Post by K+1 on May 26, 2014 14:46:29 GMT 2
Philosophical Experiments in Money Free Economies Edit 0 4…
MONEY-FREE ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY
Money and banking as concepts
The origins of money can be traced to the early goldsmiths who secured hard assets as a business practice. In return, they issued receipts denoting the quantity of assets being held. For the ease of transaction, trading the receipts became more convenient than trading the actual assets and thus, money was born. The receipts began to assume the same level of value as the assets themselves and goldsmiths quickly began producing them as the primary medium of exchange. The birth of fractional reserve banking saw the creation of money above and beyond the assets held, which served to saturate the money supply beyond a one to one value of the total assets in deposit. The goldsmiths had figured out how to create something of value out of nothing of previous value while channelling economic acivity through them.
The Argument Against Money
All monies have one thing in common: a belief in their assigned value. In terms of actual functional worth or quality of life, its utilitarian benefits are secondary to the products and services it buys. Since value is a function of scarcity within a market, money becomes a self-imposed limit on access to goods and services and largely serves to artificially inflate the value of those goods and services. Money, as it turns out, evolved from not only a desire of expedient transaction, but as the fractional reserve banking methodology suggests, a bottleneck or chokepoint for controlling access to goods, services, and by consequence, human behavior. Proponents of money-free economies assert that merely changing the master of money does nothing to alter the original slave-master relationship. If money is the messenger and its master the message, then to discredit the messenger is to make the sycophant irrelevant. Servitude is therefore a self-imposed state.
Philosophies and Experiments in Money Free Economies
The Venus Project
About:
The Venus Project is an organization that proposes a feasible plan of action for social change, one that works towards a peaceful and sustainable global civilization. It outlines an alternative to strive toward where human rights are no longer paper proclamations but a way of life.
We operate out of a 21.5-acre Research Center located in Venus, Florida.
When one considers the enormity of the challenges facing society today, we can safely conclude that the time is long overdue for us to reexamine our values, and to reflect upon and evaluate some of the underlying issues and assumptions we have as a society. This self-analysis calls into question the very nature of what it means to be human, what it means to be a member of a "civilization," and what choices we can make today to ensure a prosperous future for all the world's people.
At present we are left with very few alternatives. The answers of yesterday are no longer relevant. Either we continue as we have been with our outmoded social customs and habits of thought, in which case our future will be threatened, or we can apply a more appropriate set of values that are relevant to an emergent society.
Experience tells us that human behavior can be modified, either toward constructive or destructive activity. This is what The Venus Project is all about - directing our technology and resources toward the positive, for the maximum benefit of people and planet and seeking out new ways of thinking and living that emphasize and celebrate the vast potential of the human spirit. We have the tools at hand to design - and build - a future that is worthy of the human potential. The Venus Project presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture. What follows is not an attempt to predict what will be done - only what could be done. The responsibility for our future is in our hands, and depends on the decisions that we make today. The greatest resource that is available today is our own ingenuity.
While social reformers and think tanks formulate strategies that treat only superficial symptoms, without touching the basic social operation, The Venus Project approaches these problems somewhat differently. We feel we cannot eliminate these problems within the framework of the present political and monetary establishment. It would take too many years to accomplish any significant change. Most likely they would be watered down and thinned out to such an extent that the changes would be indistinguishable
The Venus Project advocates an alternative vision for a sustainable new world civilization unlike any social system that has gone before. Although this description is highly condensed, it is based upon years of study and experimental research by many, many people from many scientific disciplines
.
The Resource Based Economy
A Resource-Based Economy is a system in which all goods and services are available without the use of money, credits, barter or any other system of debt or servitude. All resources become the common heritage of all of the inhabitants, not just a select few. The premise upon which this system is based is that the Earth is abundant with plentiful resource; our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter productive to our survival.
Modern society has access to highly advanced technology and can make available food, clothing, housing and medical care; update our educational system; and develop a limitless supply of renewable, non-contaminating energy. By supplying an efficiently designed economy, everyone can enjoy a very high standard of living with all of the amenities of a high technological society.
A resource-based economy would utilize existing resources from the land and sea, physical equipment, industrial plants, etc. to enhance the lives of the total population. In an economy based on resources rather than money, we could easily produce all of the necessities of life and provide a high standard of living for all.
Consider the following examples: At the beginning of World War II the US had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.
In a resource-based economy all of the world's resources are held as the common heritage of all of Earth's people, thus eventually outgrowing the need for the artificial boundaries that separate people. This is the unifying imperative.
Hakim Bay and Ontological Anarchism Very interesting.
1) The Temporary Autonomous Zone
2) The Permanent Autonomous Zone
3) Gift Giving Economy: A Potlatch Experiment
The **Temporary Autonomous Zone** (Basis for Bey's subsequent explorations)
(Excerpted)
"Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind.
To say that "I will not be free till all humans (or all sentient creatures) are free" is simply to cave in to a kind of nirvana-stupor, to abdicate our humanity, to define ourselves as losers.
I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not only possible in our time but also existent. All my research and speculation has crystallized around the concept of the TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (hereafter abbreviated TAZ). Despite its synthesizing force for my own thinking, however, I don't intend the TAZ to be taken as more than an essay ("attempt"), a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy. Despite the occasional Ranterish enthusiasm of my language I am not trying to construct political dogma. In fact I have deliberately refrained from defining the TAZ--I circle around the subject, firing off exploratory beams. In the end the TAZ is almost self-explanatory. If the phrase became current it would be understood without difficulty...understood in action."
"The media invite us to "come celebrate the moments of your life" with the spurious unification of commodity and spectacle, the famous non-event of pure representation. In response to this obscenity we have, on the one hand, the spectrum of refusal (chronicled by the Situationists, John Zerzan, Bob Black et al.)--and on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would-be managers of our leisure. "Fight for the right to party" is in fact not a parody of the radical struggle but a new manifestation of it, appropriate to an age which offers TVs and telephones as ways to "reach out and touch" other human beings, ways to "Be There!"
Pearl Andrews was right: the dinner party is already "the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old" (IWW Preamble). The sixties-style "tribal gathering," the forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles...Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, old-time libertarian picnics--we should realize that all these are already "liberated zones" of a sort, or at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always "open" because it is not "ordered"; it may be planned, but unless it "happens" it's a failure. The element of spontaneity is crucial.
The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss-- in short, a "union of egoists" (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form--or else, in Kropotkin's terms, a basic biological drive to "mutual aid." (Here we should also mention Bataille's "economy of excess" and his theory of potlatch culture.)"
The **Permanent Autonomous Zone**(Excerpted)
THE EMERGENCE OF A GENUINELY ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY
Once again, this is already happening-but it still needs a huge amount of work before it comes into focus. The sub-economies of "lavoro nero", untaxed transactions, barter, etc., tend to be severely limited and localized. BBSs and other networking systems could be used to link up these regional/marginal aeconomies ("household managements") into a viable alternative economy of some magnitude. "P.M." has already outlined something like this in bolo'bolo-in fact a number of possible systems already exist, in theory anyway. The problem is: -how to construct a true alternative economy, i.e. a complete economy, without attracting the IRS and other capitalist runningdogs? How can I exchange my skills as, say, a plumber or moonshiner, for the food, books, shelter, and psychoactive plants I want-without paying taxes, or even without using ally State-forged money? How can I live a comfortable (even luxurious) life free of all interactions and transactions with CommodityWorld? If we took all the energy the Leftists put into "demos", and all the energy the Libertarians put into playing futile little 3rd-party games, and if we redirected all that power into the construction of a real underground economy, we would already have accomplished "the Revolution" long ago.
THE "WORLD" CAME TO AN END IN 1972
The hollowed-out effigy of the Absolute State finally toppled in "1989". The last ideology, Capitalism, is no more than a skin-disease of the Very Late Neolithic. It's a desiring-machine running on empty. I'm hoping to see it deliquesce in my lifetime, like one of Dali's mindscapes. And I want to have somewhere to "go" when the shit comes down. Of course the death of Capitalism needn't entail the Godzilla-like destruction of all human culture; this scenario is merely a terror- image propagated by Capitalism itself. Nevertheless it stands to reason that the dreaming corpse will spasm violently before rigor mortis sets in-and New York or LA may not be the smartest places to wait out the storm. (And the storm may already have begun.) [On the other hand NYC and LA might not be the worst places to create the New World; one can imagine whole squatted neighborhoods, gangs transformed into Peoples' Militias, etc.] Now, the gypsy-RV way of life may be one way to deal with the on-going melt-down of Too-Late Capitalism - but as for me, I'd prefer a nice anarchist monastery somewhere-a typical place for "scholars" to sit out the "Dark Ages". The more we organize this NOW the less hassle we'll have to face later. I'm not talking about "survival"-I'm not interested in mere survival. I want to thrive. BACK TO UTOPIA.
FESTIVALS
The PAZ serves a vital function as a node in the TAZ-web, a meetingplace for a wide circle of friends and allies who may not actually live fulltime on the "farm" or in the "village". Ancient villages held fairs which brought wealth to the community, provided markets for travelers, and created festal time/space for all participants. Nowadays the festival is emerging as one of the most important forms for the TAZ itself, but can also provide renewal and fresh energy for the PAZ. I remember reading somewhere that in the Middle Ages there were one hundred and eleven holidays a year; we should take this as our "utopian minimum" and strive to do even better. [Note: the utopian minima proposed by C. Fourier consisted of more food and sex than the average 18th century French aristocrat enjoyed; B. Fuller proposed the term "bare minimum" for a similar concept]
THE LIVING EARTH
I believe that there exist plenty of good selfish reasons for desiring the "organic" (it's sexier), the "natural" (it tastes better), the "green" (it's more beautiful), the Wild(er)ness (it's more exciting). Communitas (as P. Goodman called it) and conviviality (as I. Illich called it) are more pleasurable than their opposites. The living earth need not exclude the organic city-the small but intense conglomeration of humanity devoted to the arts and slightly decadent joys of a civilization purged of all its gigantism and enforced loneliness-but even those of us who enjoy cities can see immediate and hedonic motives for fighting for the "environment". We are militant biophiles. Deep ecology, social ecology, permaculture, appropriate tech..we're not too picky about ideologies. Let 1000 flowers bloom.
Redefining Value The Gift-Giving Economy: An **Immediatist Potlatch**(Excerpted)
"The basic structure is a banquet or picnic. Each player must bring a dish or bottle, etc., of sufficient quantity that e veryone gets at least a serving. Dishes can be prepared or finished on the spot, but nothing should be bought ready-made (except wine & beer, although these could ideally be home-made). The more elaborate the dishes the better. Attempt to be memorable . The menu need not be left to surprise (although this is an option)--some groups may want to coordinate the banquets so as to avoid duplications or clashes. Perhaps the banquet could have a theme & each player could be responsible for a given course (appetizer, soup, fish, vegetables, meat, salad, dessert, ices, cheeses, etc.). Suggested themes: Fourier's Gastrosophy--Surrealism--Native American--Black & Red (all food black or red in honor of anarchy)--etc."
"The main purpose of the potlatch is of course gift-giving. Every player should arrive with one or more gifts & leave with one or more different gifts. This could be accomplished in a number of ways: (a) Each player brings one gift & passes it to the person seated next to them at table (or some similar arrangement); (b) Everyone brings a gift for every other guest. The choice may depend on the number of players, with (a) better for larger groups & (b) for smaller gatherings. If the choice is (b), you may want to decide beforehand whether the gifts should be the same or different. For example, if I am playing with five other people, do I b ring (say) five hand-painted neckties, or five totally different gifts? And will the gifts be given specifically to certain individuals (in which case they might be crafted to suit the recipient's personality), or will they be distributed by lot?"
"The gifts must be made by the players, not ready-made. This is vital. Pre-manufactured elements can go into the making of the gifts, but each gift must be an individual work of art in its own right. If for instance I bring five hand painted neckties, I must paint each one myself, either with the same or with different designs, although I may be allowed to buy ready-made ties to work on."
"Gifts need not be physical objects. One player's gift might be live music during dinner, another's might be a performance. However, it should be recalled that in the Amerindian potlatches the gifts were supposed to be superb & even ruinous for the givers. In my opinion physical objects are best, & they should be as good as possible-- not necessarily costly to make, but really impressive. Traditional potlatches involved prestige-winning. Players should feel a competitive spirit of giving, a determination to make gifts of real splendor or value. Groups may wish to set rules beforehand a bout this--some may wish to insist on physical objects, in which case music or performance would simply become extra acts of generosity, but hors de potlatch, so to speak."
"Our potlatch is non-traditional, however, in that theoretically all players win--everyone gives & receives equally. There's no denying however that a dull or stingy player will lose prestige, while an imaginative &/or generous player will gain "face." In a really successful potlatch each player will be equally generous, so that all players will be equally pleased. The uncertainty of outcome adds a zest of randomness to the event."
MONEY-FREE ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY
Money and banking as concepts
The origins of money can be traced to the early goldsmiths who secured hard assets as a business practice. In return, they issued receipts denoting the quantity of assets being held. For the ease of transaction, trading the receipts became more convenient than trading the actual assets and thus, money was born. The receipts began to assume the same level of value as the assets themselves and goldsmiths quickly began producing them as the primary medium of exchange. The birth of fractional reserve banking saw the creation of money above and beyond the assets held, which served to saturate the money supply beyond a one to one value of the total assets in deposit. The goldsmiths had figured out how to create something of value out of nothing of previous value while channelling economic acivity through them.
The Argument Against Money
All monies have one thing in common: a belief in their assigned value. In terms of actual functional worth or quality of life, its utilitarian benefits are secondary to the products and services it buys. Since value is a function of scarcity within a market, money becomes a self-imposed limit on access to goods and services and largely serves to artificially inflate the value of those goods and services. Money, as it turns out, evolved from not only a desire of expedient transaction, but as the fractional reserve banking methodology suggests, a bottleneck or chokepoint for controlling access to goods, services, and by consequence, human behavior. Proponents of money-free economies assert that merely changing the master of money does nothing to alter the original slave-master relationship. If money is the messenger and its master the message, then to discredit the messenger is to make the sycophant irrelevant. Servitude is therefore a self-imposed state.
Philosophies and Experiments in Money Free Economies
The Venus Project
About:
The Venus Project is an organization that proposes a feasible plan of action for social change, one that works towards a peaceful and sustainable global civilization. It outlines an alternative to strive toward where human rights are no longer paper proclamations but a way of life.
We operate out of a 21.5-acre Research Center located in Venus, Florida.
When one considers the enormity of the challenges facing society today, we can safely conclude that the time is long overdue for us to reexamine our values, and to reflect upon and evaluate some of the underlying issues and assumptions we have as a society. This self-analysis calls into question the very nature of what it means to be human, what it means to be a member of a "civilization," and what choices we can make today to ensure a prosperous future for all the world's people.
At present we are left with very few alternatives. The answers of yesterday are no longer relevant. Either we continue as we have been with our outmoded social customs and habits of thought, in which case our future will be threatened, or we can apply a more appropriate set of values that are relevant to an emergent society.
Experience tells us that human behavior can be modified, either toward constructive or destructive activity. This is what The Venus Project is all about - directing our technology and resources toward the positive, for the maximum benefit of people and planet and seeking out new ways of thinking and living that emphasize and celebrate the vast potential of the human spirit. We have the tools at hand to design - and build - a future that is worthy of the human potential. The Venus Project presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture. What follows is not an attempt to predict what will be done - only what could be done. The responsibility for our future is in our hands, and depends on the decisions that we make today. The greatest resource that is available today is our own ingenuity.
While social reformers and think tanks formulate strategies that treat only superficial symptoms, without touching the basic social operation, The Venus Project approaches these problems somewhat differently. We feel we cannot eliminate these problems within the framework of the present political and monetary establishment. It would take too many years to accomplish any significant change. Most likely they would be watered down and thinned out to such an extent that the changes would be indistinguishable
The Venus Project advocates an alternative vision for a sustainable new world civilization unlike any social system that has gone before. Although this description is highly condensed, it is based upon years of study and experimental research by many, many people from many scientific disciplines
.
The Resource Based Economy
A Resource-Based Economy is a system in which all goods and services are available without the use of money, credits, barter or any other system of debt or servitude. All resources become the common heritage of all of the inhabitants, not just a select few. The premise upon which this system is based is that the Earth is abundant with plentiful resource; our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter productive to our survival.
Modern society has access to highly advanced technology and can make available food, clothing, housing and medical care; update our educational system; and develop a limitless supply of renewable, non-contaminating energy. By supplying an efficiently designed economy, everyone can enjoy a very high standard of living with all of the amenities of a high technological society.
A resource-based economy would utilize existing resources from the land and sea, physical equipment, industrial plants, etc. to enhance the lives of the total population. In an economy based on resources rather than money, we could easily produce all of the necessities of life and provide a high standard of living for all.
Consider the following examples: At the beginning of World War II the US had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.
In a resource-based economy all of the world's resources are held as the common heritage of all of Earth's people, thus eventually outgrowing the need for the artificial boundaries that separate people. This is the unifying imperative.
Hakim Bay and Ontological Anarchism Very interesting.
1) The Temporary Autonomous Zone
2) The Permanent Autonomous Zone
3) Gift Giving Economy: A Potlatch Experiment
The **Temporary Autonomous Zone** (Basis for Bey's subsequent explorations)
(Excerpted)
"Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind.
To say that "I will not be free till all humans (or all sentient creatures) are free" is simply to cave in to a kind of nirvana-stupor, to abdicate our humanity, to define ourselves as losers.
I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not only possible in our time but also existent. All my research and speculation has crystallized around the concept of the TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (hereafter abbreviated TAZ). Despite its synthesizing force for my own thinking, however, I don't intend the TAZ to be taken as more than an essay ("attempt"), a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy. Despite the occasional Ranterish enthusiasm of my language I am not trying to construct political dogma. In fact I have deliberately refrained from defining the TAZ--I circle around the subject, firing off exploratory beams. In the end the TAZ is almost self-explanatory. If the phrase became current it would be understood without difficulty...understood in action."
"The media invite us to "come celebrate the moments of your life" with the spurious unification of commodity and spectacle, the famous non-event of pure representation. In response to this obscenity we have, on the one hand, the spectrum of refusal (chronicled by the Situationists, John Zerzan, Bob Black et al.)--and on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would-be managers of our leisure. "Fight for the right to party" is in fact not a parody of the radical struggle but a new manifestation of it, appropriate to an age which offers TVs and telephones as ways to "reach out and touch" other human beings, ways to "Be There!"
Pearl Andrews was right: the dinner party is already "the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old" (IWW Preamble). The sixties-style "tribal gathering," the forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles...Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, old-time libertarian picnics--we should realize that all these are already "liberated zones" of a sort, or at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always "open" because it is not "ordered"; it may be planned, but unless it "happens" it's a failure. The element of spontaneity is crucial.
The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss-- in short, a "union of egoists" (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form--or else, in Kropotkin's terms, a basic biological drive to "mutual aid." (Here we should also mention Bataille's "economy of excess" and his theory of potlatch culture.)"
The **Permanent Autonomous Zone**(Excerpted)
THE EMERGENCE OF A GENUINELY ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY
Once again, this is already happening-but it still needs a huge amount of work before it comes into focus. The sub-economies of "lavoro nero", untaxed transactions, barter, etc., tend to be severely limited and localized. BBSs and other networking systems could be used to link up these regional/marginal aeconomies ("household managements") into a viable alternative economy of some magnitude. "P.M." has already outlined something like this in bolo'bolo-in fact a number of possible systems already exist, in theory anyway. The problem is: -how to construct a true alternative economy, i.e. a complete economy, without attracting the IRS and other capitalist runningdogs? How can I exchange my skills as, say, a plumber or moonshiner, for the food, books, shelter, and psychoactive plants I want-without paying taxes, or even without using ally State-forged money? How can I live a comfortable (even luxurious) life free of all interactions and transactions with CommodityWorld? If we took all the energy the Leftists put into "demos", and all the energy the Libertarians put into playing futile little 3rd-party games, and if we redirected all that power into the construction of a real underground economy, we would already have accomplished "the Revolution" long ago.
THE "WORLD" CAME TO AN END IN 1972
The hollowed-out effigy of the Absolute State finally toppled in "1989". The last ideology, Capitalism, is no more than a skin-disease of the Very Late Neolithic. It's a desiring-machine running on empty. I'm hoping to see it deliquesce in my lifetime, like one of Dali's mindscapes. And I want to have somewhere to "go" when the shit comes down. Of course the death of Capitalism needn't entail the Godzilla-like destruction of all human culture; this scenario is merely a terror- image propagated by Capitalism itself. Nevertheless it stands to reason that the dreaming corpse will spasm violently before rigor mortis sets in-and New York or LA may not be the smartest places to wait out the storm. (And the storm may already have begun.) [On the other hand NYC and LA might not be the worst places to create the New World; one can imagine whole squatted neighborhoods, gangs transformed into Peoples' Militias, etc.] Now, the gypsy-RV way of life may be one way to deal with the on-going melt-down of Too-Late Capitalism - but as for me, I'd prefer a nice anarchist monastery somewhere-a typical place for "scholars" to sit out the "Dark Ages". The more we organize this NOW the less hassle we'll have to face later. I'm not talking about "survival"-I'm not interested in mere survival. I want to thrive. BACK TO UTOPIA.
FESTIVALS
The PAZ serves a vital function as a node in the TAZ-web, a meetingplace for a wide circle of friends and allies who may not actually live fulltime on the "farm" or in the "village". Ancient villages held fairs which brought wealth to the community, provided markets for travelers, and created festal time/space for all participants. Nowadays the festival is emerging as one of the most important forms for the TAZ itself, but can also provide renewal and fresh energy for the PAZ. I remember reading somewhere that in the Middle Ages there were one hundred and eleven holidays a year; we should take this as our "utopian minimum" and strive to do even better. [Note: the utopian minima proposed by C. Fourier consisted of more food and sex than the average 18th century French aristocrat enjoyed; B. Fuller proposed the term "bare minimum" for a similar concept]
THE LIVING EARTH
I believe that there exist plenty of good selfish reasons for desiring the "organic" (it's sexier), the "natural" (it tastes better), the "green" (it's more beautiful), the Wild(er)ness (it's more exciting). Communitas (as P. Goodman called it) and conviviality (as I. Illich called it) are more pleasurable than their opposites. The living earth need not exclude the organic city-the small but intense conglomeration of humanity devoted to the arts and slightly decadent joys of a civilization purged of all its gigantism and enforced loneliness-but even those of us who enjoy cities can see immediate and hedonic motives for fighting for the "environment". We are militant biophiles. Deep ecology, social ecology, permaculture, appropriate tech..we're not too picky about ideologies. Let 1000 flowers bloom.
Redefining Value The Gift-Giving Economy: An **Immediatist Potlatch**(Excerpted)
"The basic structure is a banquet or picnic. Each player must bring a dish or bottle, etc., of sufficient quantity that e veryone gets at least a serving. Dishes can be prepared or finished on the spot, but nothing should be bought ready-made (except wine & beer, although these could ideally be home-made). The more elaborate the dishes the better. Attempt to be memorable . The menu need not be left to surprise (although this is an option)--some groups may want to coordinate the banquets so as to avoid duplications or clashes. Perhaps the banquet could have a theme & each player could be responsible for a given course (appetizer, soup, fish, vegetables, meat, salad, dessert, ices, cheeses, etc.). Suggested themes: Fourier's Gastrosophy--Surrealism--Native American--Black & Red (all food black or red in honor of anarchy)--etc."
"The main purpose of the potlatch is of course gift-giving. Every player should arrive with one or more gifts & leave with one or more different gifts. This could be accomplished in a number of ways: (a) Each player brings one gift & passes it to the person seated next to them at table (or some similar arrangement); (b) Everyone brings a gift for every other guest. The choice may depend on the number of players, with (a) better for larger groups & (b) for smaller gatherings. If the choice is (b), you may want to decide beforehand whether the gifts should be the same or different. For example, if I am playing with five other people, do I b ring (say) five hand-painted neckties, or five totally different gifts? And will the gifts be given specifically to certain individuals (in which case they might be crafted to suit the recipient's personality), or will they be distributed by lot?"
"The gifts must be made by the players, not ready-made. This is vital. Pre-manufactured elements can go into the making of the gifts, but each gift must be an individual work of art in its own right. If for instance I bring five hand painted neckties, I must paint each one myself, either with the same or with different designs, although I may be allowed to buy ready-made ties to work on."
"Gifts need not be physical objects. One player's gift might be live music during dinner, another's might be a performance. However, it should be recalled that in the Amerindian potlatches the gifts were supposed to be superb & even ruinous for the givers. In my opinion physical objects are best, & they should be as good as possible-- not necessarily costly to make, but really impressive. Traditional potlatches involved prestige-winning. Players should feel a competitive spirit of giving, a determination to make gifts of real splendor or value. Groups may wish to set rules beforehand a bout this--some may wish to insist on physical objects, in which case music or performance would simply become extra acts of generosity, but hors de potlatch, so to speak."
"Our potlatch is non-traditional, however, in that theoretically all players win--everyone gives & receives equally. There's no denying however that a dull or stingy player will lose prestige, while an imaginative &/or generous player will gain "face." In a really successful potlatch each player will be equally generous, so that all players will be equally pleased. The uncertainty of outcome adds a zest of randomness to the event."
