tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45469150607588756852024-03-19T06:10:19.170+02:00African DistributistUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-11808039961691343972014-04-17T14:11:00.002+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.858+02:00Opportunity Lost? <div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">As the national elections loom on the South African horizon and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-skafidas/nadine-gordimer-mandela_b_5143759.html?utm_hp_ref=world">post-Mandela disillusionment </a>sets in, UK journalist John Pilger <a href="http://johnpilger.com/articles/south-africa-20-years-of-apartheid-by-another-name">offers a perceptive account</a> of why so little economic progress has been made during the first 20 years of South Africa's democracy. Simply put, the ANC sold out and took the only path that remained after the fall of the Berlin Wall: neo-liberalism, the alluring but unrealistic belief that by making the rich richer (BEE, anyone?) wealth will begin to trickle down to the masses. Well, <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#No_to_an_economy_of_exclusion">as Pope Francis wrote</a>, "the excluded are still waiting". What is of particular interest is Pilger's brief description of what kind of programs could have been implemented to ensure that the end of apartheid meant not only the right for the majority of South Africans to vote, but also the right to a decent and dignified livelihood: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">[H]ad the ANC invested in [the majority of South Africans] and in their "informal economy", it could have actually transformed the lives of millions. Land could have been purchased and reclaimed for small-scale farming by the dispossessed, run in the co-operative spirit of African agriculture. Millions of houses could have been built, better health and education would have been possible. A small-scale credit system could have opened the way for affordable goods and services for the majority. None of this would have required the import of equipment or raw materials, and the investment would have created millions of jobs. As they grew more prosperous, communities would have developed their own industries and an independent national economy.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">A reinvigorated—and skilled—peasantry that fosters the bonds most essential to a healthy society is crucial to liberating South Africa from its colonial and apartheid past that shattered the peasant class and tore families—the real fabric of society—to pieces. This is the basis of distributism in South Africa. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The change that occurred in the early nineties put our country in a perfect position to transcend the ideological warfare that plagued the 20th century and embark on a new journey towards economic, political and social freedom. Instead the ANC revealed itself to be little more than an ideological playground for the black middle class, and South Africans—most of whom were not yet even born in 1994—are still waiting for real freedom to arrive.</span></div>
<o:p></o:p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-78620461831289353552013-04-18T10:55:00.000+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.969+02:00Global Wealth Inequality<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Political decay, poor farming and agricultural methods, a shrinking population, weakening military forces and a gradual decline in economic activity are some of the reasons why the Roman Empire fell. These are often presented alongside statistical or anecdotal evidence illustrating the extent to which Roman civilization had degenerated before eventually succumbing to the relentless barbarian invasions. It is tempting to look back upon the failures of past eras with a modern smugness that ignores the signs of our own decline. How will the fact that the combined wealth of today's richest 300 humans exceeds that of the poorest 3 billion be remembered by future generations as they learn about our era? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The accumulation of such a vast amount of wealth (equal to the combined wealth of China, India, Brazil and the US) in the hands of such a small group of individuals is unprecedented, and has only been made possible by the rise of globalised free-market capitalism, which allows capital to extricate itself from its historically more permanent commitment to the labour it supplies. Before the invention of money, the interests of capital and labour could only be separated as far as one could carry one's pig to the local market. The replacement of bartering with a widespread currency created a level of fluidity between capital and labour that allowed economies to flourish, but nevertheless ensured that capital's interest (excuse the pun!) was still somewhat bound up in that of labour. But in a post-industrial age, capital's ability to tap into and out of markets with such remarkable volatility threatens to produce the kind of economic absurdities that future generations may well look back on with the same smugness that we have towards those foolish Romans. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">South Africa can be seen a microcosm of the world's problems in this regard. The solution clearly isn't to obliterate capital by means of nationalisation, which merely replaces one ruling class of capitalists with another (something that the ANC foresaw would be the chief challenge of post-apartheid South Africa), but rather to find ways of successfully recapitalising the people. So far our government, via strategies like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment">BEE</a>, has accomplished transferring capital to a new black ruling class (as well as a brain drain of white professionals), but has failed dismally to reunite capital with labour, with the fruits of such a failure being on display to the whole world throughout the duration of last year's strikes.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-74352474888801145982012-05-19T20:25:00.000+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.956+02:00Peter Maurin: A Fool for Christ<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">This is the title of a short biographical piece written by Christopher Shannon for Crisis Magazine. It's striking how applicable the ideas of Maurin (which are really the ideas of the Church) are to South Africa today. Shannon writes:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Maurin embraced and promoted holy poverty in a modern industrial age that presented new challenges to the Church’s understanding of wealth. Whereas St. Francis had stood against a greed and decadence acknowledged by the moral authorities of his age as a sin, Maurin set himself against a capitalist modernity that held up the pursuit of wealth as a positive virtue in itself. This new attitude toward material gain presented the additional challenge of fostering new inequalities of wealth even as it destroyed the traditional social bonds that had softened and humanized the old inequalities of traditional European Catholic societies. Secular critics of capitalism accepted the passing of traditional society as a positive good and focused on equalizing the distribution of wealth created by capitalist modernity. Maurin decried the poverty that he saw in the slums of the urban, industrial West, but saw both reformist and revolutionary plans for wealth redistribution as simply the democratization of greed. Against the modern alternatives of material poverty and material wealth, Maurin sought to lead the modern poor from their current, negative state of destitution—which combined material deprivation with social dislocation—to a future, positive condition of poverty, which allowed for the satisfaction of basic material needs but sought true wealth in communion with God and man.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Read the entire article <a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/peter-maurin-a-fool-for-christ">here</a>. </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-91711583316027988132011-08-18T09:20:00.003+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.994+02:00E.F. Schumacher Documentary<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">This film is a short documentary portrait of economist, technologist and lecturer Fritz Schumacher. Up to age 45, Schumacher was dedicated to economic growth. Then he came to believe that the modern technological explosion had grown out of all proportion to human need. Author of </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%; font-style: italic;">Small Is Beautiful - A Study of Economics as if People Mattered</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;"> and founder of the London-based Intermediate Technology Development Group, he championed the cause of "intermediate" technology. The film introduces us to this gentle revolutionary a few months before his death.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-20502050821608168492011-08-12T12:23:00.006+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.884+02:00Chesterton's Distributism<div style="font-family: arial; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQq6XtYqlFbhYq5WKbXHBeg2Ql9z5E7enSyre3O1A_8zSb0nrYh-2X7wrPMAT5P9rcF05hTmX3vviOhbLaFo5fIom_W_xXNRRd8kUJoV2kUdzS-BMJJDCuZG93u7S9h_vOfDL0m8EPMwiy/s1600/chesterton1.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5639914310125916866" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQq6XtYqlFbhYq5WKbXHBeg2Ql9z5E7enSyre3O1A_8zSb0nrYh-2X7wrPMAT5P9rcF05hTmX3vviOhbLaFo5fIom_W_xXNRRd8kUJoV2kUdzS-BMJJDCuZG93u7S9h_vOfDL0m8EPMwiy/s320/chesterton1.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 320px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 238px;" /></a></span><span style="font-size: 85%;">"As a young man, Chesterton flirted with socialism, but he soon realized that it was mostly a reactionary idea. The rise of socialism and its attendant evils was a reaction against industrial capitalism and its attendant evils. The danger of fighting injustice is that if the battle is misguided, even a victory is a defeat. Good motives can have bad results. This is the point Chesterton makes when he talks about how the 'virtues wander wildly' when they are isolated from each other and wandering alone. In a broken society where we have this seemingly endless battle between the left and right, the virtues on either side are doing war with each other: truth that is pitiless and pity that is untruthful.</span></div>
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<br />"The conservatives and the liberals have successfully reduced meaningful debate to name-calling. We use catchwords as a substitute for thinking. We know things only by their labels, and we have 'not only no comprehension but no curiosity touching their substance or what they are made of.'
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<br />"It is interesting, it is fitting, that the philosophy which Chesterton embraced as the only real alternative to socialism and capitalism (as well as to liberalism and conservatism) goes by a name that is utterly awkward and misunderstood. As a label it is so useless it cannot even be used as a form of abuse. Its uselessness as a label demands that it be discussed. To say the name immediately requires explanation, and the explanation immediately provokes debate. The troublesome title is 'Distributism.' It has to do with property. It has to do with justice. And it has to do with everything else.
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<br />"There is more to Distributism than economics. That is because there is more to economics than economics. Distributism is not just an economic idea. It is an integral part of a complete way of thinking. But in a fragmented world we not only resist a complete way of thinking, we do not even recognize it. It is too big to be seen. In the age of specialization we tend to grasp only small and narrow ideas. We don’t even want to discuss a true Theory of Everything, unless it is invented by a specialist and addresses only that specialist’s 'everything.' In reality, everything is too complicated a category because it contains, well, everything. But the glory of a great philosophy or a great religion is not that it is simple but that it is complicated. It should be complicated because the world is complicated. Its problems are complicated.
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<br />"The solution to those problems must also be complicated. It takes a complicated key to fit a complicated lock. But we want simple solutions. We don’t want to work hard. We don’t want to think hard. We want other people to do both our work and our thinking for us. We call in the specialists. And we call this state of utter dependency 'freedom.' We think we are free simply because we seem free to move about."<br />
<br />These are excepts from the essay, "<a href="http://distributistreview.com/mag/2011/08/g-k-chestertons-distributism/">G. K. Chesterton's Distributism</a>", by Dale Ahlquist on <a href="http://distributistreview.com/mag/">The Distributist Review</a> website.
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-18319815484627329062011-07-07T17:06:00.009+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.871+02:00What Makes Man Human<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIxygFUZ9aAO3n5AT7mS9IFsMXCJN5EBh7bFPPka7rUmBoqa7AMipMD9hPfMsZXABU1doSEThyWsRJofzI4498NEhhyphenhyphentMxC_CSS5mg96XM3GzxyMw1tME1KOHJImiPM6Ced4vZPj3LAJFR/s1600/Maurin0009a.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 185px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 259px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5626630088228839170" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIxygFUZ9aAO3n5AT7mS9IFsMXCJN5EBh7bFPPka7rUmBoqa7AMipMD9hPfMsZXABU1doSEThyWsRJofzI4498NEhhyphenhyphentMxC_CSS5mg96XM3GzxyMw1tME1KOHJImiPM6Ced4vZPj3LAJFR/s320/Maurin0009a.jpg" /></a><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFakuMvIINlZGHS2OEnN9Y7sXywpK9Gj647jZoXZnI_e8xeDgc9e9acSSqK91ZQFRa65mIPrqdc-QutxcV5oShOfUPqNLXjq86rY0MYqSqvRy47GnYnK_8ZzI-X8ZDPVtHiO-IoHF-C77S/s1600/Maurin0009a.jpg"></a><div><pre><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">To give and not to take<br /> that is what makes man human.<br />To serve and not to rule<br /> that is what makes man human.<br />To help and not to crush<br /> that is what makes man human.<br />To nourish and not to devour<br /> that is what makes man human.<br />And if need be<br /> to die and not to live<br /> that is what makes man human.<br />Ideals and not deals<br /> that is what makes man human.<br />Creed and not greed<br /> that is what makes man human.<br /></pre></span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">By <a href="http://www.catholicworker.org/roundtable/pmbiography.cfm">Peter Maurin</a>, founder of the <a href="http://www.catholicworker.org/">Catholic Worker Movement</a>.</span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-74248846583636982572011-07-05T16:50:00.016+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.950+02:00The Church (and Buddhism) on Work<div align="justify">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCZeXysv7u01BnAF010lVqQCvaLVJ3sbpGSi0-JhpPk856NbmL7-_ieg9kvwLfSHfOLv3eC362gvpxB1cNRnAs1a3f30hiCj2ySbJ1VqrOp2pdo14T1Acxq1Qq22MxcuC0pVHioLo-y07W/s1600/factory.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625887273663975842" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCZeXysv7u01BnAF010lVqQCvaLVJ3sbpGSi0-JhpPk856NbmL7-_ieg9kvwLfSHfOLv3eC362gvpxB1cNRnAs1a3f30hiCj2ySbJ1VqrOp2pdo14T1Acxq1Qq22MxcuC0pVHioLo-y07W/s320/factory.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 218px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 320px;" /></a>Nowadays the work we do for a living is often treated as a necessary evil, a mere means to a financial end. Even from an employer’s perspective, the less labour of others' he has to pay for the better. That work is viewed in this negative light</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">by labourers and their employers</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">is the mark of a society that has lost touch with its own value system and has long forgotten both the creative and the redemptive nature of work. In contemplating this dual nature of work, one is able to move beyond the deceptions of modern neoliberal economics that obscure</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and thereby devalue</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">what has been, from even before the Fall, the vocational calling of mankind.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P8D.HTM">The Catechism of the Catholic Church</a> teaches that work ought to be fundamentally creative:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Human work proceeds directly from persons created in the image of God and called to prolong the work of creation by subduing the earth, both with and for one another. Hence work is a duty: ‘If any one will not work, let him not eat’ (2 Thes 3:10). Work honours the Creator’s gifts and the talents received from him.<sup>1</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Work is done for the physical and material good of ourselves and of others. Bringing forth goods which are needed by society is a duty of every man capable of working. But St. Paul’s connection between working and eating rests on an assumption long forgotten by those engaging in modern workplaces: our work should be directly related to providing that which is genuinely needed by our communities. Therefore our work ought to be for the material benefit of our community. We only have a right to what we genuinely need (St. Paul uses the most obvious example of food), insofar as we take part in bringing forth what is genuinely needed by the community (proper work). By accepting the invitation of the Creator to co-labour with Him we participate in his creative purposes of providing us, His children, with what He knows we need.<sup>2</sup><br /><br />That work is done to honour that which the Creator has given us</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">including both the resources of the earth and our talents and abilities</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">should also be a guiding light in determining what kind of work is proper to man. Every end-product of our modern economy has been made by combining the raw materials found in God’s creation with what He has given each of us in terms of our physical and mental talents. Consequently, every single thing we create for the consumption of ourselves or others should be brought under the scrutiny of whether it honours the true Creator.<br /><br />One of the chief illusions brought about by post-industrial economics is that the primary purpose of work is to earn money. Work is therefore a trade-off: by engaging in something somewhat unpleasant we are rewarded financially. Work is a mere commodity and workers are consistently seeking to sell less of their labour for more. We forget, as Pope John Paul II reminded us in 1991, that “work is work with others and work for others: it is a matter of doing something for someone else.”<sup>3</sup> Indeed, without the needs of others to be met there would not be any work to be done at all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A year before Karol Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II in 1978, British economist E.F. Schumacher (pictured right) died, aged 66. Once a protégé of John Maynard Keynes, Schumacher, while appointed as Chief Economic Adviser to the UK National Coal Board (one of the world’s largest organizations, with over 800 000 employees) travelled to Burma in 1955 as an economic consultant. While there, he developed a set of principles based on the belief that people needed good work for proper human development. He came to understand that at </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the heart of a civilization's understanding of work lies its system of values, and more precisely, its view of the individual and his relationship with others. This realization led him upon a journey of spiritual awakening, and, following his wife and daughter, he eventually converted to Catholicism in 1971. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Two years later he wrote the international best-seller, </span><em style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Small Is Beautiful</em><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, in which </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">he outlined the ideas he had learnt in Burma, articulated in a chapter entitled ‘</span><a href="http://www.schumachersociety.org/pdf/buddhist_economics/english.pdf" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Buddhist Economics’</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. Schumacher clearly saw that work rooted in a participation in creation was a key aspect of human development, with its fundamental purposes being “to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties… and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.”</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> But he also understood that work went beyond a participation in creation and had a redemptive aspect when he identified a further function of work: “[T]o enable [man] to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task.”</span><sup style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4</sup><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> He saw that Buddhism and Catholicism in their common rejection of materialism, had happened upon a shared truth:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the <i>purification of human character</i>. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products.<sup>5</sup></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One may as well replace the word ‘Buddhist’ in the above quote with the word ‘Catholic’. Unless we first understand the creative nature of our work</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">that it finds its divine purpose in providing the goods and services genuinely needed for a becoming existence, as opposed being a mere means to the fulfilment of materialistic desires</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">its redemptive nature eludes us. Only when we see our work as a service to our communities done in partnership with others to honour God for what he has given us, are we able to allow our work to become redemptive in our lives. As the Catechism continues:</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">By enduring the hardship of work in union with Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth and the one crucified on Calvary, man collaborates in a certain fashion with the Son of God in his redemptive work. He shows himself to be a disciple of Christ by carrying the cross, daily, in the work he is called to accomplish. Work can be a means of sanctification and a way of animating earthly realities with the Spirit of Christ.<sup>1</sup></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In Christ, our work is not only done in obedience to God’s original command to subdue the earth, nor is it limited to a type of participation in His creation, but it is elevated to a participation in His work of redemption. (This is why in the first centuries of the Church, Christianity spread so rapidly throughout the slave classes. Their lives were no longer understood as the fleeting economic instruments of their owners, but as having eternal value, not in spite of their condition, but <em>because</em> of it, in their union with the sufferings of Christ.) Here, in addition to the considerations given to work as a sharing in creation, we have an even brighter light for discerning the nature of work proper to man: it participates in God’s work of redemption. Dorothy Day’s once remarked that we should all be able to identify the work we do for a living as a work of mercy in one way or another, and it is with this understanding that we come to identify good work as that work which sanctifies the soul.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The two natures of man’s work are based on the two principal works of God among men: creation and redemption. As nature is perfected by grace, the latter does not exist without the former: our work fails to be redemptive if it is not also a participation in creation. Therefore, even if we are working strenuously, exercising self-denial and strict discipline towards our task at hand, our work nevertheless fails to be redemptive if what we are doing is not a participation in God’s good creation, i.e. not bringing forth goods genuinely needed by man. Examples of this may range from building weapons intended to be used on innocent civilians to designing enticing advertisements to increase people’s useless desires for things they don’t need.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The double nature of good work ought to help us to pause and reflect upon whether what we do for a living is really a vocational calling of God. As a nation we are in desperate need of rediscovering our work as something that meaningfully contributes to the common good, and as Christians we need to prayerfully reconsider what role our work plays as a daily means of drawing both ourselves and others ever-closer to our Redeemer. “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.”<sup>6</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em><strong>References:</strong></em></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">1. <em>Catechism of the Catholic Church</em>, n. 2427</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">2. Matthew 6:32</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">3. Blessed Pope John Paul II, <em>Centesimus Annus</em>, n. 31</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">4. E.F. Schumacher, <em>Small Is Beautiful</em>, p. 45</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">5. E.F. Schumacher, <em>Small Is Beautiful</em>, p. 46</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">6. Colossians 3:17</span></div>
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-86456813647114128792011-07-03T22:16:00.011+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.981+02:00'Big Society' offers South Africa a way past tired old dichotomies<div align="justify">
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiltV05HeSvF7E8SN-Kx-b9MX6pM17DCkYBKvVGb4BOSXaSnwhoNX1ZHGmaoDqqsZHkpR3CVOF4RGj-FJqJReG2HuzpKF9s_-sqtNM8MPGuq4D6rQYskj4tcUNisqP1vcVWpaTYZwCx1Ce-/s1600/malema.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625225199262397506" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiltV05HeSvF7E8SN-Kx-b9MX6pM17DCkYBKvVGb4BOSXaSnwhoNX1ZHGmaoDqqsZHkpR3CVOF4RGj-FJqJReG2HuzpKF9s_-sqtNM8MPGuq4D6rQYskj4tcUNisqP1vcVWpaTYZwCx1Ce-/s320/malema.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 180px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 320px;" /></a></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">‘Big Society’, the selling point of the Conservative Party in their successful 2010 general election campaign in Britain, is an attempt to reframe British politics beyond the liberal/conservative paradigm mapped out by the worn-out dichotomy of big business (on the right) and big government (on the left). As an on-going strategy it aims to empower citizens and their communities by engaging decentralized local government with community work and social enterprise. In light of recent calls from Julius Malema (pictured above) for nationalisation in South Africa, it’s time the Distributist alternative, embodied by many of the ‘Big Society’ ideas circulating around Britain, entered the local debate. In a June 2010 </span><a href="http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112084" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">article</span></a><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;"> for BusinessDay, Chris Waldburger argues that instead of nationalising our country’s assets into a vague emanation of ‘the people’, we should recapitalise the people themselves, and allow South Africans to become the true stakeholders in their own future:</span><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">When the Soccer World Cup recedes into memory and South African public life begins again, there is no doubt that the debate over nationalisation will recommence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">It was African National Congress (ANC) Youth League President Julius Malema who sparked these fires, and what concerns many investors is the fact that Malema was also the first to demand the recall of former president Thabo Mbeki . And with Malema declaring Mugabe’s land-grab a success, one wonders if nationalisation is the next logical step for an ANC propelled by a fatalistic momentum outside the control of party moderates.</span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">But if truth be told, Malema was not the first politician to urge nationalisation. As he himself has pointed out, Nelson Mandela as late as the early 1990s was calling for nationalisation of the mines. And perhaps the chief source for the debate is the Freedom Charter, which declared that “mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; all other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people”.</span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Mandela would vociferously and somewhat paradoxically contend that the document was not a blueprint for socialism, yet before the fall of the Berlin Wall (and the rise of the New Left in the shape of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and indeed Mbeki), nationalisation remained firmly on the ANC agenda.</span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">And now the ANC, in the face of widespread discontent at the failure of Mbeki’s neoliberal Gear policies to provide meaningful gains in standard of living for the poor, finds itself in an internal wrestling match for its doctrinal future. The general argument against nationalisation runs along the lines that since para-statals such as Eskom are failing, why would government intervention in the mining sector fare any better? Can the state possibly extend itself even further when health, education, and energy already seem like time bombs waiting to explode? Let efficient and competitive private corporations do what they do best — make profit — and then we will see the inevitable trickle-down benefits of supply- side economics.</span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Those in agreement with Malema, however, contend that monopolies were created in the mineral industries by imperialist henchmen such as Cecil John Rhodes — a figure who notoriously allowed fires to burn in De Beers’ mines for eight hours before he sounded the alarm, all for the sake of turnover, which mostly found its way into foreign banks. Such exhibitions of corporate power will always insist on the enrichment of the few at the expense of the working-class many, activists contend.</span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">And so, depending on your background and political bent, it seems that is predetermined to favour one of these two options.</span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">But what if there was another option — an option other than the devil or the deep blue sea that could marry the concerns of the poor, with the innovation and competitiveness of the free market? As South Africans hash out an age-old, and a seemingly anachronistic, debate, it may be useful to broaden the horizons of our economic thinking. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">Read the rest of the article </span><a href="http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112084" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">.</span><span style="font-family: arial;"></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-21225519567063241632011-06-30T13:16:00.036+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.897+02:00Christianity and the Invisible Hand<div align="justify">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnrztuj06cMHIpsuyAzGETOUGzbcqfnJs42o64KVk-Swr1xyBXUFaAYtWyeIpxWwznUOx1XNb573V05oX4xg6BYriyAJuwrtEPJAvZ699p3NsnkOS6xkyxhIGUuV0_DJLeAQajOjhYvovU/s1600/img_4228.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5623995664903564482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnrztuj06cMHIpsuyAzGETOUGzbcqfnJs42o64KVk-Swr1xyBXUFaAYtWyeIpxWwznUOx1XNb573V05oX4xg6BYriyAJuwrtEPJAvZ699p3NsnkOS6xkyxhIGUuV0_DJLeAQajOjhYvovU/s320/img_4228.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 320px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 293px;" /></a><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">In his classic 1926 work <em>Religion and the Rise of Capitalism</em>, R.H. Tawney (1880 – 1962) explores the complex relationship between Protestantism and economic development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a Protestant himself (Tawney was an Anglican), he builds on ideas espoused by Max Weber in his <em>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</em>, demonstrating the influence the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation unknowingly had on the development of modern economic thinking.<br /><br /><em>Religion and the Rise of Capitalism</em> serves as an ‘examination of the spiritual problems concealed behind the economic mechanism of our society’, and its general thesis is concerned with the role of Protestantism in the exclusion of ‘economic activities and social institutions from examination or criticism in the light of religion’. Although Tawney was not a Distributist, here he identifies the golden thread that runs throughout Distributism: the belief that economic phenomena ought to be expressed in terms of personal conduct, and not in terms of mechanism. The mechanism we are most familiar with today is commonly known as the ‘invisible hand’, by which what would otherwise be the ethical concerns of the individual buying and selling in the market, are absorbed into a self-regulating system that supposedly ensures the maximization of resources for the benefit of all. Tawney clearly understood that this conception of economics relegated Christian charity to a region that subsists beyond our everyday interactions with others in the world we find ourselves in:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-family: arial;">If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, trade is one thing and religion is another, they imply a not very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan… The existing order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the [18th] century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope:<br /><br />Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,<br />And bade self-love and social be the same.<br /><br />Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical examination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of conduct.<sup>1</sup></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">The work of the invisible hand relies on the premise of what Tawney calls the ‘all-sufficient motive’: self-interest. Not only is our Christian charity removed from our daily economic existence, but it is replaced by the very thing Christian charity bids us to overcome. In many respects this new rule of economic conduct has brought forth much material fruit, but if we are to have any faith in the words of Christ Himself and His countless commands with regards to money and material possessions, it is something we cannot accept insofar as it is founded on selve-serving interests and relationships of exploitation and violence. Overcoming the blind acceptance of the unjust mechanisms of modern economics, as materially advantageous as they may be, is perhaps the first step towards a truly Distributist economy. In the words of Pope John XXIII in his 1961 encyclical on ‘Christianity and Social Progress’, <em>Mater et Magista</em>: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-family: arial;">[If] the organization and structure of economic life be such that the human dignity of workers is compromised, or their sense of responsibility is weakened, or their freedom of action is removed, then we judge such an economic order to be unjust, even though it produces a vast amount of goods whose distribution conforms to the norms of justice and equity<em>.</em><sup>2</sup> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">A recurring question with regards to Distributism concerns its practical implementation. How are we to begin to live out these ideas? The first step, as outlined both here by Tawney and the consistent teaching of the Church, is to come to the realization that the supposed moral neutrality of the economic order is a modern illusion, and the invisible hand of the modern economy, if it even exists, is not a substitute for personal accountability and restraint in one’s participation in the market. The next step is simply to open oneself up to living in accordance with this realization, and allowing Christian charity to once more govern one’s actions within the sphere of economic activity. This step is difficult, especially as the realization deepens of how implicated we really are by virtue of our participation in--and reliance on--such an unjust system, and how dependent we’ve come to be on the structural violence that is concealed behind the economic mechanism of our society. It means re-evaluating what we buy, how much we buy, who we buy from and what kind of work we do. It means praying to God for the grace to give up our jobs if they don't contribute to the common good of society, asking ourselves whether the work we do helps feed, clothe and shelter man, or whether it distracts him from the natural and supernatural ends he is called to, enslaving him with worldly and useless desires. Dorothy Day wrote that 'everyone should be able to place his job in the category of the works of mercy' in one way or another. It is here where the commands of Christ and his call to a detachment from earthly possessions begin to take on a new meaning for the industrialized world, where the call to come out of Babylon</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: super;">3</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;"> is perhaps louder than ever. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><strong style="font-size: 85%;"><em>References:</em></strong><br /><span style="font-size: small;">1. R.H.Tawney, <em>Religion and the Rise of Capitalism</em>, p.191-192<br />2. Pope John XXIII, <em>Mater et Magistra</em>, nn. 82-83</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial;">3. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Apocalypse 1</span><span style="font-family: arial;">8:4</span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-29472577331796667072011-06-28T14:09:00.008+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.926+02:00Ethics, Not Economics, Will Fix Our Broken Society<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCqxAVmrOHAcyjN5CilisSKfCDhiRSet9m3yBZtwu7BmNJW9OG7gLV9lFU1gjQFSRz3InI6UwoFvSoDJP3Yc110LxxBMLEP7H7xWMrB8gohFmsc_muPCKZYUGQ4L98B_pVmrJp-KZtIldC/s1600/South-Africa-550x324.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5623246035296150066" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCqxAVmrOHAcyjN5CilisSKfCDhiRSet9m3yBZtwu7BmNJW9OG7gLV9lFU1gjQFSRz3InI6UwoFvSoDJP3Yc110LxxBMLEP7H7xWMrB8gohFmsc_muPCKZYUGQ4L98B_pVmrJp-KZtIldC/s320/South-Africa-550x324.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 189px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; text-align: justify; width: 320px;" /></a></span>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In a country of war-like levels of violent crime; the constant abuse, rape and murder of children; and staggeringly brazen levels of corruption; South Africa’s loudest political protests have largely been framed as responses to mere service delivery inefficiencies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In the face of gross moral breakdown, our public conversation has confined itself to a critique of the mere workings of government.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In his State of the Nation parliamentary address last Thursday evening, President Jacob Zuma failed to transcend this technocratic fixation – the solutions proposed did not broker anything beyond the increased lubrication of government machinery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Whilst service delivery is a legitimate crisis requiring indignant and urgent action, one could arguably assert that the glaring absence of a deeper kind of protest to our society’s grotesque habits is of an even more alarming nature than municipal ineptitude and callousness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Rather than confronting the darkness of our country directly, we have instead neglected the issues in a blaze of government-speak and rhetoric. Instead of turning to the difficult yet simple light of human morality, we have relied on technical intervention alone to solve deeply spiritual problems.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Even in the language of the official opposition to the ruling party, the terms of debate have largely remained that of inefficiency and delivery. The problem with this approach is that it never answers the question that is truly at the heart of our politics: what has gone so horribly wrong in our land?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A cursory glance at the public square reveals a plenitude of jargon based on the complexities of economic growth and development planning. Spending on education and health is lauded as the panacea for our woes, but a careful analysis of the problems in our nation’s health and education sectors quickly demonstrates that our crises are not of a mere technical nature that can just be solved by the greater professionalism of elected bureaucrats.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This discord between our problems and purported solutions is perfectly demonstrated by the fact that despite our consistently good economic performance, the viciousness of South African crime has shown no significant signs of abating. The crime levels are still comparable to war zones all around the world, whilst government’s condom distribution has not altered the landscape of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Both issues are brought together in South Africa’s vilest moniker – ‘The Rape Capital of the World’.</span></span></div>
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And all the while, our politicians dare not take the risks of exploring the full implications of their duties as representatives of their beleaguered citizens. Like the foes of Socrates, they focus instead upon the style of politics, rather than its substance. And the citizenry is largely silent.</div>
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Months before his assassination, US Senator Robert Kennedy poignantly noted the ironies of a simplistic correlation between technical, economic efficiency and national well-being:</div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Our gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials... it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What Kennedy understood was that politics needs to have a deeper point of reference than mere management of state machinery or blank economic growth – it should require a kind of moral and philosophical imagination that asserts core ideals concerning the human person.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If we cannot understand what constitutes the good for the human person, if human beings are not more to us than economic units, all we are left with is a decrepit welfare state in which all of our problems are collapsed into economics and service delivery. The result is dehumanization – citizens become mere clients of the mercantile state.</span></span></div>
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Such a process is exhibited in the political approach to crime and AIDS. It is assumed that unemployment and lack of education are the intertwined causes for both problems. If we get the economics right and the matric pass rates up, it is believed that a whole culture of violence and casual sex will dissipate and that South African families will suddenly emerge as whole, healthy and prosperous.</div>
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The order of that intervention needs to be reversed. Studies have shown that children raised by married parents are exponentially more likely to succeed economically – for it is the family and other societal bonds that produce high levels of education and productivity, not vice versa. Our current model of problem-solving hopes that economics will simply save our families, rather than renewed families saving our economics.</div>
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Spending on education is undoubtedly a good thing, yet such spending will not do its work until we begin with the harder and all-encompassing work of being good parents and neighbours.</div>
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Again, the latest research in HIV transmission has demonstrated that the unique problem in Southern Africa is the high prevalence of concurrent and multiple partners amongst the sexually active. It is hoped that by handing out medical goods such people will suddenly learn the supposed responsibility required to dent the transmission rates – a moral problem apparently has a scientific solution.</div>
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But when a person has multiple partners, and sex has become a mere game that sometimes produces children by accident (who can simply be aborted by the ‘womb cleansers’ illegally advertised on every lamp post), is such a solution really viable?</div>
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Until greater attention is paid to the collapse of sexual ethics in our nation, no technical ‘solution’ will gain real traction.</div>
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These issues all constitute the black hole of our national culture. We have simply refused to view our problems through a moral lens, despite our morality being the most human thing about us. We rightly concern ourselves with material conditions, but we fail to see that material conditions are not the sum total of our society.</div>
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South Africa has simply adopted the prevailing global ideology that the most basic thing about humans is their economics, and not their morality, their relationships and their families. It is the myth of pliable, liberal man – that family, sexuality and morality are subjective appendages rather than essentials.</div>
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What is required is a governmental approach and a public conversation that goes beyond questions of only economic intervention and lack of service delivery and turns instead to the ideal questions of relations between state, family, land, and the ethics of the human person. It is the interplay of these notions that carries our fate.</div>
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The great example of this is the historical destruction of the black peasantry. This annulment of the African family farm led to the cash culture of the slums, and tore the social fabric in such a way that we need to go beyond mere industrial intervention if we are to weave it back together again.</div>
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In short, our politicians and citizens must become philosophers again - grappling with the essential nature of goodness and justice – before we are able to lay a truly civic platform which can begin to restore to our country a human face.</div>
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Until this happens, we will continue to fail to solve our moral and human problems.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><em><span style="font-size: small;">By Chris Waldburger. Originally published in the Cape Argus on Thursday 27 February.</span></em></span></div>
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<em></em></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-5490002527993253732011-06-28T11:53:00.014+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.932+02:00Some Preliminary Questions...<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQHMeWWwBB6SkJNZ7aB-WT3G9TyvqrPBakSmO0rfJ3HIIPJ2xEV9JCK9_19V0RxtnSzGlUriA1iG5uQvxtU4-nFLPqG9l2Q8oV0AKgOP3Zggi7LC94tvzXepKZpwhQRXgTcQCHNKYF8VBP/s1600/El_Papa_Leon_XIII_003.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 218px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5623217886638373778" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQHMeWWwBB6SkJNZ7aB-WT3G9TyvqrPBakSmO0rfJ3HIIPJ2xEV9JCK9_19V0RxtnSzGlUriA1iG5uQvxtU4-nFLPqG9l2Q8oV0AKgOP3Zggi7LC94tvzXepKZpwhQRXgTcQCHNKYF8VBP/s320/El_Papa_Leon_XIII_003.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">... and answers from the <a href="http://distributistreview.com/mag/">Distributist Review</a>:</span></div><br /><div align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;"><strong>What is Distributism?<br /></strong>Distributism finds its roots in the social and economic theories articulated in the documents of the Catholic pontiffs, beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s (pictured right) <em>Rerum Novarum</em>. These social encyclicals raise imperatives on economic transaction and its relation to labour, solidarity, wages, the wide diffusion of ownership, and the proper limits of technology. Distributism is an economic system compliant with the principles of these documents, and is centred on the widest possible ownership of property as the best guarantee of political and economic freedom. A family that owns its own land or its own tools can make its own way in the world without being dependent on someone else for a “job.” Thus, Distributism seeks to extend property ownership to as many as possible, and end the concentration of ownership by few capitalists or state officials.<br /><br /><strong>What are the ‘means of production’?<br /></strong>The ‘means of production’ are the land, tools, and equipment needed for labour to transform raw materials into goods and services. As wealth (goods or services) is only possible by the combination of the means of production, labour, and raw materials, we believe it is best when these are owned cooperatively (worker-owned) or entirely operated by the family.<br /><br /><strong>Are you Capitalists or Socialists?<br /></strong>Neither. Capitalism–or Proletarianism–is a system bent on the maximization of returns on investments, and seeks it at the expense of labour and the common good. Socialism aims to eliminate ownership and place it in the hands of an impersonal, centralized government. Both systems–Capitalism and Socialism–limit real ownership in practice. The only difference between a Socialist state and a Capitalist state is whether power is concentrated in a few private or a few bureaucratic hands.<br /><br /><strong>So you don’t support ‘Big Government’?<br /></strong>Distributists are decentralists who believe most organizational functions (whether business, government, or labour) should occur at the smallest competent level as possible (subsidiarity). Institutions like local guilds and governments exist to curb large-scale control, whether bureaucratic or commercial.<br /><a name='more'></a><br /><strong>What’s with all the talk about justice?<br /></strong>Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and economists have deemed justice an integral element of the marketplace; a factor to be considered before exchanges take place. However, during the period of history known as the Enlightenment, a misconception arose that social justice springs solely from “market forces,” or from central planning by the government. In this case, man becomes a mere cog in an economic machine; he is reduced to material insignificance with disregard for his fallen nature or telos (purpose). Thus, while acknowledging man’s dependency on material goods, we recognize trade and social policy as subordinate to his virtuous vocation.<br /><br /><strong>Wouldn’t Distributism be less efficient, and so make us all poorer?<br /></strong>Although Capitalism claims to be highly “efficient,” it doesn’t work very well without massive government expense and interventions. Distributists assert productive property as a genuine generator of wealth, because it serves and sustains the family materially (food, clothing, and shelter), and cultivates the soul through work. Moreover, we emphasize that distributed property is actually more efficient and is less dependent on huge government or corporate conglomerates. Property means liberty for the household from the jaws of financial volatility, as from the perspective of the household, land transcends market values due to its indispensability for the family’s stability.<br /><br /><strong>What is your position regarding our present economic crisis?<br /></strong>Stagnate wages, usury, speculation, derivatives, waste, and consumer debt, are but a few of the problems which have transformed a land of small businesses and small farmers, into a nation pitted between corporations handing off their liabilities to taxpayers, and an obliging government looking the other way as jobs are shipped overseas. With relatively few producers and more outsourced production, the family’s confidence in obtaining healthy food, fair wages, home ownership, healthcare, and proper education for their children through the means of employment, has collapsed.<br /><br /><strong>How does Distributism plan to help us restore economic sanity?<br /></strong>We believe a renaissance of local economics will repair the damage wrought by corporations that squeeze the government for greater subsidies from the public purse. Distributism puts forward a humane economic and social policy invested in the needs of the family through property ownership and measured technology. Our objectives include the restoration of the guild system, family and worker-owned business advocacy, micro-credit lending, Community Supported Agriculture, and associations tasked with implementing vigorous husbandry programs. We support political initiatives to favour differential taxation policies, legal assistance for the home-based business, as well as the revision of current accounting and banking practices. We intend to achieve our goals by forming a popular movement consisting of academics and laymen working together to create regional chapters dedicated to the implementation of the Distributist program.<br /><br /><strong>Isn’t this all very Utopian?</strong><br />No, Distributism is a practical system, which is validated by the many examples of functioning Distributist firms; on the small scale, there are thousands of home-based and employee-owned companies, micro-lending banks, credit unions, and insurance companies; on the large scale, there is the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation of Spain, one of the most successful cooperatives in Europe, and the Distributist economy of Emilia-Romagna (Bologna) in Italy, where over 45% of the GDP comes from cooperatives, and which boasts a living standard twice the rest of Italy and among the highest in Europe. Distributist economies and firms have a built-in competitive advantage over their Capitalist and Socialist counterparts, as well as social and community advantages that Capitalism and Socialism cannot begin to match.<br /></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4546915060758875685.post-27803128588170317442011-04-27T00:03:00.027+02:002018-08-07T17:11:34.913+02:00Distributism and South Africa<div align="justify">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9Z5PkRtUIrAPlyNSlXdHpcJPxUkbFAkWozlOT-owae63SG_ETN6gLmVhSKGC3OYiF1ak6HMlai-_EzGCecJ1WLs0xqco6apV3WP9y6AgeSDrZFIIJyrnBhb1aNwUeuxj0AQeIR2hO9RS5/s1600/chesterton-2.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5623213574965273954" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9Z5PkRtUIrAPlyNSlXdHpcJPxUkbFAkWozlOT-owae63SG_ETN6gLmVhSKGC3OYiF1ak6HMlai-_EzGCecJ1WLs0xqco6apV3WP9y6AgeSDrZFIIJyrnBhb1aNwUeuxj0AQeIR2hO9RS5/s320/chesterton-2.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 320px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 228px;" /></a><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">Distributism is a socio-economic theory formulated in the early 20th century by G.K. Chesterton (pictured right) and Hilaire Belloc in an effort to apply the social teachings of the Catholic Church to an increasingly industrialized world. Often misunderstood to be a compromise between socialism and capitalism, Distributism is in fact a sharp critic of both philosophies insofar as both are enemies of private property: socialism restricting ownership to the state, and capitalism to an elite few. As Chesterton once said, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."<br /><br />Distributism is underpinned by the Catholic principle of subsidiarity (as articulated by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical <em>Quadragesimo Anno</em>), which holds that all economic activity ought to be performed by the smallest possible unit. Families if possible, ought to be in control of the means of production, rather than large corporate bodies which alienate people from their work and means of livelihood. By favouring cheap mass production over that of small societies of artisans, such modern corporations erode the cultural fabric that naturally binds communities together. Distributism, by bringing labour, capital and the environment back into a united whole, aims to restore the integrity of such communities.<br /><br />It is not difficult to imagine the potential impact the ideas embodied by Distributism could have on the current state of affairs in post-apartheid South Africa. Since 1994 the new government, albeit with its own set of internal challenges, has lacked the much-needed single-minded direction in initiating meaningful and sustainable social and economic development. Leftist plans of nationalisation have been abandoned in favour of cautious yet ineffective programmes like GEAR and BEE, both incapable of creating any real economic progress for the average South African. The same holds true for the disastrous state education initiatives employed over the past 17 years.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">The reason why progress has been so stunted is that the problem is not merely an economic one, or, at least, the ethical dimension of an economic way forward has been neglected. This is because the estrangement of labour from capital is at its roots a deeply moral dilemma, as the Church has taught for the last 120 years. The alienation of the worker and his family from the land on which they were born has its origins in the colonial enforcement of hut tax—essentially a program for migrant labour—which in turn destroyed the family as the basis of a flourishing society. That the fundamental and divinely instituted setting for both the learning and the preservation of economic and social values—the family—is still being ravaged by a cascading array of destructive social forces (AIDS, unemployment, crime) is undoubtedly the direct result of the capitalist history of our colonial past. This is, in fact, the very heart of the matter; and any economic thinking which fails to penetrate the root of the moral problem will be utterly helpless to bring about any lasting change.</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;"><br /><br />In line with much modern talk of environmental sustainability, Distributism identifies as a chief cause of the current set of problems the alienation of the family from the land</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14px;">—</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">from ownership. Humankind’s relationship to the land is at the very foundation of what it means to be a healthy community. Both the socialist concept of nationalization and capitalist privatization have sought to mend the broken relationship between labour and ownership in the same wrong way. Where nationalization seeks to expand national interest by destroying individual ownership, privatization and its accompanying free-market modus operandi effectively limit ownership to a select few: both are effectively enemies of widespread private property and are thus antagonistic towards the establishment of healthy communities. Where one is situated along the continuum between leftist nationalization and rightist privatization is beside the point. Distributism operates beyond the old categories (that are increasingly defunct in a globalized world) by seeking to restore the relationship between labour and ownership without eliminating either of them.<br /><br />This broken relationship has been primarily caused by a very flawed conception of what exactly labour is—a conception prevalent within the system of migrant labour that built the foundations of South Africa’s economy. The fact that labour is viewed as a necessary evil by both labourers and their employers is an indication of the state of a modern industrial landscape ravaged by the capitalist exploits of apartheid and colonialism. One only needs to take a cursory glance at the city slums that surround each of South Africa’s economic centres to see that meaningful work—a chance to utilise and develop one’s faculties, and to overcome one’s ego-centeredness by joining with others to achieve a common task of bringing forth goods that are genuinely needed by the surrounding community—is largely an alien concept. The recovery of labour as a good will only take place when we learn to see that our social problems are in fact moral problems, and that labour and ownership carry a kind of sacredness in their integration with the family and the politics of a dignified humanity.<br /><br />Therefore, the best foundation of a nation is one built upon an ownership society, that is, a reinvigorated peasantry and manufacturing class The family farm and the family shop need to be restored within a new framework of localism, a framework that is not only natural to humanity and our environment, but also saves the vulnerable from the destructive turbulence of globalized finance. If working people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the means of the production of goods fitting to a dignified humanity, the consequence will surely be that the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will begin to be bridged, and once-divided communities brought nearer to one another. As Pope Leo XIII wrote in <em>Rerum Novarum</em>, “Men will always work harder and more readily when they work on that which belongs to them.”<br /><br />The problem in South Africa isn't so much about material destitution</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14px;">—</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">we live in a wealthy land</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14px;">—</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">but rather it is about the break-down of society and the relationships that are able to uphold healthy communities and bring forth the fruits of the earth and humanity’s labour. A sacramental understanding of each aspect of society—the family, the land and the environment, ownership and work</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14px;">—</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">can restore to us the full picture of our South African reality that has been hidden for far too long. In the context of a country with unparalleled economic disparity this is undoubtedly a task that requires nothing short of a spiritual reawakening, a deep and widespread moral conversion: a miracle. This is ultimately something that no state or earthly institution can ever achieve. But at the very least the implementation of Distributist ideas in the political and economic arena of South Africa—even by mere individuals in the manner in which they conduct their daily economic and social transactions—will help to build, as Catholic Worker founder Peter Maurin famously said, “a society in which it will be easier to be good”</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14px;">—</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;">a society in which miracles are more likely to happen. </span></div>
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