This blog is my political activity. I am making it because I don't want to feel helpless and overpowered, and because I don't just want to sit on the sidelines and watch others work. Its title was discovered by a chance operation in John Cage's text composition How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). What is the title's meaning? Stop putting off political activity, it should happen in the present, not only the future. What is another meaning? I believe the best politics is impure politics, inclusive politics, synthetic politics, pragmatic politics, not-only politics, and the more we move toward not-only politics, the brighter our prospects for the future, hence "not-only": The Future! If you read other meanings in my title, they are legitmately there; that is the beauty of chance operations.
I've put together a list of topics that I feel are the most important for me politically. They are the following:
Anarchism: I believe with Henry David Thoreau that "That government is best which governs not at all, and when people are ready for it, that is the government they will have." My understanding of "anarchism" is as a striving towards a balancing of relations of power; moving towards a society not defined by anyone having power over anyone else.
Abolition of Money: Money is at best a provisional idea; at worst it is a genuine evil which reinforces and unbalances power relations, rather than helping us balance them. How do we move beyond money?
(those are ideals, those things to which we aspire, visions of the future. but this blog is not only the future. the following topics are more practical and present)
Get rid of corporate personhood. Especially since the Citizens United decision, the notion that corporations are legally "persons," a bad idea to begin with has become yet more toxic. Again the problem is that making corporations persons both significantly unbalances power, and reinforces that unbalance. Corporate personhood must be abolished in order for real democracy (not corporocracy) to prevail.
Get rid of the two party system. More voices need to be heard, one, and it needs to be more difficult for the wealthy and powerful to exercise their influences on our representatives. Making candidacy more wide-openly available accomplishes both.
Re-establish and re-invigorate the labor movement. Vigorous and powerful unions, and a broadly understood sense of their importance, are crucial to democracy and to real prosperity. For the same reasons that we value checks and balances in our political system, we must maintain economic checks and balances as well.
(and those are the nitty gritty real world topics. finally, a broad, thesis-style statement of purpose type topic)
We want a society in which all are physically safe, economically secure, properly nourished and adequately sheltered, with access to equal educational opportunities and health care; and in which freedom of expression and assembly and the right to privacy are understood and respected. We want the society articulated in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human rights, the document the US refused to ratify (because of the guarantees of economic rights) and which the USSR likewise refused to ratify (because of the guarantees of individual rights). The time has come for us as human beings to demand that society guarantee both, and to NEVER settle for anything less.
Thanks for reading. Let me know your thoughts. More to come.
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