The basic needs within a community
As humans, we all share some common needs for our survival. For centuries, a worldwide system of trade and barter was the mainstay of our community economies. Our basic human needs provided us with this rudamentary system of intra community commerce and the local opportunity to trade our surplus goods. This system of barter and trade also helped to provide farflung communities with some assurances of sustainability, while at the same time fulfilling daily human needs. Barter and trade also helped to link communities in a basic form of social cooperation that was beneficial to all. Throughout our human history, this simple economic force that had kept communities linked in cooperation, has shown us by example that our social cooperation can help to ensure community sustainability, economic rewards, employment opportunities, and a measure of social hope about our future. This being true – then what got in the way? Simply put – competition and greed – sound familiar?
Let’s get back to basics
The road to community cooperation can lead us all to hope for the future. Cooperation involves you, your relatives, your local friends, and your neighbours, all working together to share skills, resources, and social connections, in a positive way that helps to provide some mutual benefits. Strange concept? Maybe not. But it does seem to have a strange “ring” to it though, does it not? Maybe that’s because we are all living in a “capitalist dream world” – that the reality of a world of cooperation, as an ideal, has been “displaced” by the more “fair” monetary system of capitalism. Or maybe its just that the “trance” like state that the present economic system keeps us in from paycheck to paycheck, only works in favour of the few, who through continued exploitation, continue to perpetuate their “capitalist dream world”? The many of us, through the tenets of the capitalist business model, have been socially conditioned to think that the constancy of “competition” within our society is a good thing. We have all been told, over and over again, that this social and financial competition is all necessary to improve our quality of life and the economic activities within our communities – well we certainly now have the results don’t we. The success of social competition and the financial exploitation of the many, by the very few, has certainly been, and continues to be, a one way street to the few! Here’s another question for you. What has “capitalism” done for you lately, or your family, or for your community even, in any positive social way? Please make up a list and submit it to me. I’ll post the best here.
We should all be mad as hell!
Why do we continue to reconcile this obvious failure of capitalism to help provide the many of us with any real hope for our financial future? A world future – that is not just for us who are in the present, but also for worldwide future generations? The worldwide economies that are being implemented to serve in this “new world order” that has been planned by the very few, for decades, are destined to remain under the total control of a worldwide connected few. Those very few that are the self appointed protectors of the “free enterprise” system and a global system of business practices that are just continuing the global exploitation of the many by the same few. The social and financial imposition of a “new world order” simply put – means business as usual for the few.
Can real social change come for the many?
If you, on a personal level, are happy with the way that things are being played out on an international scale, or maybe you just feel too victimized by the whole thing to act, or maybe you are content with the “status quo”, this is probably where we should part company. Sorry that I wasted any of your time. But if this brief outline of the way things are in our world today has woken you from the “trance” of capitalism and the “dream of free enterprise” and has possibly brought you to the point of interest in perhaps “chipping in” and helping to change your community for the better without “taking to the streets” then please read on. Because positive social change is possible. It’s in action in many communities throughout the world today in 2013. Cooperation has become, if you will, a social path to follow that can lead a community to sustainability and in turn some local independence far from the “madding crowd”. If you are interested in this type of change happening within your own community, then lets get ready. Positive social change can come because all it will take is a little PUSH some brain work, some legwork, and a dedication to social change. DHL 6