A bit of a homework assignment for you today, dear readers:
- Please take a look at this wonderful 4-page article by David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World.
This was the presentation David made at the conference I attended in
Boston a couple of weeks ago. In it, David does the following:
- Correctly
identifies the causes of the social and environmental crises now facing
us: overpopulation, overconsumption of resources, inequality and
'institutional pathology' (the fact that 'private-benefit' corporations
are designed to increase consumption and inequality, instead of to
advance the public good)
- Prescribes what is needed: reduced
consumption, redistributed wealth and power, reallocation of resources
from harmful to beneficial uses, increasing 'natural capital' while
reducing financial capital, and freeing up knowledge (removing
intellectual property rights) to accelerate social innovation,
adaptation and learning.
- Calls for the breaking up and
replacement of 'private benefit' corporations with rechartered 'public
benefit' corporations with a mandate to produce what is needed for
social and environmental health and well-being instead of to produce as
much as possible as profitably as possible; these would serve as
catalysts for the creation of a new decentralized, self-organizing
economy consisting of self-reliant community-based economies, comprised
in turn of locally-rooted, human-scale, fair-trade enterprises (what I
have called 'Natural Enterprises').
- Calls for leadership of
citizens who reject capitalism 'working from outside the existing
institutions of elite power', to educate others and demand 'strong,
active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce
rules' to create this new economy.
- Then please take a look at my article from Tuesday,
which the graphic above is from. You'll notice that what Korten is
calling for is precisely the model corresponding to the Natural social
worldview in the lower left of this graphic: Natural Enterprises making
up a Natural Economy operating within devolved-power, self-sufficient
Natural Communities.
What's your reaction to Korten's proposal? Mine was that it's exactly the impossible and unachievable change we need.
Citizens just don't rise up against a dysfunctional
socio-economic-political system and replace it with something else. And
if they did, they would be fighting the government of the day to the death,
since that government exists precisely to defend and sustain the
existing dysfunctional economy. We are not going to have a collective
anti-capitalist uprising and revolution, and even if we were
governments certainly wouldn't be responsive to it.
Let me say it again: Whether you want to change
the political or economic system, save the whales, stop global warming,
reform education, spark innovation or anything else, the answer is in how meaning, and understanding of what needs
to be done, emerges from conversation in community with people you love,
people who care.
That's
the way you see the solution to problems when you take the 'feminine'
Natural social worldview in the lower right of the graphic above. If
(let's be optimistic, when)
communities start having conversations about this, and start to really
care about it, so it goes from the 'nice to do' list (that never gets
done) to the 'have to do' list (that does get done) -- when that happens, the kind of
emergence of 'what needs to be done' is unlikely to be revolution, mass
uprising, or pressuring of governments. The consensus on 'What needs to
be done' is more likely to be a walking away from the existing economy,
a refusal to do business with 'private-benefit' corporations, and the
creation of local, mostly women-run cooperatives, Natural Enterprises
within a cooperative local Natural Economy. We'll just drop out of the
industrial economy, and starve it to death. It's our consumption that
drives the current dysfunctional economy, after all.
I wonder if I can persuade my
publisher, Chelsea Green, to give copies of my book on Natural Enterprise away
free to aspiring women entrepreneurs.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
