There is Another Way

Just read an article that has given me hope, great hope, 'Evolution of Inequality, New Scientist, 28.07.2012'. I am no longer that nutter aspiring to impossible dreams. There are alternatives, so they are achievable if only we want them enough. Our capitalist based society of the winner grabs the lions share and gets to dictate has only been around for some 5,000 years. Whether or not you accept the premise that prior to that our hunt gatherers ancestors lived an egalitarian lifestyle  matters not. What does count is that there is an alternative to grab first and hoard. He with the biggest hoard gets to take his pick of what is available,  grab more and then use his hoard to buy fealty. The rich just get richer and richer off the backs of the poor, too poor and weak to resist.

The alternative is an egalitarian society where we look out for each other and make sure that what we have is no more than what anyone else has. No one is left in need or want, the group looks after it kin, as the weakest bring them all down, but together they have strength beyond the sum of their parts.

Just the required fresh new way of looking at our world as we have passed beyond the tipping point, where our plunder of its resources exceeds its capacity to replace or regenerate. We have to get back to a more frugal way of life. We have to stop putting our own little clique first and start to ensure all people born on this planet have some hope of a life not too disparate from our own expectations. A way to minimise our use and waste of scarce earth resources. A chance to rein in the incomprehensibly wild extravagances of the few and to look carefully at what the earth is able to offer so that we can all have a comparable share in it. Not equality. Not match for match, but comparable, not so disparate as to give rise to resentment, but a rough and ready fairness dependant on global position, climate and ease of access to resources.

Of course the bully boys and their cohort thugs have ruled the roost for millennia. Each generation is born with them as their only their role model of, take what you want and answer to nobody, as the possible viable route to follow. They are not going to give up their inherited accustomed rights and privileges. Yet their excesses can only be fuelled by the acquiescence of the masses that go without. So it is mutable, but whether peacefully or their rush to force can only be countered by a matching force, is the question to be addressed.

There are prospects, not everything we value in life is based on what can be obtained by force. Appreciation, respect, attention, these give an inkling of an Achilles heel that could bring the capitalist tyrants to book, maybe. Assuming, as a daydream, we overthrow our capitalist society and replace it with a society founded on egalitarianism, the battle is not over. There is always, in every society, it is in our human nature, the small percentage of cheaters, who claim full shares but hold back and conceal their gains. Or even worse steal or take by force when no one is looking. Nothing new here I guess. Like our hunter gatherer ancestors before us, the consequences of becoming a social pariah has to outway any advantage gained by stealing a march. When we all share in the same comparable distribution of resources, when we all know what we are entitled to, it does take the heat out of the need to go one better.

The longer you contemplate an egalitarian society the more it reveals in it a new calmness, the need to work together rather than to complete. How the world could begin to start out afresh in a new dimension. Inspirational but not beyond realisable.

Hands that do Dishes

Once we led the way to an industrialised society. Utilising the skills of all our craftsmen and artisans honed over the centuries, we fashioned new ways to meeting tomorrows desires. Now we hardly make anything or at best assemble some others production. Too puny to take on the world markets with an exhausted worn out industry that has since been pulverised. Just the memories of a once rich trading nation linger on.


End of the line? Relegated forever to being a service provider, licking the boots of those nations with the wealth? Not my view of our Nation. We do have to reinvent ourselves of course. As a staring point then, an inventory. An inventory of our handworking skills, not our software or accounting, but those skills we have had to make or fashion objects. As a nation we are noted for being creative, skilled in adapting, having a high technical competences and a wealth of generations of passed on craft skills. 

This is the resource pool we need to capitalise on before we lose everything. We promote ourselves to do what we are really good at. The one-off, the proto-type the pre-production modelling, the mould maker, the pre-production test bed, this is our forte. Able to access and modify the electronics and software controls with the craft skills to fashion hightech products out of raw material or re-cycled spare parts. With the ingenuity to see solutions where others see impossible problems and a high design backoffice to call on. This is what we take to the world market and flog. Got an idea, let us flesh it out for you and demonstrate how it can be turned into a marketable product and on to mass production.


We have to seize this vision of a future and invest in the infrastructure to make it happen. Invest in apprenticeships in all the old and current production techniques, encourage the setting up of production plant and develop the skills to operate them. So invest in schools, training, materials sciences, production techniques and electronic and software controls. Certainly not directly by central government who have a proven deadhand in the status quo but making start-up grants and loans readily available with generous extended paybacks for 'successful' businesses. Let our budding entrepreneurs seek out the rich seams, let them use their ingenuity to overcome market obstacles. Government being there, consistent, supportive, encouraging, being helpful when needed and quick to network problems to solution finders. That way we might still have a meaningful future as a Nation.