The Institutional Separation of Society

[undergroundpanther]

The problem is, to quote John Maynard Keynes once again, "Practical men are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

To put the problem of these "practical" — aka "common" — men in more practical terms here's iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen presciently explaining the situation:
...the ownership of property in large holdings now controls the nation's industry, and therefore it controls the conditions of life for those who have to resort to the markets to sell or buy. In other words, it has come to pass with the change in circumstances that the rule of Live and Let Live now waits on the discretion of the owners of large wealth. In fact, those thoughtful men in the eighteenth century who made so much of these constituent principles of the modern point of view did not contemplate anything like the system of large wealth, large-scale industry, and large-scale commerce and credit which prevails today. They did not foresee the new order in industry and business, and the system of rights and obligations which they installed, therefore, made no provision for the new order of things that has come on since their time.

...the population of these civilised countries now falls into two main classes: those who own wealth invested in large holdings and who thereby control the conditions of life for the rest; and those who do not own wealth in sufficiently large holdings, and whose conditions of life are therefore controlled by these others. It is a division, not between those who have something and those who have nothing — as many socialists would be inclined to describe it — but between those who own wealth enough to make it count, and those who do not.

A vested interest is a legitimate right to get something for nothing, usually a prescriptive right to an income which is secured by controlling the traffic at one point or another... is common in the respect that he is not vested with such a presciptive right to get something for nothing. And he is called common because such is the common lot of men under the new order of business and industry; and such will continue (increasingly) to be the common lot so long as the enlightened principles of secure ownership and self-help handed down from the eighteenth century continue to rule human affairs by help of the new order of industry.


http://inspectorlohmann.blogspot.com/2006/12/building-invisible-comic-community.html

[undergroundpanther]

1. From part one..

From the linked site as the OP was at:

Lawrence Goodwin, in his Introduction to The Populist Moment, discusses the difficulties in creating community that seeks to challenge the status quo. Such "protest communities" need to experience "sequential achievement", something that is almost impossible to achieve in most circumstances:...evolving stages of achievement are essential if large numbers of intimidated people are to generate both the psychological autonomy and the practical means to challenge culturally sanctioned authority. A failure at any stage of the sequential process aborts or at the very least sharply limits the growth of the popular movement. Unfortunately, the overwhelming nature of the impediments to these stages of sequential achievement are rarely taken into account. The simple fact of the matter is that so difficult has the process of movement-building proven to be since the onset of industrialization in the western world that all democratic protest movements have been aborted or limited in this manner prior to the recruitment of their full natural constituency. The underlying social reality is, therefore, one that is not generally kept firmly in mind as an operative dynamic of modern society -- namely, that mass democratic movements are overarchingly difficult for human beings to generate.

Of course he's right. So the goal for us should not be to create a social movement to change the world, 'cause that's not going to happen.

But we do have the power and ability to change ourselves, and we can form our own connections to assist us in this endeavor. Underground communities throughout history were formed to protect its members from a dominant culture that abandoned them. So when a system abandons us, we owe it to ourselves to abandon the system. And the first step towards doing so is to reframe our own contexts and realize that there is an "outside" to the system one inhabits. Not to do so is to entrap our own epistemology into the context we seek to escape from. ("The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." —Steve Biko) Our system, Wealth Bondage, ultimately, is a shared social reality that we have internalized as the only one available to us. So long as we cannot conceive of an "outside" we have internalized the conditions of our own imprisonment.