What would you change about modern society?
There is too much to change to achieve justice and decency in the relationships that human beings have with each other. But in the richer West and North of the globe, one necessity must be to stop the pressure on seeing economic growth as the means to hopeful futures. Even supposedly socialist parties are obsessed with this in the UK. However, how economic growth that benefits only a few can lead to hope, let alone socialism, is beyond this socialist.
And those same parties are no longer the friends of progressive taxation or other redistributive measures and tend increasingly to see private wealth as the answer to growth with increasing public poverty. Public poverty means poor shared and co-owned cooperative resources, such as the NHS was intended to be. Such power happens as a concomitant of growth measured by private wealth but electorates seem prepared just to accep thist. This contrast was well known to the citizens of ancient Pompeii but was ignored there too. At least their apocalypse of burning human flesh was brief though, and not their own fault.
Of course, some countries have never benefitted from growth and those same countries, even whole continents, will be the ones to suffer first from the environmental effects of Western and Northern growth. This is a paradox impossible to solve outside of a more global take on redistribution of resources. That will cost ‘working people’ the new name for the entitled white western working class, one that excludes the lumpenproletariat, in Marx’s ugly term – the disadvantaged and unable to work, at least under conditions of extreme competition. And no party will admit that, even in a relatively mild policy like ULEZ (ultra low emission zones).
Once upon a time (in the 1960s) some people seemed to understand Schumacher’s term ‘Small is Beautiful ‘. It promised that we might live better in smaller more cooperative units, with less private wealth and more that is public and accessible, but perhaps not grandiose nor luxurious. It too is a problematic idea of course but it was at least an aspiration for a set of values not determined by the cask nexus and pure exchange values. It was about use values, a kind of return to Ruskin’s perception that all wealth is paid for by tangible spending of lives involving our own eventual death.
Yet we watch Rhodes burn and blame the workers of exploitative tour companies for not looking after us, and then book next year’s package holiday all inclusive of unseen wage-slave labour. We elect only governments that lie about hard choices. Indeed the only hard choice the current Labour Party makes is not to make it clear to electorates that vast inequalities of private wealth and growth through commodity innovation, driven only by the lies of advertising, is productive only of more inequality and waste and damaged systems for continued life.
I wish I had answers. I don’t. No one person has. But we need to find ways of addressing this. What next? I don’t know. Do you?
Love
Steve
Steve_Bamlett_blog 