinforcers to marry for money. Of course, human beings being as complex as we are, many other factors also contribute to the long-term success or breakdown of a domestic partnership or friendship. However, with the removal of financial factors and all that goes with them, we can realistically expect to see a significant rise in the success rate of domestic partnerships and other relationships as measured both statistically and subjectively in terms of human happiness and the quality and longevity of relationships in the home and community.

On Choreography and Logistics

In order to maximize efficiency and avoid overproduction or underproduction, we will create a universal network that uses a distributed computer database and tracking system to adjust production to need. The concept has been covered elsewhere but it bears reiterating.

Passive RFID chips embedded in products can be used to track consumption and inform production facilities how much of goods or services are needed and where, based on to-be-determined Target Inventory Levels and Balances On Hand, geographically coordinated and taking trends into account over time. As time goes on, forecasting will become increasingly accurate as larger data sets are collected and analyzed.

This function will not be one of control or management in which production facilities are ordered to produce arbitrary quotas. It will function more like an orchestra conductor or bandleader cueing different instruments when to come in. Also, in order to maintain the sanctity of individual privacy, RFID chips will not be used in such a way as to be able to track which product is associated with which individual.

On “Commission Work”

Commission work, a euphemism for voluntary virtual slave labor, is a common ploy used to lure potential salespeople into working essentially for free using the prospect of big bonuses and commissions, and "performance-based" pay structures. The myth and hype are very different from the reality.

A typical commission-based position offers sub-living or no pay as "base-pay" with "incentives" in the form of commissions based on sales, business volume or other metrics. The unfortunate employees lured into these jobs find themselves in a position where the only way to survive is to make as many sales as possible, by any means necessary. This results in a hard-sell culture in which clients/customers can expect to be victimized by misrepresentations, falsehoods, and promises that will never be kept.

A recent case study in the United States is Wells Fargo bank, whose unrealistic sales quotas created an economic sword hanging over employees' heads, leading to the false creation of thousands of fraudulent accounts due to fear of being fired for failing to meet performance metrics.

Other notoriously “commission based” companies include Closet World, Home Depot and similar setups where "representatives," "consultants" or "associates" spend considerable time commuting to the homes of prospective clients, spending hours with them drafting drawings of proposed solutions and installations, calculating cost estimates often multiple times. For all their efforts, they are only paid if and when there is a sale, which carries the risk of "charge-backs" if the customer changes their mind.

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM’s) and Network Marketing businesses are yet another form of commission-based work. In these business models, people are recruited with the appeal of “being your own boss” and told true stories of individuals who have made huge incomes in the business. In such businesses, one must constantly bring both new customers and new recruits into the business in order to make any income. One is only paid when they sign someone up or make a sale, or when one of their sign-ups signs someone up or makes a sale; and one has to contend with the same “charge-backs” if someone they signed up changes their mind at any time.

Waitpeople in restaurants are yet another example of “commission” work. Workers are paid sub-minimum wage on presumption of tips, which are often commandeered by the owners and then portioned out as they see fit.

The psychological reinforcers of making the sale at any cost, lead to a culture among sales professions of dishonesty, misrepresentation, hard-selling, cutthroat competition, and desperation. This kind of exploitation will cease to exist forever with the end of Capitalism.

A Better Way Of Life Versus Payback And Revenge

This Transition is not and must not be focused upon the CEOs, billionaires, corporations and other players who perpetrate and perpetuate the economic pyramid. If we are to be successful, we must rather be focused upon halting the paradigm in which all of us have been operating, the behaviors that it reinforces, and the results in terms of enhancing or detracting from human happiness, well-being, thriving, and a sustainable environment for us to live in. We must focus not on the players, but on the game, the nature of the game, what it reinforces, and on what are the likely and inevitable results of the paradigm. If we are to create a truly new, more empowering, compassionate, vibrant and functional Community paradigm, then we must not be distracted by us-and-them thinking.

This transition must happen very soon if we are to avoid a very long dark age, the likes of which humanity has never seen; but it must not be yet another bloodbath, another change of power from one group of corrupt dictators to another, no matter how well-intended.

On Taxation

Government, under Capitalism, is limited and controlled by money as a barrier, as much as individuals are. Countless times, worthy, beneficial projects languish and are suppressed due to lack of funding. Government is forced to prey upon its already struggling citizens through taxation in order to gain funding.

In the new paradigms, government will be free to build bridges, improve roads, provide disaster relief, build hospitals and schools, encourage scientific research and send exploratory spacecraft out into the universe without such constraints. There will of course always be some kinds of constraints. The laws of physics and chemistry, for example, or the availability of real resources, rather than arbitrary constructs, will determine what can and cannot be achieved. No capricious constraints will hobble human ingenuity.

On Initialization

Regarding the initialization strategy for the Transition, a day must be decided upon and widely communicated both within the affected country and globally. It will be most effective if all individuals consciously involved in staging the Transition act at once across all of the country.

The Declaration should be released and transmitted across all media at around mid-day, after the Transition is underway. This should be timed to come at around the point in time when those unaware of what is going on will be confused and anxious. The Declaration will clarify and instruct, while hopefully easing fears of violence.

On the Perceptions of Life, Work, and How They Fit Together

Capitalism and similar systems have created an artificial, destructive, demoralizing fragmentation and alienation, dividing life into work, home life, and play. This inevitably results in a drag on, and negation of, our natural engagement in the processes of life and in our social community interactions. Work becomes something oppressive that is forced upon us, leading to a desire to not work, to be free of work, and to have time for what we really care about, which is usually not work. In most work environments, employees are keenly aware that the employer does not care about their well-being or happiness as much as it cares about profits, stock value, and market share.

Yet the distinction between "work" and "life/play" is artificial. Children typically express a desire to join in adult activities, including "chores" like cleaning, doing dishes, gardening, and work activities if they are exposed to them. They do not distinguish between "work" and "play." In hunter-gatherer, pre and non-Capitalist cultures, hunters do not experience hunting as a yoke upon their shoulders, craftspeople do not feel that their crafts drain their spirit, and farmers do not experience farming as an imposed burden or economic shackle. There is pride of workmanship and a positive relationship between an individual and the job they do in the community.

The distinction arises for complex reasons, but major among them is that "work" gradually takes on an association with being pressured, belittled, taken advantage of, bullied, put down and disempowered while performing tasks that hold little interest, fulfillment, motivation, satisfaction or sense of purpose. The ever-present threat of the "wolf at the door" becomes increasingly real and onerous as the child transitions through adolescence into adulthood.

In many non-capitalist societies, taking on the activities and responsibilities of adulthood is an empowering, positive experience of being mentored into a position of becoming a valued contributor to their community. This is living proof that we humans are not predisposed or doomed by our "nature" to suffer the ravages of capitalist neo-Feudalism.

How we interact, organize, and carry out our social interactions as a community, including performance of necessary activities for living typically defined as "work," is largely up to us. Long observation and experience show that certain paradigms, such as monarchy, traditional Feudalism and modern capitalism, actually work contrary to our best interest and happiness as a species and as individuals by reinforcing and emphasizing behaviors that create a preponderance of dysfunction, unhappiness, conflict, destructiveness, and suppression of our best attributes.

Under the new paradigms, this artificial distinction will fade. Our contribution to the community will become an increasingly authentic expression of our interest, passions, strengths and abilities, and our instinctive engagement in the processes of life as a social species

On the Evolution of Systems

Our transition from hunter-gatherers to modern, global technological human communities started out slowly and haphazardly. The major discoveries that changed our ways of life, often for the better, sometimes not, came about spontaneously and more or less randomly.

When our ancestors discovered and learned to appreciate, develop, and consciously apply our problem solving, observational, innovative abilities and how to share information from person to person, community to community, and generation to generation, our rate of change and development accelerated until at this time in history it has possibly outpaced our ability to assimilate the changes in lifestyle and technology that we ourselves have brought about.

We have mastered the arts of engineering solutions to physical world challenges, goals and problems. Yet we have not applied those same abilities to ourselves as individuals or as communities to nearly the same degree. There have been some efforts in that area: democracy, communism, and socialism are some familiar examples.

Yet in the area of social systems we are still functioning at the level that our bronze-age or possibly medieval ancestors functioned with respect to the physical world. It is time for us to observe what we have learned about ourselves as individuals, as communities and social constructs/systems and reexamine how we function well and how we function poorly. We will truly begin to thrive when we start to apply the same creative problem-solving skills to those areas as we do to technical challenges, being guided and directed by the goal of creating social systems that consciously, consistently evolve in the direction of fostering the greatest empowerment, fulfillment, well being and happiness of all human beings as individuals and as communities.

In some ways, the new Paradigm may superficially appear to be a form of Socialism, and indeed it does have some common elements. There are important differences, however. One of the most salient ones is that while in Socialism, the government or State owns or controls resources and administers them in as equitable a way as they are able. In the new Paradigms, however, most resources will be owned and/or controlled by the individuals or social entities using them. The role of government will be more to prevent excesses and abuses by individuals or groups and to facilitate and coordinate the flow of information to enable productive dialogue between producers and consumers to ensure real needs are met while minimizing waste. Some resources, such as major infrastructure, national defense, space exploration, national parks, etc., will be administered by the government transparently to, and responsible to, the People. The role of government will be more like an orchestra conductor and at times a referee, than like a ruler or dictator. The concept of the “commons” will be revived and updated as needed on a large scale.

On Compulsive, Obsessive Growth

The current mode of operation dominating large-scale Capitalist corporations and other enterprises includes the constant compulsion, in order to continue to survive as a business, to constantly increase profits and stock prices, and to accelerate the rate of increase, usually the through artificially-imposed and forced self-devouring cycle.

Logically, this model is unstable and impossible to sustain indefinitely. Picture a process that starts out consuming a pint of water a day, producing an ounce of product a day, and generating a pint of waste a day and has to keep scaling up to stay in operation. Let’s say facilities are built to supply the global need and profit off of it at $10 per ounce. Let us suppose that after a month, this process consumes a gallon of water a day, produces eight ounces of product a day, and generates a gallon of waste a day. Imagine if seven billion people each purchase the aforementioned ounce of product a day, every day. After a month, that would be seven billion gallons of water consumed in every day, seven billion ounces of product produced in that day, and seven billion gallons of waste that needs to be disposed of that day. And that is only the beginning.

Now remember that this needs to keep increasing indefinitely with no upper limit. It is easy to see how at some point, the demands of this process would overwhelm the global water supply, fill the oceans with waste in the place of water, and bury the population in products whose weight would crush them. That is exactly what is happening as long as capitalist paradigms operate unregulated and unchecked on a global, or even national level. If it is not deliberately shut down, it will ultimately break down anyway due to its non-sustainability and cause untold human suffering in the process. If not curtailed, it may well reach the proportions of an extinction-level event, according to current research.

The Danger of "It Can't Happen Here" Thinking

To think "it can't happen here" regarding totalitarianism, religious fanaticism, genocide, environmental collapse and other worst-case scenarios is as unwise as driving while watching TV because one is sure that one is familiar with the road. These kinds of abuses and tragedies are not exclusive to one party, ethnicity, religion, philosophy, ideology, country, place, or time. They are behaviors carried out by human beings in diverse times and places. As such, we must always be alert - not hyper-vigilant or paranoid - but aware to notice symptoms of these phenomena if they do arise and take action to prevent their proliferation. We are not that way by nature; but those attitudes and behaviors are sadly within the darker end of the spectrum of human behaviors.

Tragically, it can happen anywhere, when the conditions and human dynamics are fertile for it to arise. To deny the possibility is to blind ourselves and convert it into an active danger. If we simply remain conscious and observant, then we will see and identify such phenomena and be able to contain and de-escalate them before they can become institutionalized and turn into a crisis.

It is equally dangerous and self-defeating to apply "it can't happen here" thinking to the positive end of the range of human potential.

In heavily capitalist countries like the United States, many people are aware that their society is severely broken; yet when one brings up the possibility of improvements and solutions that they are aware are working very successfully, such as free higher education and healthcare for all as is practiced in places like Norway, Sweden, Denmark and elsewhere, many immediately react by saying, "That could never work here, this is America and we're capitalist." Similar reactions are encountered when any kind of cooperative models are discussed.

This is equivalent to an individual who is sick with cancer but says "Oh no, that won't work for me, I'm too sickly" when a treatment with a high success rate is brought to their attention. This mindset is almost certainly the result of psychological processes and dynamics strongly akin to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Stockholm syndrome, in which captives and victims of abuse come to identify with their captors and abusers. We will do well to study and learn the effective treatments for PTSD and Stockholm syndrome and apply them to ourselves, each other, and those who resist the Transition because of such patterns of thought.

Happily, best-case scenario paradigms can happen anywhere. These are all matters of choice, completely within our ability to attain in either or both directions.