Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Life-Dance Union

4/10/02

Life-Dance Union;

By Piankhy Thompson

2002 Piankhy Thompson

Toward a healthier economy

{note: I posted this at Twin Oaks community within months of my first coming to live there. Although it is applicable, in broad outline, to any community, It, is my attempt to share with my idea of one way to bring this particular intentional community to Life. As of today such a policy has not been adopted there, although two of us have been holding weekly “Life-Dance Union Meetings” (we call them “Living Friendship Meetings” now) here for sometime. I will describe what the actual meetings” have become on the other web log at some point in a “neighbor entry”. A much abrieviated version of this posting has appeared in the fall 2003 issue of Communities Magazine.

Healthy and Unhealthy Economies

Mal-employment, Malproduction, Malconsumption, and Maldistribution. These are the cardinal points of an unhealthy economy and where any one of these four things can be found I am contending that the others can be found also. Let’s take the old plantation economy for example. In order to supply an overseas population addicted to tobacco (Malconsumption), the institution of slavery and slaveholding (Mal-employment), supported by unsustainable farming practices (Malproduction), maintained a regime of social and economic injustice (Maldistribution) inherited from Europe. Of course this misery of slavery (and slave holding) required some sort of anesthesia to be tolerable and this, in various forms (whiskey, sugar, etc…) was usually malproduced by some other malemployed and miserable people—or perhaps by the same ones. This enabled them to continue to malproduce their major cash crop of tobacco to be malconsumed as anesthesia for the miserable and mal-employed rich and poor overseas and so on.

I believe that it was possible at that time to end that vicious circle and lose-lose dynamic (and without a Civil War—which didn’t succeed in doing this any way), by sufficiently transforming even one of the four aspects of it that I have just introduced(1) . For example: Show me a sustainable and appropriately scaled sort of agriculture that is really healing and restorative to the land (Good Production), and I’ll show you a bunch of happy and diversely occupied “farmers” who are themselves being restored by what they are doing and how they are doing it (Good Employment). And because the healing nature of their work is a gift to themselves as well as to the land these people will have less and less need for anesthesia of any kind (Good Consumption) and will have the time and energy and inclination to give both of/to themselves and of/to each other in other ways (Good Distribution).

Employment

And (what is more relevant to the subject of this posting), I am also saying that truly sustainable production, consumption, and distribution, could also have been reached in those antebellum days through a sufficiently extensive healing of the Mal-employment of both the slave and the slave owners. Had the Healthy Knowledge existed then that the need for anesthesia of any kind (whether expensive or cheap) is a sign of pain and misery as well as ill health, it may have been possible for both parties, seeing their mutual enslavement, to work together toward their mutual freedom(2) . As they helped themselves and each other in the work of recovery from habits of mal-employment and self-exploitation (and this “helping” is also Good Employment), so the ways and means of Good Production, Good Consumption, and Good Distribution would be progressively engaged to sustain such a win-win restorative dynamic.

Our Labor System

What does all of this have to do with Twin Oaks and our labor system? Well, although it’s true that the economy here is not half so parasitic and self-destructive as the old plantation economy (or the equally unhealthy economy of the present day), it is clear that our socio-economic paradigm is different from them both mostly in degree rather than in kind. We do not seem to see, any more than the average slave owner or corporate manager, that our “high standard of living” consists mostly of access to distractions and anesthetic substances and technologies which we would not need or be addicted to if it we were not in the pain and misery caused by mal-employment. We do not seem to have transcended, any more than they, the dichotomy and dialectic of slave and master in the realization that to be a master, even of oneself, is to make that of which one is a master into a slave and that neither slave nor master can ever be Friends, either to themselves or each other. At Twin Oaks we can become to some extent our own slaves and our own masters, but we will be on the way to real Freedom only when we learn to be our own and each other’s good Friend.

Consider our labor system. I think it is, in many ways, among the most progressive of such systems of any community in the world. And yet the Mal-employment involved in the hammock shop and Emerald City, for example, is obvious by the ubiquitous presence in those places of malproduced and anesthetic “enticements” (coffee, sodas, “canned ” entertainment) that seem to be necessary in order to get people to work sufficiently long shifts. And is it just a coincidence that the products themselves are in many cases made of unsustainably produced, potentially toxic and non-biodegradable materials? Another sign of mal-employment here is the exclusive use of the quota system to monitor only “under work” and not overwork. I’m sure that most of us really do care, more than the average corporate employer, whether we work each other and ourselves to mental or physical sickness but our formal work culture does not affirm or validate this. And we certainly seem to be willing to put ourselves and each other through much stress to maintain a standard of “living” that amounts to not much more than the availability of gadgets and substances which we would neither need nor want if we were better and more sustainably employed.

And in a real sense, even sustainable employment in a sustainable economy is not enough. For just as extreme soil erosion can only be successfully countered by actually creating soil (i.e. by composting rather than just slowing down the processes that produce the erosion), so a degenerative economy can only be successfully countered by a Regenerative one. The progressive erosion of the economy and culture in which we are embedded and on which we depend is a reality which makes that which is not proactively regenerative ultimately not even sustainable. And of course a cardinal aspect of a regenerative economy is Regenerative Employment.

The Life-Dance Union

Such regenerative, good employment is not the same as self-indulgence any more than good consumption is the same as over eating on sweets. With both overwork and over-idleness as with overeating and anorexia, it is true that “you can never get enough of what you don’t need in the first place”. What I believe we really do need is a commitment to a "balanced diet" of work from what I think of as the five main "food groups" of work: Collective, Local, "Familial", Psychological, and Personal. These are really just aspects of the one Good Employment, the one Good Work of Healing ourselves, each other, and the world around us.(footnote4) Beginning this work of healing and mutuality would mean giving ourselves and the world the Gift of a labor system that validates and encourages the realization of our whole Personhood as good "Family" members, good Neighbors, good Citizens and good Souls. Such a Labor system would reflect the paradox that an Integral Neighborhood (a healthy "Twin Oaks") can only be one that facilitates the integrity and wholeness of the households and the individuals that compose it as well as that of the larger movement of which it is a part. Such a Gift of healing, to ourselves, each other and the world is already the “Good Distribution” which is consistent with Good Consumption, Good Production, and Good Employment and with an economy of Mutuality as opposed to Parasitism.

The Life-Dance Union is an organization committed to the regenerative work of healing ourselves, each other, and the world in a balanced and coordinated manner. It seeks the progressive subordination of the work of surviving (which makes a good servant but a bad master) to the work of Living and to the full expression of our individual and collective Humanity and Personhood. The Life-Dance Union is a consensus group in which the facilitation of inner consensus (which is Personal integrity) is encouraged and coordinated with the facilitation of consensus on other levels regarding effective steps toward the goal of making our inner and outer worlds safer for the pursuit of greater integrity, greater authenticity, greater expression of the best of ourselves. At Twin Oaks this Union could function as a managership in which labor credits are given for the work of coming together for greater integrity as a Neighborhood, as Households, as a Collective movement (The FEC), as Souls, and as individual Persons. The details (and to a certain extent even the general outline) of how this all might work here at Twin Oaks are open to discussion as far as I am concerned. I have some ideas myself, but as, at present, the only Life-Dance Union member, my main object in this posting is to find out if anyone else feels similarly about things. Would any one be interested in simply discussing these issues and ideas? If so, please get in touch with me in person or drop me a card.

In the spirit of Mutuality, Friendship, and Good Will

Piankhy

footnote1: This statement is rather paradoxical since any real improvement in any one of these aspects of the general pathology of an unhealthy economy inevitably involves—even implies-- consideration of and work on the other three and the balance between them.

footnote2: This “mutual enslavement” is not one of blame or Victimization and such thinking is not a part of healthy knowledge. By “mutual” I do not mean “reciprocal” and so I am not saying that the slave owners were abused by the slaves just as they abused them. I am saying that both nominal slave and master were—to the extent that they accepted these roles

posted by: piankhy | 11:21 | comments