What is a valid contribution to society?

In the current system, the distinction seems largely to be whether you are in paid work or not. Although some paid work is taboo - drug dealing, say,  pretty much any paid work is seen as contributing to society - even selling cigarettes / tobacco.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, as there are people of course who give of their time voluntarily and do things that are socially necessary and/or socially constructive. These will tend to be people who have the money and therefore the time to do something socially constructive without being paid specifically for doing so. Even as I write, I see the true logic of how society should be operated arising from what I am writing, even though I'm not writing exactly what I originally intended.

No-one should be doing anything that is not socially constructive. We put people in prison for some socially destructive things, but for others we pay them a salary. Lunacy. Let's go back to the volunteers. They're doing something socially constructive, because it is socially constructive and for no other reason. Does it not seem likely that the vast majority of people, freed from waged slavery, would do the same?

Under the current system, consuming is contributing to society, because of cyclic consumption:  I have to work to get money to spend to keep you in work so that you can consume and keep the next person in work, and so on. Lest we should see the foolishness of all this, advertising/marketing steps in to keep us thinking we must consume more. What is this system (or those that operate it) trying to achieve? Are they genuinely trying to use up resources as quickly as possible? Do they just not care that the system is consuming the resources ever more rapidly?

How money distracts our focus

In today's Metro (London), Oxfam expressed concerns at the decline in Christmas card sending because of the money that is raised through selling them.

I'm not having a go at Oxfam, or Christmas, but if Oxfam need money to feed the hungry, etc, we can actually just give them money without buying anything.

As I argue here often, what people want / need is a full belly, a roof over their head, and a source of information and communication (that's not an exhaustive list, but indicates life's necessities simply). As things stand they need money to get these, but it doesn't have to be like that, and by extension, we shouldn't need to buy Christmas Cards to make it happen.

Public vs Private Sector

An article in The Week (10 July 2010) which was presumably quoting from a newspaper columnist - it may be Eamonn Butler in The Guardian - it's unclear - said of the 600,000 people public sector employees forecast to lose their jobs - "with nearly half a million jobs now being advertised, even in these uncertain times, there's plenty of scope for committed people to find work."

The forecast is for 1.3 million jobs to go in both sectors, but the article also quotes the Office of Budget Responsibility's forecast of 2.5 million new private sector jobs by 2014. The article doesn't attempt to decide whether these 2.5 million jobs are new additional - ie whether we are to deduct the 700,000 (1.3 million less 600,000) or it has been deducted.

It's a fat lot of good callibrating all this in "jobs" as if any one job is equal to any other job, and here we have the tacit assumption that private sector jobs are better than public sector ones. "Committed" people in the public sector will of course go out and get a new job in the private sector. What it is they were doing in the public sector or will be doing in the private sector is entirely irrelevant, it would seem.

If a job is pointless - having no social return - and is just there to give someone something to do so they can earn money and thereby access to the necessities of life, the 'sector' that it is in is entirely irrelevant. The point is that we should arrange to have done the things that are necessary for our survival and prosperity as a species by the most efficient means possible, and this means de-coupling work from access to the necessities of life.

Cut the backroom staff

Lib Dem Councillor Chris Naylor wrote to The Independent that the Chancellor should "apply his 80-20 rule to these [public sector] cuts too: 80% from Overheads and backroom, 20% from front line". This is purely arbitrary.

Later in his letter he adds "but ask these staff where the cuts should fall and they will of course say cut the cntracts [that they monitor] - not the payroll." How many people are going to suggest cuts that detrimentally affect them personally? Most people are going to defend their own jobs.


Once again we need to decouple work from access to the necessities of life. That way people don't have to defend their employment in lieu of access to life's necessities. Then we can truly concentrate on doing (or having done) only what needs to be done to improve humanity's lot, and have it done as efficiently and sustainably as we can manage.

Soldiers on parade

Soldiers paraded through Barking town centre this week. A fair few people came out and waved union flags. A group of Muslims protested against the wars the west has fought in Muslim countries and some right wingers including the English Defence League showed up to counter the Muslim group.

I don't wish to denigrate or dishonour these soldiers (or those who have died in service) for doing what they believe to be right, but as Jacque Fresco says, sort if, how can we call ourselves civilised if our highest achievements - celebrated - involve killing each other?

One woman, commenting on the protest, said on the BBC that her son had just come back from Afghanistan and he was "doing his job". That's not enough. This doesn't just apply to the forces, but to any job. We should be able to do what is right - has a social return - for humanity and the planet and not be constrained to do 'any' job just to access the necessities of life (via money).

ZM/TVP from first principles

Why does The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) appeal to me and so many others:

(1) It recognises that the creatures on this planet have to live within the finite resources of this planet. This is a plain, unalterable fact, though you wouldn't think so from the waste we produce and the lie that is continual growth and continually increasing consumption. This is the starting point of the idea of a resource based economy.

(2) It embraces technology. We were all told that technology would give us more free time. Hmm. Some are unemployed because of technology - and therefore poor. Those working in the information economy are working just as hard, if not harder, but just producing more. The idea of technology freeing us up to do what we're good at and want to do is - frankly - wildly exciting. Jacque Fresco and thus TZM refers to cybernation - a slightly quirky word meaning computerisation, automation, mechanisation combined (probably).

(3) It clearly denounces the perversity of money. People have to have it. If you go into a shop to buy something, it is unlikely that the shopkeeper will tell you that you can get a better and/or cheaper equivalent in another shop. If you work in a tobacconist's you want more people to take up smoking. If you work in the arms industry, you want more war. [I say "you want" in each case - more precisely I should say "it is in your interest for there to be"]. I'm not sure that this perversity can be cured by monetary reform, even if the problem of money supply and money as debt could be. All the while we have to compete for the necessities of life through the proxy of money we have a problem.

How to help people into employment in rural areas

http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=19225665

I only saw the header for this article and it prompted me to write to Idea about Resource Based Economy and the ideas of The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM). I'm writing my response here in the public domain, rather than just on the closed discussion boards of Idea.

My first point is practically verbatim from The Venus Project (TVP): It is not jobs/money that people need, it is access to the necessities of life. Peter Joseph, founder of TZM says that if a job does not have a 'social return' it should not be done. A 'social return' is something that benefits humanity / the planet - that is it helps us in - or at least does not hinder us from -living sustainably on this planet within the resources available to us as we quite plainly must do - hence Resource Based Economy (RBE).

In an RBE, it's only jobs with a social return that get done - and they get done the most efficient way possible, which means automation / mechanisation as much as possible - 'Cybernation' in TVP language. Remember, it's not jobs/money that people need but access to the necessities of life - so we must access 'the necessities of life' as efficiently and sustainably as possible. Such jobs as can't ever be cybernated- which would be few - would be done by humans.

In the current system, people have to get a job to get money to access 'the necessities of life'. This may take them away from doing something with a social return - bringing up children, say, to doing something with no social return, say giving out leaflets at the station. In our value system the second is worthwhile as it's a job earning money but the first is undesirable as it's not (unless it's a paid child carer, paradoxically). It's plainly nuts.

To step it up several levels, does anyone really accept that it's OK for millions of people to be starving - even die of starvation - because they haven't got enough money to buy food, because they haven't got a job? This is an utter disgrace. Some people argue that the planet is overpopulated - but who says it's the people with the money who get to say who lives and who dies?

Or take it from a political stance. Working in the armaments industry is a job, but to use arms, we need wars. Therefore there's an incentive to start or escalate wars to generate jobs in the arms industry. How sure are we that the fighting our forces are carrying out is entirely to rid the world of 'evil dictators' or 'terrorist organisations' and not at least in part to generate work in the arms industry?

The need for people to work to get money to access the necessities of life is completely opposite to the need to be efficient as only 'cybernation' can bring efficiency - look at automation in the car industry and agriculture for obvious examples. Also the need to keep people in work means that companies need to compete with each other to sell things. Those things must not be as reliable and durable as possible because that won't keep people in work repairing or replacing them. This means they land up as waste - maybe even in landfill - but no matter, the waste industry creates more work.

If you work in a company that produces anti-cancer drugs, you need people to get cancer so that you can sell your product and stay in work.

On a more human level, people doing jobs with no 'social return' are wasting their lives "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers" as Wordsworth put it. People doing jobs with a negative social return are wasting other people's lives.

To add to all this, the money system is totally broken. Practically every country owes money and not enough money exists to pay back all the debts. Therefore one or more countries have to go bust.