A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
(Full Story)
Search This Blog
Back to 500BC.
==========================
Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Thursday, June 22, 2017
Rural Poverty? Cooperatives!
Humanity
has had and has big projects. Mastery of nature is one, still going on.
Middle range phenomena have been mastered, but not the micro level of
viri–HIV is a current case–nor the macro level of climate–to the
contrary, humanity is making it worse.
Another huge project can be called Material-somatic comfort, including
health. Well-ness not ill-ness. Amazingly successful, look at an average
day in what can be called the bourgeois way of life. As is well known,
this second project may contradict the first project.
Other huge projects stand in line, calling on our attention.
Spiritual-mental comfort, also called happiness, well-being, is one, not
to be to be confused with indicators of material-somatic comfort
assuming that one automatically translates into the other.
Peace, both as absence of violence and as positive peace, being good to
each other, is another. Between persons called friendship, love;
problematic. Between nations, states, civilizations, regions very
problematic. One reason: we may not have wanted it enough, too low
priority relative to the others. And that also applies to:
Equality, both by lifting the bottom up meeting their needs and reducing
gaps between high and low. There are those who get material and
spiritual comfort from war and inequality like the present
Trump-generals-billionaires regime in the USA; fascist with a strong and
belligerent state and super-capitalist in its economy. With none of the
socialist elements in Hitler’s nazism and Mussolini’s fascism. (*)
Inequality and violence, urban vs rural, hit those who produce and
deliver food for all of us; one reason being urban fear of a delivery
strike. China experiments with radical elimination of the urban-rural
difference by moving industries to villages run by
agricultural-industrial cooperatives, most or many working in both.
Interesting, but let us look at cooperatives to master rural poverty.
Cooperatives as opposed to farms. Farms are companies with CEOs, farmers
owning the land and family members and others tiling the soil. The
risks are many: unmastered nature, conjunctures, food imports; the farms
become indebted-impoverished, farmers starving, suicide.
The primary purpose of rural cooperatives is to feed themselves by
sharing risks, and share gains on top of that. Members are both farmers
and farm workers with risk-absorbing capacity and sharing. Poor and
unemployed from towns and cities may join, at least getting food in
exchange for work. There may be mental aspects: old, lonely farmer
couples wanting vacationing students as company, they also sustaining
themselves. The old farm = company is not good enough. Nor is capital
buying all the land for single crop automated farming at the expense of
both human and nature’s needs.
Rural cooperatives for rural uplift, Gandhi’s sarvodaya with villages as
a productive units, means exactly that. Although this could go beyond
Gandhi and be much more diverse, adjusted to local contexts.
Spain offers a fascinating example. Travel from Sevilla toward
Cartagena, white, poor villages with farmers tilling small plots, the
land often owned by absent land-owners, some unused, massive misery. And
then suddenly Marinaleda, a commune that became a rural cooperative by
getting help from the region expropriating the land-owners, the
population being paid according to the work input, run by general
assemblies and setting aside funds for kindergarten-schools-health
services, all free. The mayor is the highly entrepreneurial Juan Manuel
Sánchez Gordillo. Lad-owners all over Spain will do their best to
prevent a repeat, but Gordillo has shown how it can be done. It will
happen again.
A “modern” company offers low price-low quality products, pays workers
and managers a minimum, the CEO a maximum for handing over the net
profit to the board. In a cooperative, they are at the same level
rotating among functions. Basic input work, not capital.
They are dramatically different. The jump is dramatic. Could it be more gradual, are there in-betweens?
Starting with customers-clients: “modern” business spies on them, gets
their “profiles” from IT data for “matching” products. The method is
that of dictatorships. In cooperatives, a producer-consumer dialogue
between equals about products–like better cars, computers–is easy,
developing products together. The method is that of democracy.
Take advertising in the media, with no chance for consumers to rebut,
criticizing products. Dictators get some feedback, but the media treat
ads as gospel truths for fear of losing advertisers. We need a culture
of open product discussion and producers may find that this also serves
their interests, not only those of consumers.
But companies could do better. “Marketing research” uses questionnaires and interviews, they could easily include dialogues.
Take the whole exploitation aspect, squeezing downward. Companies are
now gradually accepting listing “negative side-effects”, especially for
medicines. One day also for cars and computers and the rest.
Take the penetration of the human mind by what we often call
“commercialization”, buying and selling, with few or no questions asked.
And look at the list of Big Projects and bring them in–does this
buying-and-selling serve peace? Equality? Have a look at the price of
the final product and break it down into what is paid for resources,
capital, labor and profit. Customers have a right to know.
Take the segmentation of workers and of customers; trade unions and
customers associations have brought them together. Good and decent
companies would celebrate not fight, not marginalize them from
decision-making but would include them as cooperatives do, by
definition.
Treat the countryside badly, you get revenge: “Why Rural America Voted
for Trump” (Robert Leonard, NYT 5 Jan 2017). Treat it well, let it have
its own life, integrate rural and urban, and get a good country.
NOTE:
(*) “Half of the World’s Wealth in the Hands of Just Eight Men” (Inter
Press Service 16 Jan 2017). “Obscene”, pathological. Who are they? Bill
Gates (Microsoft), Amancio Ortega (Zara), Warren Buffet (Hathaway),
Carlos Slim (Carso), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook),
Larry Elison (Oracle), Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg). Six Americans, one
Spaniard, one Mexican. Let Trump isolate America. America or the
California-Canada-China-Mexico alliance gets the upper hand.
www.transcend.org