… continued from the home page
… but my father kept reminding me that when Chamberlain allowed Hitler to roll over Czechoslovakia in 1938, it only encouraged Hitler to start World War II in 1939. Sigh. Dad was always quick to remind me of that. He was also quick to remind me that Stalin imprisoned and murdered millions of people in the name of communism, so Dad believed that communism anywhere, even in tiny Vietnam, must be resisted as passionately as Nazism was. And if only Goldwater had been elected instead of LBJ, we’d have finished the job in Vietnam and been out of there.
Thus, my teenage dilemma was how to end the cold war without giving in to the evil communists, and how to eliminate poverty without becoming an evil communist. This set up a philosophical tension that kept me from being COMPLETELY dogmatic when I was 21. That was the year I quit the music business forever for the first time, and set out to answer three questions: 1) What causes war, 2) What causes poverty, and 3) What the hell can we do about them?
War, because the atomic bomb made me nervous, and psychological counseling didn’t help.
Poverty, because at one point during the Great Depression of the 1930s, my mother was down to just peanut butter and tea. Then, for three days, it was only tea. I’m still trying to figure out what was so great about the Great Depression.
I can imagine some Gen Z-er asking, so why didn’t I set out to prevent climate change, huh? Um, I didn’t even know about it in my twenties. But there was an Ecology Center in my suburban hometown of Walnut Creek, and promoting recycling seemed to be a nice, pleasant place to start on my path as a brave new activist, because it avoided all my unanswered questions about how to end the cold war without appeasing the evil communists, and how to end poverty without becoming an evil communist. However, recycling turned out to be a dangerous thing anyway, if you think petroleum is essential to all that is good and right. For it led me down the decadent path of promoting alternative energy as a way to empower local, grassroots economies, and avoid wars over oil. (Click here for creepy organ music.)
If I had to name the day I started down that alternative energy rabbit hole, it was one of the days that I was kicking around Berkeley, which was a half hour away from Walnut Creek in our greenhouse gas producing car. I decided to drop into the Berkeley Ecology Center and meet the founding mothers and fathers of recycling. There, I ran into a guy who was sleeping on the floor of the Ecology Center in order to avoid rent. This was so that he could pursue a radical (but conveniently for me, a non-communist) goal: Nudge the economy of Berkeley into being a shining model of community based economics, with a mix of mom and pop businesses and privately owned worker coops. Green jobs. Local Self Reliance. Getting off the corporate grids that bring us cycles of boom and bust, and wars over oil.
I wanted to join with him right away. But alas, I needed money. So I spent the next two years organizing a traveling band that ended up in Fairbanks, Alaska. Once there, I discovered my true calling, my right livelihood: Working for, um, Big Oil on the Alaska Pipeline.
In 1977, with my contribution to global warming solidly behind me — forever — for the first time, I came back down to Berkeley to work against big oil. Berkeley, sometimes known as The People’s Republic of Berkeley. The place where I was to meet many a communist, and many a former communist who quit the party when Stalin made his pact with Hitler, just before World War II. I kept looking for the commie agents in trench coats whispering in the ears of innocent twenty somethings, and possibly eating them. (Click here for creepy organ music.) They were nowhere to be found. Instead, I got to know many a caring person who hated poverty and war, and looked to Marxism for answers.
So, did I become a communist?
No. I don’t like the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat. I’m sure there are plenty of nice proletariats around, but let anyone become a dictator, and who knows what they will do.
So, I must be a capitalist, then?
No. Capitalism is the dictatorship of the investor. I’m sure there are plenty of nice investors around, but they are already the dictators, and look at what a mess we’re in.
Let’s see, that means I must have become a democratic socialist? Yes, and no. I say yes because — what is democratic socialism, but a 21st Century version of the New Deal? Let’s face it, the New Deal was the first — and last — large economic system that actually worked for business geeks and workers alike. Listen to my song, Eco Social Market for an explanation of why I think that’s true. Especially the verse that goes, “Driving wages lower was the thing to do/ It didn’t matter if your workers hated you/ But poor and struggling workers don’t produce very well/ And they are not in the market to buy what you sell”.
Here is the problem, though, with Democratic Socialism: When you get down to it, it is an attempt by a democratic government to nudge the investor into contributing to the common good and not JUST to their family’s bottom line, everybody else be damned. But there are always some aggressive investors around who find dirty, unethical ways to hoard money anyway. Ways like paying stupidly low wages to their workers. Then they dominate the elections with their dirty money (a song I will link to when I get around to it) and that brings us back to the Dictatorship of the Investor (which, in the latter half of the 20th Century, was known as “trickle down economics”). Then the whole system starts to collapse, because too many people have no money to buy the goods that the investor-owned businesses sell. If the cycle goes well, we go back to some form of Democratic Socialism just before the pitchforks come out, and the economy recovers. But alas, after a generation or two, people forget why they got to such prosperity. Soon the greedy sector of the investor class finds some way of convincing everyone that trickle down economics is the only practical system — ever — and the cycle starts all over again. Or, the pitchforks really do come out before democratic socialism is ushered in, and we go to Communism (which has been the dictatorship of the dictator who nonetheless wants you to have a roof over your head) or Fascism (which is the dictatorship of the dictator who only wants HIS kind of people to have a roof over their heads). Then we have a world war, or a cold war, which can mix everything up and potentially usher in another New Deal, like happened after World War II. Then the cycle starts all over again.
Enter the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain. They go a long way toward solving the dilemma of that boom and bust cycle, but not all the way. On the plus side, the Mondragon Corporation is run as a representative democracy, unlike the traditional capitalist business, which is run as a dictatorship. Now, in Northern Spain, the Mondragon cooperatives practically own the local governments in much the same way that big corporations own our governments in the USA. But since the Mondragon cooperatives are democratic, they are much more likely to take the common good into consideration, not just their profits (which they call “surplus”).
A communist once called me an anarchist when I explained the Mondragon Coops to him. Anarchist. Aren’t those the people who throw molotov cocktails at Central European Princes and start World Wars? I prefer the term Libertarian Socialist, because I prefer to try solutions that are local, voluntary and grassroots before turning to the government. But I have to admit that there are places where the government does it best. Like roads, bridges, and defense. Okay, even the most ardent libertarian will agree with that. But unlike the most ardent libertarian, I’ve come to the conclusion that the government also does it best when it comes to health insurance, retirement, and unemployment insurance.
So am I a Libertarian Socialist?
Close, but still no dice, because I see a problem with the Mondragon model that I have not yet found a satisfactory answer to: The Mondragon Corporation still operates in what is now an unfettered free market system, a Dictatorship of All the Investors Who Now Own the Government and Don’t Care. While free markets have an important role to play in a prosperous economy, an unfettered market requires endless growth and endless consumption. This is bad for the Earth, and eventual suicide for the human race.
But there’s another problem lurking. Irony of ironies, one of the central products of the Mondragon complex in the 20th Century was robotics. Which puts people out of work. So what are we gonna do, in our unfettered market system, when AI and robotics have eliminated a huge swath of the available jobs? Are we going to move to a ten hour work week, and all have a life? Probably not. Instead, the added efficiency will go for higher profits. Which will theoretically go into more companies that create jobs, in the trickle down fantasy land. But look, if workers are laid off (on top of being paid even less, because there is more competition for jobs), then fewer people will be able to afford any goods and services that are not essential. So using all that profit to invest in new companies that sell new things to newly non-existent consumers will not be so alluring. All that extra profit, then, will go into owning — not producing — basic goods and services that already exist, that people HAVE to buy, like housing. More corporate-owned housing. Higher inflation. And the same principle will apply in other sectors, like health care, and producing eggs.
Lenin would probably say, okay, so the government must step in and divvy up all that real estate. Dictatorship of the proletariat.
No. Dictatorship of the dictator who, at least, wants you to have a roof over your head. C’mon, we can do better than that!
At some point it began to dawn on me that the whole argument between capitalism and communism is, well, a red herring. The deeper problem is that for thousands of years, there has always been a minority of men (mostly men) who are so addicted to power, status and wealth that they are willing to game any system available to them to satisfy that addiction — at the expense of everyone else. Some systems are just easier to game than others. And some systems are set up to be gamed.
If only they would channel their addictions into being rock stars instead of politicians, the world would be a better place. Maybe I should volunteer to be an example for them! Let me think about that.
Although my experience with Berkeley activists was mostly positive, my experience with Berkeley electoral politics led me to realizing how corrupt any politics could become — on both the left and the right — thanks to that small minority of men (mostly men) who are simply addicted to power. So, in 1980, with my pipeline money running out, I quit electoral work FOREVER for the first time, and began studying interpersonal conflict resolution methods that didn’t work as a way of saving the world from nuclear war. I tried active listening, that gold standard of interpersonal relating (“Let’s see, I hear you saying I’m a total jerk and loser. Thank you for sharing.”) But for fifteen years, I couldn’t hold a relationship together to save my life. Then I stumbled on the marriage research of John Gottman. Inspired by Gottman’s work, I wrote a couple’s conflict resolution album for a masters thesis at San Francisco State. Later, I discovered another method that also works, and is a nice complement to Gottman’s stuff.
In any case, as the decades wore on, I zigged and zagged through studying the Marshall Plan (which worked, unless you were a communist), to studying the Mondragon cooperatives (which can sometimes be accused of being communist, which they never were, I mean, they were founded by a Catholic Priest!), to reading about the bonobos, who have sometimes been accused of being the hippies of the animal world, which they certainly are. “Make love, not war!” is a slogan they take very seriously indeed. While for most of recorded history, murder and rape have been more or less tolerated in human culture, both murder and rape are completely taboo in bonobo culture. On the other hand, Bonobos have very few taboos against sexuality. Except, of course, for rape. As a result, the nice guy usually gets the girl, but the jerk — never! That may be why they have no wars.
Speaking of the war problem, I also did a deep dive into that founding father of modern nonviolence, Gandhi, who has sometimes been accused of being a wimp. Contrary to all rumors, he was not! Go ahead, study him for yourself. I promise you won’t turn into a wimp. What, are you afraid to look?
Wimp! 🙂
So, to finally sum it up already: When I was in my teens, I made a promise to myself to be skeptical of all pat answers, left or right, secular or spiritual, as I tried to get to the bottom of questions that bothered me so. Now, at 73, I am putting together a website of songs about the interesting answers — and the many still unanswered questions — that I have stumbled across in my journey.
Many of the solutions I write about here are ones you may have heard of before. Some might surprise you. Some are about mistakes — how not to do things. Some are about successes, ones that lay a foundation for more to come. We never know what tiny success may put the final stone in place that brings it all together. It may be what YOU are working on! (Or your big mistake may be something that others learn from, and they then put the final stone in place. No effort is wasted!
In the final analysis, the big challenge of the 21st century may be in how we get all these answers that are dancing around us to dance together — without resorting to authoritarian rule to make it happen. And without giving in to authoritarian rule when it subtly, or with a sledgehammer, tries to interfere.
I invite you to take a listen, and then judge for yourself what you think ought to be done.
And then, hey, write a song about it.
All around me I see the answers
Dancin’ all alone
What if they came together
To push each other on?
From “Ecotopia (One Place in the World)“
by Lloyd Ferris ft. James Williams and Toni Briant