Equality Of Basic Supply

Do you think suppression of free public speech killed the Soviet Union? Seems Stalinism was responsible for more slaughter than Nazism. But Stalinism was not socialism. Any slaughter is an immediate sign of lack of democracy, which is another word for what the initial ideal of "socialism" envisaged. So I'll promote Democracy. Well, what is your high ideal of Democracy?

My high ideal of Democracy would rest on equality. Not equality of "opportunity," which is impossible, but equality of basic supply. What has been called "equality of opportunity" has produced a Dizzying Disneyland Fantasia of consumer goods, and extremely gross international by-products such as ressentiment, cancer, addiction, homelessness, fear of the bogeyman, gunshot deaths, prozac, alcohol, soulless hospitals, frozen corpses, burgeoning prisons inflicting years of sensory deprivation on broken men and women, ritalin for kids with high energy and their own fleeting interests, Nobel scientists issuing warnings re the planet itself-- the end of life on earth, or its reduction to some cowed monoculture, herds and herds of wandering Ronald McDonaldses-- what's your poison, gentlemen?

What might an equality of basic supply produce? Well, how does productive soil produce when generously manured and aireated and given fallow to recover river silts and stardusts to its inverting manure? Hard not to imagine that after a couple of generations of healing and therapies and walks in the sunshine and long visits over coffee or a bottle of wine with neighbours not turning the lights on as dusk came, letting night rise all around us, wandering off to bed maybe 2 or 3 AM feeling delicious and deep, we might expect some pretty amazing production.

It might produce worms waving over black soil fifty feet deep. Then comes the Fecundation-- jungles of new growth, rich ideas, and the synergy of cooperation rather than the extremely gross international by-products of "fierce competition." Let us propose over the Internet to search for co-operation planet-wide to bring about a wonderful planet to live on! Why live in such darkness and deprivation? Why work to exhaustion to keep up with the consumer-goods explosions, but gnaw and ulcerize, worry as your face ages, worry in the night, feel afflicted, feel as if something's wrong but you'd better keep up your act.

The second scientific/technological Renaissance has happened. It is soaring vertically. The humanist Second Renaissance, second generation Renaissance scuffed a note from singing sands in "the 1960s" and there is much yet to digest in and from that explosion. Darkness has prevailed over our faces since 1973. But many leaves there were to enrich the soil. Many seeds planted, with varying gestations. Well, we went into the darkness where worms were. We let them wave o'er our heads like hair of a Medusa kid, each worm separate and waving free.

And that is where I come for a landing on the wide screetch-halt of Democracy.

Let me unfurl a great scroll across the sky: Democracy! Money is manure, it needs to be spread around, in fact, let everyone have their handful of manure. What kinds of gardens, in what dimensions let the radio and TV ask of people suddenly free from the worries, constraints, deprivations, fears, phoninesses, politics of having to go to work. Working for more at low wages would be thus voluntary rather than "no other choice," and those positions would be filled. Filled to overflowing, with kids wanting ways to access the wonderful world of consumer goods, especially cool computer and Internet toys/tools. Working for short hours, putting each buck earned into a jar or Interact account toward the wanted thing, and then triumphantly, going to the store to make the purchase. Groceries and rent taken care of, his guarantee from a rich society which brags about its economic performance, of his citizenship. Basic living essentials: a right of citizenship. Without it, we are not citizens, but cattle or denizens, and, I'm sorry to say, even if a decent guaranteed income was established tomorrow, and governments began immediately to promote the joys and creative possibilities of freedom, of individual growth and study, of physical fitness and plentiful wild nature, we will still have to go through a veritable stampede of chickens thundering home to roost, we will be snapper-denizens a while even then. Denizens grinding our teeth at night. A denizen needs much darkness, he lurks or he kills openly with a knife. A citizen can stand in the sun in his fedora. A citizen can stand naked.

Nose to the grindstone, making ends meet removes a man's potentials as a citizen. A consumer he may be, and more so for opiates; but not a citizen. Since Athens, citizenship has been a luxury, or an overflow of nature, a post-biological spirit that is cooked in the vessel of the biological, that underwrites our dreams.

Who has the leisure to be a citizen, especially when you are hounding us to mindless subordination to somebody else's dubious project of getting rich? Whose primary concern is profit, the product or service secondary: "fill."

Nobody has any leisure to be a goddamn citizen. Too caught in the rat race. Too trampled underfoot. Too lost in competing expensive hedonisms.

Citizens make a Democracy. Denizens adjust to what they see and feel. A democracy delivers space, some arable land, food and clothing, free time, state-of-the-art shelter technology, tools-- for the honored recipient of this Synergetic Democracy, you. You in particular. Not for eternally maximizing the profits of a few shareholders.

No, we don't need to destroy the market game if so many are addicted to it. Let 'em play-- Let their products and services compete-- but on top of a level living floor, which can support those who do not wish to play that game, or necessarily any game, any dropouts from exhaustion, burnout. Any parents who want to tumble over green grass and wander the woods with their kids, read them books in nooks under sunshiny trees, sleep in sleeping bags in the night, not having entered the house at all that day.

Any dreamers who want to apply years, decades of personal work energy in personal projects, projects of one's own devising, unrolling their carpet of discourse without concern for any deadline or profiteering. Yet wanting community, the love of tribe and fellows, an influence to the good as a citizen, and a welcoming, in joy, of death when it comes.