Tue, 2 Jun 1998 11:27:38 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 11:27:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Franklin Wayne Poley Subject: Re: COMBINING PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITIES AND HELP FOR WELFARE RECIPIENTS WITH THE FALSE CREEK HOUSING PROJECT. To: Paul Riess publabor@relay.doit.wisc.edu, labor-l@yorku.ca, labor-rap@csf.colorado.edu, united@cougar.com, union-d@wolfnet.com, labmovs@sheffield.ac.uk In-Reply-To: <199806012154.RAA01585@ns.itn.cl> On Mon, 1 Jun 1998, Paul Riess wrote: >> To Franklin >> I am citing your latest posting on False Creek: > False Creek may have no industry built in other than the usual (e.g. a > neighbourhood clinic given that out of 5,000 typical Canadians there are on > average 10 MD's and 25 nurses). But it can still function very well as a > planning centre of future villages which meet all of these ailments as long > as it simply sees how a "critical mass" can provide the greater remedy. >> If this is what you really expect, it is completely realistic and in my >> opinion you even underestimate the possibilities offered. Under such >> conditions you will certainly have no objections to put my own >> proposals up for discussion in the workfare and the laborforum groups. The "critical mass" can be one large city. AFL-CIO has a "Labor Cities" policy. They want to influence the political systems of as many cities as possible to be pro-union. How far could one go with that? What if a city became all unionized? What if the workers also owned all industries? Mondragon is one model. It has 30,000 worker-owners so counting dependents we must be looking at close to 100,000 people. But you can take a Directory out of the library to show you that there are many large >50% worker-owned companies in the US. With Canada-USA increasing by 2-3,000,000/year AFL-CIO could plan a city for 1,000,000 built from scratch. Who could design the worker-owned conglomerate company for it? Any business administration department at a major university. But I see the neighbourhood/village as the social-political-economic unit. And the village must have the constitution firmly in mind. In other words given that this system works for people what makes it work? Can we come up with 5,000 people at False Creek who can spell out the big picture of an economy which is "by the people, for the people"? Currently NAFTA/GATT/MAI/APEC etc. are rich mens' clubs. They are not by the people, for the people. Let me repeat what I have said about the larger unit which is an integration of model villages. It must meet these criteria: full and fair employment; an end to absolute poverty; economic self-sufficiency so as to be immune to the predations of those rich mens' clubs. All three criteria are attainable. There's nothing 'utopian' about this. It is only good sound social science. Full and fair employment is attained by having the employable unemployed share the work as well as the profits and acknowledging that poorer people deserve as much of a choice in jobs as richer people. They too should have jobs in the conglomerate which are in accordance with their aptitudes-interests-education and so on. As long as the sharing is fair and productivity is as high as it should be in this era of technology marvels there will be no absolute poverty. Economic self-sufficiency is attained by working "what you grow and what you mine" through to finished goods and services to meet the criteria for the lifestyle sought. Livestock and seeds and mineral concentrates are obtained very cheaply. Ask those business administration departments what kind of conglomerate it will take to refashion them into cars, housing units, TV sets etc. How large a population? That is the size of your "Union City". It produces first to meet its own needs, ie local markets. Then it can export the surplus. FWP. *** False Creek Model Village in Vancouver. Join the discussion of an exciting Millenium Project:http://www.onelist.com/subscribe.cgi/falsecreek to subscribe to list; http://www.vcn.bc.ca/fc for backgrounder. ***