So, we need a movement.
We don't really have an option anymore because the ruling class seems to be doing all it can to wipe us off the planet. We have been in open class warfare for decades but really, we've only seen one side fighting. This class massacre has left our organisations in tatters or welded onto the machine itself.
How then, do we build a movement?
Why is it that the myriad of anarchist/communist/leftist groups that have existed in this time not gained traction? The oppression is surely there, wages have been stagnant, costs of living have gone up and taxes have been lax on the wealthy. The material conditions are certainly there. There is no lack of public knowledge about the issues or distrust in government. Our generation and large amounts of past generations share distaste with the status quo. Some to the point that capitalism has finally become more of a dirty word than socialism.
So why then, if all this is true why are we not revolting now?
The answer is not easy, its obviously heaps of different factors but the big ones are these:
Primal needs
Pacifism
Fun
Despair
Imagine yourself as a worker on minimum wage. You have a couple kids and a partner. The rent is expensive and the kids even more so. You don't have much in the way of savings because bills tend to swallow up the majority of it. Food isn't getting any cheaper, nor is electricity or petrol.
You work most days and come home exhausted. In that time that you are home before bed, you get that precious time with your children who you don't really see as much as you'd want to. Before long you have to usher them off to bed.
You end up going to bed yourself. Getting ready for the next day.
You get some days off, but they aren't many. You rarely get two days off in a row. Those days off are precious. You either spend them half-dead on the couch or hanging out with your kids. Either you lack the energy or the time but even on those days off, there isn't much space for politics.
Besides, what would you be going to? Everytime you've gone to one of those lefty groups its been a bunch of students and old farts babbling in terms you barely understand. You leave there, not really sure what to make of it all, but you don't really feel like you made a difference to anything, not even yourself.
Such is the issue of the modern left.
Workers don't have time to come to some meeting where people talk about esoteric shit and never actually do anything. Theory is important and interesting when you know the lingo, but it is not of primary importance.
As leftists our primary job should be to better the lives of the workers.
I mean shit, isn't that what we say we are trying to do?
We leftists are competing with a economic system that produce far more shit than we could ever produce. The path of least resistance for a person already struggling is not to rock the boat. Atleast then, their bills can get paid.
So, if we want workers to attend our meetings, if we want to build a movement. We must first alleviate the suffering of the poor.
What this means is that we as leftists need to create systems to provide primal needs for people, free of charge.
What are Primal needs? They are the certain material factors that all humans need to survive. They transcend race, nationality, culture. They are the same needs all humans have and so for any socialist revolution to occur we must secure these from the monopoly capitalism has over them.
The less money people pour into the capitalist system the better. However, more crucially, the more workers can get for free (or via co-operatives that slash the costs enormously) the less time workers need to spend in wage labour.
By freeing up time from wage labour, we give workers the time to pursue academic, artistic and social pursuits. The ones that capitalism has forced them to forgo due to time constraints.
So, if we are to free the working class, we must work to provide:
Sustenance (Food, water)
Community (social sphere, communal spaces)
Shelter (Housing, creative spaces)
How did i come to these three categories?
Sustenance is obvious but there is alot to it.
Food ends out being a large amount of the weekly costs of the average worker. It is also, the most basic need a human has. It crosses all cultures and the only thing that changes in regards to it are the flavours of the food.
This means that if we can assure the food of workers in our country, the same systems we produce her can be reproduced anywhere. More than anything, socialism cannot just happen in one country, it has to happen world-wide to clean up capitalism's mess. So for any regional benefits we create we must also consider them not as an end but as means to pursue the end in worldwide socialism.
How we might create a socialist alternative to food goes in multiple steps. This revolution wont happen overnight so we must accept that we will have to act under capitalism until we are strong enough to transition.
1: Food buyers co-operative.
Whilst we are under the yoke of capitalism there are some less radical means to reduce the cost of foodstuffs going to our communities. The most simple way i can envisage is a food buyers co-operative.
-100 people come together and write down a list of household items that they might buy in a regular month.
-They then take all the most common items on everyones list and place them on a survey list.
-The 100 then fill out the form detailing how much of each household item they need for a given month.
-The total cost of the 100 houses is tallied per item.
-The co-op organizer then talks to the producer of each item to determine the wholesale price of those items.
-The 100 houses pool their money based on the quote.
-the co-op organizer buys all the products and has them shipped to a central location.
-The 100 houses come by on the day to pick up their products
-products at wholesale prices reduce the overall cost of living for the 100 houses.
2: Self-sufficient cities.
Production of food is an important thing to decentralize. Whilst Capitalists control the supply of food, no alternative is possible. The production of food in common is also a wonderful oppurtunity for communities to come together across age groups. Decentralized production of food is integral to the Edenist dream. Decentralized production of food not only allows food to become demarketized, but brings public conciousness to view the ecosystem as something they live within, rather than despite.
If we are ever going to solve the ecological crisis we are suffering, the public at large must seem themselves as humble stewards of nature rather than would-be conquerors of it.
Self-sufficiency could happen in a handful of ways:
2.1: the planting of fruit trees on verges and in parks.
This is already done but not to a large extent. The problem with this currently is people do not make use of this ready food supply when it arises. In the summer in Christchurch you can see literally thousands of plums dripping off the trees onto pavement to rot or be eaten by the birds.
So, if the same people who planted the trees harvested them at their proper time of year, Turned them into jams or juices or even just gave away the raw product. We might end up seeing our cities moving closer to self-sufficiency.
This group of city farmers would also create a group of people who new the soil conditions, water conditions and general ecological condition of the city as a whole. The cities environmental custodians could ensure that New Zealanders live in cities that produced for them but also thrived because of them.
2.2: Public Orchards.
Much like the previous point, this would utilise the new environmental custodians to maintain fruiting trees within the city limits. This point would just expand that in places where there is space.
Christchurch for example, has quite a significant amount of space in the east which was built upon reclaimed swampland. This land is unsuitable for housing, as we plainly saw in the earthquakes that hit the city. It seems, however, that the government has not totally learned its lesson with some of those same areas being redeveloped for housing.
History repeats itself, so they say.
On marginal land such as east christchurch we, as a country built on such a precarious faultline, should not be building houses for people to die in. Instead, such marginal land should be used as recreational and agricultural land. In the Christchurch example, rather than repeat history, large areas of reclaimed swampland should either be returned to swamp (with the carbon holding and water purifying uses swampland has) or turned into public orchards which serve a memorial purpose as well as a recreational one.
2.3: Home Agricultural systems
The previous two ideas would work well within a nation which has a highly centralized state. This would create wage work dependant on the state with the benefits directly going to the citizens.
Though, true decentralization doesn't come by moving food production from undemocratic capitalist institutions to the representative democracy of the state. It comes by trying to get citizens themselves to be self-sufficient.
Home Agricultural systems would aid in this, though i have no illusions to them being able to produce an entire households needs.
Home agricultural systems such as aquaponics set-ups, hanging window gardens, aeroponics boxes could be created to be used within the household to provide a small amount of fresh organic produce to be used by the families in question.
Technology in this area is often very minimal with some households set ups costing about as small as 50 dollars. As the ecologically minded come up with new ideas, we could find food generating systems that cost less, produce more and require less human intervention.
3:Permaculture gardens within schools.
It is most important for each subsequent generation to grow up understanding that they live within a ecosystem, not despite it. The reason for this is as follows:
The ecosystem will always be exploited and degraded by the people under any system if humans see that there is a Humanity/Environment dichotomy.
Humans find it relatively simple to exploit things that are part of an outgroup. This is where racism comes from. We are social animals who strive for the betterment of our close ingroup. To benefit our ingroup we have historically done some terrible things. Colonialism, Slavery, Wars, Genocides and so on. We have only been able to overcome much of this due to Art, Media, communications technology, literature and of course the internet. All these things helped us empathise with the suffering of others and in doing so made it harder to justify exploiting them. The "other" became considerably less so. Though we haven't truly succeeded in solving these issues, we've come some serious way.
However. It is hard to empathise with a tree.
Highly centralized and urbanized states have trouble seeing themselves as part of nature. Within cities, nature is manicured to fit our whims or is a nuisance weed to be gotten rid of. Huge sprawling concrete jungles allow us to feel like we have triumphed over nature and created for ourselves an environment that is subservient to us.
Within these manufactured environments so little natural environment exists that children grow their entire lives without having grown a single thing. Without seeing any animals that aren't nuisance animals (pidgeons, rats, cockroaches) apart from their highly domesticated pets. If you have no interaction with the "other" barring the nature that has been bent to mans whims. How could you empathise with nature as something that needs to exist in its own right? Let alone see you and it as operating symbiotically!
Schools must first as foremost teach children to be good stewards of nature. Humans have ascended to godlike power over our world. But we have not learned the responsibility necessary to use that power reasonably. Indeed we have created an economic and moral system that desperately tries to justify responsibility to nothing but oneself.
Schools must have permaculture gardens as living experiments for humans to see the interconnectedness of things. Permaculture creates ecosystems of multiple different plants, animals and insects, all working in tandem to produce a virbrant environment that can largely reproduce itself once humans stop investing time into it. As such, Permaculture gardens are an amazing oppurtunity to have students have a first-hand experience in gardening, engraining the notion that the human animal has an important part to play in helping the environment flourish. Not only that but it is a chance to teach children about the water cycle, about ecology, chemistry, biology, food sciences and obviously the horticultural/permacultural knowledge we would hope they continue using for the rest of their lives.
How this might look is sectioning off some land from fields in all schools to be turned into a bare patch of dirt. A permaculture garden would then be created on the land by the students.
The students would, under the guidance of a teacher, learn the various techniques for water retention, shade distribution and plant placement that were employed in the planning of the garden.
The students would then work to create the design that the teacher had designed for the land and in doing so, understand what each plant gives to each plant. What place insects and animals have within the mini ecosystem and so on.
That years garden would exist until their final year. The trees will be moved to grow elsewhere but the bushes, plants and water features will be dug up until it is once again a patch of bare dirt. Then the new year of students will begin work on their garden that will follow them through their high school years.
This destruction of the students permaculture garden would hopefully be a fairly heartwrenching moment. The cyclical nature of the environments being built until they are something beautiful only to be destroyed should be able to say something about our own lives. Namely, to have a firsthand experience of the horrors that come with destroying working ecosystems. Hopefully, this hard lesson will teach students the importance of protecting the larger habitats around our country. Hopefully, it would explain what we would lose if we saw the environment as just a resource.
Each year, a harvest festival could be held on the school grounds to show off the produce created by the students. it could be a communal affair with the families of students coming in to share their produce and the delicious dishes they can make from them. It could be a time where the entire community comes together to eat, dance and generally socialize. To create ties between families and get our suburbs to become communities.
Water is also a major concern. The world capitalist machine seems to see water as a resource that can never be depleted. Barring the evaporation of our atmosphere in some cataclysmic astral disaster, they are right.
Water, however, can be made unusable. As it is currently being done all over the world.
China has sullied its rivers to horrid extents by treating them as open sewers for industrial chemical waste. But really they are just following in the footsteps of all industrial countries who have found a market incentive in the destruction of natural resources.
As human populations grow, so too does their need for water. Either for drinking, industrial uses, agriculture or all the myriad other uses we have for water.
Water, over the next few decades, will become some of the most sought after resources on the planet. we would do well to preserve it from the capitalist machine.
Water, though now is close to free in New Zealand, is not and will soon not be so elsewhere in the world. Indeed if we sully our rivers at the rate we have been doing perhaps we might add ourselves to that.
Water resources must be taken under socialist control to ensure that we will always have fresh water in the coming years while the rest of capitalist governments sully their own. In the coming decades we may well see water wars. New Zealand would do well to preserve its natural resources and fortify them against foreign capitalist incursion (most likely from China or America)
Sustenance itself, feeds into the next Primal need, community.
If food once again becomes a communal thing with
