Three
Economic Complex Index
Percent of Swedish workers in trade unions (2013): 67.7
Percent of US workers in trade unions (2013): 10.8
Percent of unionized private-sector US workers in 1900/2015: 6.7/6.7
Hours American workers work (as a percentage) compared to their UK, Norwegian, and Dutch counterparts (2013): + 7, +27, +30
Rank of US in terms of income per hour worked in manufacturing (2010): 11
Number of countries whose GDP is less than the combined fortunes of the five wealthiest Americans (2013): At least 149
Ratio of net worth of the wealthiest 400 Americans to the 150 million poorest Americans (2009): 1/1
Percent change in Wall Street profits from 2007 to 2009: +720
Percent change in unemployment rate from 2007 to 2009: +102
Percent change in total home equity from 2006 to 2009: –61
In contemporary America, belief in the free market economy above all else is absolute. It is unarguable. And yet there is no such thing as a “free market,” despite the noisy claims of the fundamentalist marketeers, their apologists in the bought media, and the well-mannered barbarians from the business schools. The “free market” is highly contested, politically managed, extensively regulated, and supported by government policy and our tax dollars at every level—often, but not always, to the advantage of the rich. Historically the free marketeers have howled at the elimination of child labor (“Let the little tykes earn a buck!”), inspections at meatpacking plants, the organizing of trade unions (“Selfish Bolsheviks!”), environmental regulations, clean air and water standards (“The market will sort it all out in the long run”), health and safety regulations in mines and fields and factories, the eight-hour day (“How dare you arrogant elitists deprive the laborer of his freedom to work as many hours as he likes?”), and the abolition of their right to trade in human beings. Of course chattel slavery was but one form of human trade and trafficking, and wage slavery—though different—is another. Today a defining stance of the marketeers is roaming the world in the company of extravagant military power in search of resources and markets as well as dirt-cheap, superexploited labor that can be had without those pesky rules (“Child labor has the added benefit of teaching the natives discipline and obedience right from the start”) and then get cast aside without consequence.
More recently the marketeers have found themselves in a bit of a contradiction. The near collapse of the US banking system in 2008 led to George W. Bush nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage lenders. He instituted one of the biggest state interventions in world history by buying up “toxic assets” to the tune of $700 billion in taxpayer subsidies, and shifting a huge chunk of the financial sector to state ownership. It was a perfect 180-degree pivot: suddenly the market was no longer without fault, and the government no longer broke. In fact the government was now the ideal instrument—streamlined, efficient, and prosperous—to save the day. Bush argued that while the “free market” was still wondrous beyond compare, it nonetheless rested “on the conviction that the . . . government should interfere . . . when necessary.” Bush and his fellow racketeers had determined that this was just such a time. Socialism for the rich and the powerful, and capitalist-fabricated dirt and destitution for the rest.
Modern economists extol the wisdom of the “free market” in hushed tones typically reserved for glorifying a holy book, or they mumble about the “laws of the marketplace” as if explaining the laws of magnetism or optics or aerodynamics. When my oldest son was in college, he took Economics 101 and within a couple of weeks he’d figured it out: if you substituted the word “capitalism” every time the textbooks or the professor said “market,” “economics,” or “industrialism” it made the readings and lectures completely sensible. Economics was simply a metric that reflected political choices and (with more or less accuracy) the social and class relations of society. When he asked why the course wasn’t called Capitalism 101, the professor responded, “Same thing.” Indeed.
Economists quantify everything, disguising their values and their meanings in a mystifying faux language of objectivity. They advise the rest of us ordinary folks, as the Wizard advised the four seekers in the throne room in Oz, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
Let’s look anyway.
***
It would be more honest to admit that economics—like history or anthropology or political science—is a smashing together of the subjective and the objective, or, more precisely an interpretive look at facts and forces that exist in the world. It’s the gathering of statistics in order to describe and construct the world, and the decision as to what we count is of primary importance. Neither the facts and forces nor the interpretations are beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals. We don’t need to be technical experts to be active citizens engaged in the big questions that impact who we are or what we become as people or as a society. We can know we want clean food and water without being epidemiologists; we can say that we want bridges to hold up and airplanes to stay in the air without degrees in engineering; we can recognize that gross disparities in wealth distort and destroy democracy without spreadsheets that can only be read with a magnifying glass; we can decide that nuclear power plants are a bad idea without PhDs in physics. And we can decide we want a system of production and distribution that is transparent, participatory, and in the service of the general welfare—it’s not rocket science. Oh, and we can decide what kinds of rockets ought to be built too and how they should be used.
All the rules of the economy are made up and put in place by people, and they can’t really exist beyond or outside of human culture and politics. Anything made by people can be unmade or remade by people. While there is surely a real world of hard edges and data points, it’s not a world beyond the basic human enterprise of meaning-making, nor is it a world beyond values and ethics and political calculation. The economic system is not beyond our capacity to alter or even abolish it. Even a brief glance at history reminds us of our often astonishing power to correct or amend or, if we choose, to revolutionize all that we see before us. This is where a vital and robust public—and a mobilized social upheaval when necessary—makes all the difference.
If we pay attention we can see before our eyes the consequences of economic laws that are conjured from thin air. In response to the quite real threat of cataclysmic climate change, for example, some governments have agreed to “marketize” carbon—to make carbon pollution something to bank up, buy, and sell at a spanking-new marketplace. “Cap and trade” programs across Europe haven’t slowed CO2 emissions an iota, but they have spawned a multibillion-dollar commodities market trading carbon credits for profit. We might have chosen, with fierce and sustained opposition from the filthy extractors and the deadly destroyers no doubt, to ban polluting activities altogether, to prioritize wind and solar energy, or to create tougher regulations, but the fundamentalists prevailed, inventing a whole range of new categories and rules, and—presto—carbon is suddenly a part of the “natural” logic of the market, which is nothing more than a newfangled casino with poison as its currency.
The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) recently adopted Pay for Success, a program funded with so-called social impact bonds, a partnership between investors and corporate philanthropies designed as a profit-making venture in the public sector. Pay for Success was used in Utah to prevent 99 percent of children supposedly headed for special education from actually being identified for those programs, and paid the giant Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs and other investors for each child not placed in special education. When the first cohort of students under the program enters kindergarten, CPS will begin paying lenders for each fewer child assigned to special education when compared to a control group—Goldman Sachs will receive more than $9,000 every year for each identified child who does not receive special education. What evil genius thought that up?
Michigan governor Rick Snyder took office in 2011 vowing to run the state like a business. Snyder had amassed a fortune as a venture capitalist, and he pledged to deploy his super-slick business skills and experiences as governor. He moved quickly to cut business taxes as well as taxes on the rich, and he aggressively pushed and passed anti-union legislation. He also signed a controversial bill into law that allowed the state to install powerful emergency managers in municipalities in order to take control of all local financial matters, supposedly in the interest of curbing spending and balancing budgets. Today more than half of Michigan’s Black population lives in cities where the local government—appointed not elected—is being run like a business.
The results are in, notably in Flint where the unelected manager chose to switch the source of municipal water from the Detroit River to the toxic Flint River, saving money but at the same time poisoning the residents. Capitalism at work! Thousands of children suffered elevated lead levels, and the health impacts on the entire population have been catastrophic as well, but that’s capitalism. It’s worth noting that the determined and sustained activism of the people of Flint themselves in the face of official denial and cover-up has been exemplary—without action from below the pain and suffering would have remained local and hidden, and no remedies would be in sight. In the face of escalating lawsuits and demands for accountability, Snyder appropriated a million dollars of state money for his own legal fees.
But now we see clearly that everything is quantified and everything has its price under capitalism. Everything can be bought and sold; everything is reduced to a cash nexus. Birthing a child, cancer treatments, childhood vaccinations, clean water—everything is monetized. We’re encouraged to know the price of everything but the value of nothing. We’re instructed to think of health, for example, not as a human right or a common good, but as an industry—the health care industry. Similarly it becomes less and less jarring to hear talk of the housing market (as opposed to housing), the food industry (not food as an obvious universal need), and the public safety and education markets. The water bazaar is well under way; still to come: the air exchange. This is the way it is, but this is not the way it has to be—not at all.
***
Labor, of course, is a source of pride and satisfaction as well as the root of all social wealth, an honorable and ethical activity when it helps workers and the wider community. Human beings from the start long for work that is real. But when labor is alienated, when the worker is estranged from the created product or service, when work exploits, oppresses, harms, destroys, kills, and degrades people or our shared world, it becomes corrupted. In a predatory system the noble nature of labor is amended, and work becomes a necessary evil. When work is recast as a bummer involving only the sacrifice of leisure and comfort, the worker becomes more resistant to labor. But because work is necessary, the worker fights to maximize wages and compensation.
The boss faces the same conflict and contradiction in that little con game, but from the other side: the owner of the means of production has in mind an ideal end point of limitless production, expansion, and profit without workers constantly demanding things like food and rest and shelter. To the owner, labor is nothing but a cost of production, and so the boss fights relentlessly to reduce that cost in every imaginable way—dividing labor into smaller and smaller unskilled bits, plundering resources and human bodies, promoting white and male supremacy, speeding up production lines, introducing automation and implementing technological advances, suppressing wages by destroying trade unions and work rules, shuttering whole industries and relocating to impoverished nations where labor is cheap and regulations nonexistent, trafficking in human beings as semi-slaves, and even exploiting the labor of children. The boss dreams and schemes to eliminate workers altogether while maximizing and expanding wealth.
There is little or no consideration for the greater good in this approach beyond a kind of orthodoxy that the market is natural, inevitable, and entirely wise—and that it exists, therefore, automatically for the greater good. This is entirely fact-free and faith-based dogma, but it’s trotted out on every occasion to dress up in colorful clothing the relentless drive for cheap resources and cheap labor, maximum profit and minimum cost. Automobiles and oil and highways are made to seem normal and rational as the chief means of moving from place to place—without any alternative whatsoever. But if the opening question were a consideration of the best types of transportation, various forms that fit the needs of people and do minimum harm to the earth, an imaginative world opens up, and we begin to see lots and lots of alternatives. Technological innovations would be worthy, then—redirected away from producing superprofits for a few and superexploited labor for the many, and toward meeting people’s needs while eliminating exploitation and galloping consumerism altogether.
A modest use of resources is preferable to an excessive use since resources are everywhere limited, and as E. F. Schumacher, the British economist, argues in his classic little book Small Is Beautiful, “People who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.”1 We might advocate, then, never taking a ride—even on public transportation—if one can walk or ride a bike instead. We are now explicitly speaking in a different register: values, ethics, politics, human purposes, and real choice.
Activists in Detroit today are engaged in an ongoing effort to “reimagine, reculture, and rebuild” our dying cities. They are promoting a revolution in values and a reformation on the ground: urban farming, cooperative bakeries, housing rehabilitation, alternative people-centered transportation (in the Motor City!), collective art projects, occupying and taking over schools and health clinics in order to serve the people. Their slogans are intentionally provocative: “Detroit: City of Hope,” “Detroit Is All of Us,” “Detroit Is the Future.” They are signaling that the crisis of capitalist deindustrialization is not unique to Detroit, and that when we work toward solutions we should reject the path of investments in casinos or prisons in favor of deeper and more humane transformations that can only be found when we mobilize people power.
***
Thinking in radically different ways about work and want, productivity and human need creates a sturdier ground from which to challenge all manner of conventional thinking: government is broke; we can’t as a society create public work projects or build a free universal health care system or guarantee incomes for older people; because people have been living lavishly and beyond their means for decades, workers must labor much longer and retire with much less; policies that help wealthy people get richer will have a “trickle-down” benefit that will magically make all the rest of us better off; heavily taxing the rich is both unfair and suppresses economic growth; the “invisible hand of the market” is the secret sauce that brings prosperity and happiness to all; and what’s good for Wall Street is good for America. All of this accepted wisdom is just a collection of clichés—nothing more than gobbledygook and pure bullshit.
Take the question of support for older people. Cuts in benefits to the elderly—disguised as increases in minimum retirement ages, or the ages at which full pension or retirement benefits can be realized—are idiotic on their own terms. They’re based on a popularly promoted bit of common sense: we are living longer, there are fewer workers to support the elderly, and we must therefore work longer and get less. This perversely powerful logic is completely erroneous.
It turns out upon closer examination that “we” are not actually living longer: wealthy people are living longer; nonwealthy people, not so much. It’s been widely reported that middle-aged white men are now dying in unprecedented numbers from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses—another signal of a social system on the edge. “Raising the retirement age cuts benefits for those who can’t wait to retire and who often won’t live long,” James K. Galbraith argues. “Meanwhile, richer people with soft jobs work on.” Furthermore, a lot of workers retire because they can’t find jobs: “Extending the retirement age for them just means a longer job search, a futile waste of time and effort.”2
Frankly we don’t need another factory or workplace staffed by old folks to make another line of widgets, nor do we need more workers to produce the goods we actually consume. We certainly don’t need more casinos and more prisons—well, the powerful may in order to crush and control, but we, the people, do not—or more war spending as the last and most desperate attempt at a massive jobs program. One of the truly profound problems we face is finding a way to separate “jobs” from meaningful, useful, and fulfilling work for all—work that promotes the common good and the welfare of the community, work that enhances the human sense of purpose and productivity.
Work is surely a source of satisfaction—it allows us to take care of ourselves and our families, for starters. But work can also promote feelings of pride and purpose at a sheet of metal cut properly or a difficult weld executed correctly or a deadline met or a problem solved creatively in a coordinated team effort—even though the fruits of our labor, the profit, is typically taken, alienating us from our work in some fundamental sense. And there’s a lot of important work to be done—taking care of the very young and the disabled and the elderly, fixing the roads and the bridges and the water systems, improving housing, growing healthy food, reinventing transport—but these things don’t always translate neatly or easily into the profit-oriented “jobs economy,” and that’s the problem of labor in ethical terms. We all need work; we all want to find meaning and happiness in our labor. Some work can give us great satisfaction but does not provide a proper income, while some jobs can offer us a wage—drone operator, prison guard, sniper—but cross a line into a shameful territory where pride becomes perverse.
***
The primary and essential labor of human beings is what Ai-jen Poo and the courageous women who organize as Domestic Workers United call “the work of caring and helping.” Poo and her colleagues organize a workforce that is largely immigrant women of color, mostly marginalized and superexploited, and they realize that class identity is fundamentally formed in solidarity and struggle—it’s not automatic. They rethink labor, invoking images of mothering and parenting, teaching and caregiving, gardening and repairing. They imagine radically different relationships and argue that the real business of people and the real work of the world is not building “the economy” but is, in fact, building one another as living human beings of mutual creation. At the same time, these sisters want to be treated fairly as workers with adequate compensation, good benefits, and basic rights.
There are many other vivid examples and models of human cooperation, union and community building, and the co-creation of one another and our shared world. In the Basque Country of Spain, worker-owned and -managed enterprises have multiplied over decades as workers have come together in the spirit of economic democracy and justice to build viable alternatives to corporate power and predation. The co-op movement in general, and the associations under the umbrella called Mondragon in particular, call explicitly for the construction of a freer, fairer, and more caring Basque society through economic and social reconstruction. The organization rests on principles of sufficient and fair pay, basic equality of worker-members—“their rights to be, possess, and know”—transparency, enduring universal education, full participation of all in the democratic process and the sovereignty of an elected General Assembly.
Immigrant women created a women-owned, eco-friendly house-cleaning business in Brooklyn, New York—Si Se Puede! Women’s Cooperative provides social supports and educational opportunities for its members and creates living-wage jobs that are performed in safe and healthy environments. In the Bronx the Cooperative Home Care Associates, a worker-owned home care agency, offers quality home care to clients and decent jobs for direct-care workers. Started with twelve home health aides in 1995 it now employs more than twenty-five hundred people and delivers free training for six hundred low-income and unemployed women annually.
When workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago noticed large pieces of equipment being removed from the Goose Island warehouse in 2008, they suspected that a closing was imminent; when they learned that the owners had purchased Echo Windows and Doors, a nonunion shop in Red Oak, Iowa, the writing was on the wall. Maintenance worker and local president Armando Robles and his team began mapping contingencies, and when the bosses announced that operations would cease, 260 workers would be laid off without receiving accrued sick or vacation days, and their health insurance would be immediately terminated, 200 workers took control of the plant, moved in, and barricaded the place. Progressive churches, communities, and other unions mobilized in support, and within a week the workers had won their demands for fair compensation and continued health coverage.
That’s just the start of the story, according to James Thindwa, a dazzling and effective community organizer and strategist in Chicago via Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Miami University who was active throughout. Thindwa’s family had taken part in Rhodesia’s fight against British colonial rule, and as a youngster he had absorbed a profound lesson about the power of organized labor and mass protest: “Unions to us, growing up, performed more functions than just negotiating for better wages for workers. They really were seen . . . as a legitimate vehicle for transforming society.” As the workers at Republic learned the same lesson, Thindwa told me that the takeover demonstrated concretely where real power and wisdom resides, and before long the workers decided to manage their own collective destiny as owner-operators at Republic. “That’s a vital model for others to learn from,” he said.
***
People are fighting back in every corner and from every vantage point: Occupy Wall Street! Occupy the Farm! Occupy the Hood! Occupy the Pentagon! Seize the State House! Occupy Hong Kong and Istanbul! On and on and on: occupy the schools and the community health clinics, occupy the media and your imagination, occupy as metaphor—a free space where every grievance is welcome and every hope is grounded and embodied. Of course, Occupy Wall Street did not end the predatory financial system, overthrow zombie capitalism, or smash the state, but those are pretty high bars, and only a cynic would cite those as movement failures. Occupy did accomplish a significant reframing of the national conversation about income inequality, poverty, and exploitation; it introduced the wildly imaginative metaphor of the 1 percent and the 99 percent; it made the taxes paid by the wealthy an object of scrutiny and critique. Before Occupy happened, all of that was dreamy and impossible; after it happened it looked as if it had been inevitable all along.
In 2015, young Black people dramatically reframed the serial killing of Black youth, naming, documenting, exposing, and challenging state violence: the visible and undeniable militarized police occupation of Black communities, the impunity with which police murder Black young (and not so young) people, and the institutionalized white supremacy embodied in the carceral police state. Black Lives Matter exploded into public consciousness as a radical, national social movement. Again, cynics may say that the movement hasn’t obliterated the racist system—true—but it has indeed upended the consciousness of millions, changed the frame on the role of the police in a democracy, for example, the place of prisons, what Black liberation could and should look like, and the kind of society we need to build if we are to gain a humane future.
Who knows where the next explosion of resistance will burst forth, and who can say how far it will take us toward liberation? Contradictions between the workers and the bosses, the haves and the have-nots, the 1 percent and the 99 percent, are intensifying daily, and our worldwide interconnectedness is more tangled, complex, durable, and fragile day by day. Who can predict with any certainty which specific spark of the millions relentlessly flaring up and dying down will ignite a global uprising? A land seizure by First Nations people in California or by peasants and farmers in India; a walkout by factory workers in China; a village takeover in Mexico or the capture of a manufacturing plant in Brazil; a mobilization of the homeless in Detroit or New Orleans to control and rebuild sections of their abandoned cities or of youth in Cleveland and Oakland to disarm the cops; a mass jailbreak with community support and coordination or the transformation of a corporation into a worker-owned co-op— each of these and more is already happening; each carries the potential to bring down the old and usher in the new. A single spark can start a prairie fire.
***
Of course we live in the era of late global capitalism, and the ways in which production is organized and developed impacts our values and attitudes and perceptions—indeed, not only our way of life but our whole conception of reality and possibility. When James Carville, candidate Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, rallied and focused his troops with his now-famous reminder, “It’s the economy, stupid!” he was echoing a view that is widely shared today: Materialism—the forces and relations of production, owned, organized, and managed by the rich and powerful—is the driving force of human history.
In perhaps the most elegant and extravagant praise-song ever written about capitalism—exceeding in both style and rapture anything from the pen of Ayn Rand or the mouths of Alan Greenspan or Donald Trump—one of capitalism’s greatest admirers claims that in scarcely a hundred years, capitalists “created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjugation of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways . . . clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground.” Capitalism’s actions and activities are awe-inspiring and breathtaking to behold: “It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.” This is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at their exuberant best.
It’s often assumed that the Communist Manifesto, first issued in 1848, is a diatribe against capitalism, or a handbook for taking power and installing a communist dictatorship, but it’s not true. The Manifesto identifies capitalism as a historic artifact to be examined and understood, something that was born in certain conditions, is driven by certain laws, and will, like everything else, one day die—this is in the first place a brief explanation of the materialist conception of history, or the ways in which the organization of production drives human affairs: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
But the major contribution of the little book surprises many people who actually take the time to read it: Marx and Engels practically swoon at capitalism’s protean nature, its inherent and permanent revolutionary character, and its unprecedented accomplishments: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society,” they rejoice. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all which is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Capitalism is the most dynamic economic system ever known, a giant swirling vortex sweeping aside all in its path in its incessant drive for profit and new production, and Marx and Engels are swept away as well.
Their admiration for capitalism extends to its scope and range, its world horizon and its cosmopolitanism. The industrial revolution broke open and overwhelmed all existing borders, and the constant quest for raw materials, cheap labor, and new markets “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.” Here they anticipate globalization, a buzzword of contemporary life: “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in the material, so also in the intellectual/spiritual production. . . . National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.” We might say a global culture, in every sphere. The achievement of a world horizon was a wonder and the foundation for imagining and then creating a future society.
Their awe and admiration do not, however, blunt the searing condemnation of capitalist exploitation and immiseration or their withering critique of its injustices, built-in oppressiveness, and incorrigible avariciousness. Their most intense and insightful indictment is reserved for what capitalism does to our humanity, the fundamental degradation and perversion of our humanness. Capitalism reduces people to objects, things to be used, numbered, labeled, conscripted, and coordinated; it brings to prominence our basest qualities, greed and fear, and necessarily forces people to subordinate and suppress our natural sense of cooperation and kinship in order to survive in a cold, harsh world. Capitalism “has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’”; it has essentially reduced every norm of freedom “into that single, unconscionable freedom—free trade.” “Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things,” they write. “It has therefore robbed the whole world, human as well as natural, of its own values. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and being. This alien essence dominates him and he adores it.”
***
What kinds of people do we want to become? Can we imagine advancing beyond the predatory phase in human affairs, envisioning a place of more, not less, participatory democracy, more, not less, economic justice, more respect for civil liberties and more tolerance for private lives, more public culture and more joyous shared space, more peace and dialogue and disarmament and camaraderie and fellowship and sisterhood and solidarity and reconciliation? Can we find avenues to participate now in efforts to create and support worker-owned enterprises, cooperatives, collectives, and unions through negotiation where possible and occupations, seizures, and takeovers where necessary? Can we mobilize a messy, raucous, and lengthy community meeting where everyone learns to make something (vegetable stir-fry, tortillas, lentil soup, pasta salad) from scratch, avoids looking at a clock or a screen, and considers how much stuff is too much stuff?
Imagine the burden and the satisfaction of engaging in whatever we collectively deem to be the common good; imagine focusing our attention and weighing in about issues that often seem distant or obscure or somehow best handled by the experts: food production and distribution, child and elder care, education, housing, justice, community health, infrastructure development, neighborhood gardens and parks and murals. Imagine what it would mean to have voluntary and universal community service, say at eighteen, everyone choosing to devote a year of service in one of ten areas determined of, by, and for the people—we’d likely have more powerful investments and opinions and political priorities about who we are and what we want to become. And then imagine keeping it growing: a year of voluntary service at twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-eight, and fifty-eight. We’d all be better for it, and it might help us collectively create a vibrant, robust, and authentically participatory democracy.
What does it mean to be human today?
How shall we live?
Imagining the future society we would like for future generations, we unleash our spiritual and social imaginations. We think of children and grandchildren, and of grandchildren’s grandchildren precisely because a co-invented and dramatically extended family, at its evolving best, can be a small-scale model of a mini-society driven by norms of equality and reciprocity, a sense of shared community in which people care about and for one another, mutual respect, recognition of differences including distinct capacities and interests and needs, shared wealth, attempts to account for and correct all chance/accidental disadvantages, and so on—from each according to what he or she is capable of, and to each according to need.
There it is, the wild but in some sense the universal “family”: imperfect to be sure, a little off-kilter and slightly dysfunctional by definition, and yet at its best a model of everyday anarchy and commonsense socialism.