For me what it really comes down to is that an emerging social and eco- orientated conscience with a willingness to work towards those ends which are of most benefit to humans living in modified landscapes alongside what might be defined as natural landscapes is that the old model of commercial/charity being the only way to approach a problem just isn't cutting it anymore and we shouldn't have to make that paradigm fit us as we design approaches to the re-vitalisation of our place on this earth.
It stands to reason, but a reason yet to be clarified, that it would be advantageous if we accepted a model whereby we all need to work to live, and therefore some sort of recompense was required but at the same time accept that that work can be of benefit to more than just ourselves and so in line with what might now be called a charitable contribution.
This might be what is termed post-capitalism, which might be almost the same as capitalism except the impetus and drive isn't to advance the individual in terms of material consequence but is a retention of the system of barter being afforded efficiencies using a monetary basis for exchange alongside and serving, as it were, a collective orientation towards the greater good.
Long ago I realised that an efficient process would do itself out of it's job, which is to say that anything started and taken to fruition would get to a stage where it became self perpetuating and didn't require human labour anywhere near the extent that it did at it's beginning but the biggest problem with this within a capitalist system is that there is an inbuilt tendency for this not to happen simply because it would no longer yield profit and so the initial investment of time, labour and capital would be lost.
The automobile industry is just one of many that illustrates this well in that it is well within our abilities as an industrialized economy to create vehicles which could easily last for decades upon decades with an absolute minimum of re-investment but we don't do that. What we do do and it's is hugely wasteful is to keep creating new vehicles year after year which degrade not mechanically at all, or at least not significantly, but that they degrade mostly in style as they are almost exclusively a fashion accessory and that this has almost become the paramount requirement to ensure full employment of the vested interests which have aligned themselves within that industry.
And it's completely stupid.
A comparison would be to look at the efficiency of growing vegetables and fruit trees on an average 1/4 acre block, because we all somewhat understand this process within our own little kingdoms, but imagine if every year we had to sell off more and more of that efficiency simply because wheelbarrows were badly made and it became our prerogative to keep changing the colour each season to the extent that the changing of the colours became paramount and the simple fact they were badly made had little consequence?
But now I must cede back into my original discussion and give up this easily embraced criticism of what things are like now because that's one of our big problems too. This inclination we all share to spend far too much time hauling the present system over the coals and not actually spending time, if any, in creating solutions. And that's why we need to work towards redefining the commercial/charitable paradox because we need people to be able to earn a living but also work towards redefining the possibilities of new ways of doing things.
The present system is unfair in the sense that people without backing can't afford to be as charitable as they might wish they could be and in that regard charity is the playground of the affluent.
But again I diverge towards criticism of things as they are... so simple!
One thing I have noticed over the past few years is one that effects the market economy, and I don't mean markets of the type that Merrill Lynch etc plays in but the type we see forming in carparks on weekends with a bent towards the craft market alike Titirangi and Coatesville which occur once a month. At once quite quaint and somewhat nostalgic they also often sit, the marketeers, on economic realities not visited upon the mass of economic activity to the extent that within what we might call the first world these people are almost having to exist in a third world. Case in point is that those who effectively engineer a product from nothing, or at least a cheap and available resource, must basically get in and make their money both to recoupe their investment and provide a living without protection from others who might recognise the validity of their works and the efficiencies they have created and just basically steal all the hard word they have done creating a market share for their product.
Yet the types of efficiencies these people create is what we actually need. This kind of seedbed architecture of how things might be is left on the forest floor of economic development to make it's own way and while on a personal level this is quite a good thing, as it makes the individual canny and aware (given they even make it through), such strengths are missing and decidely under-developed in the group sense and this is what we really do need if we are to cede into a post-capitalist system.
In short instead of seeing wealth creation as the end product of efficiencies we have to see, and embrace, wealth creation at the beginning of production.
And that which is our stream of waste is the most likely candidate to enact the groundwork required to create a feasible system where people are allowed access to that stream of waste and in a way that encourages both a growing and expanding view of that use whilst also ensuring these experimenters and possibility makers have a reliable source of income which doesn't require them to protect and lock out others from utilizing and making even more efficient the use of resource they have created.
Then what needs careful consideration is that once a resource becomes valuable within our current system the likelihood is that the suppliers of said resource, which started as rubbish, becomes part of regular economic activity and subject to increasing costs which then basically renders it rubbish again because the people who are able to utilise it when it was cheap cannot afford it any longer and this kind of irony, in the capitalist system is actually the most in need of re-aligning towards a sense of what charity is and can be as the future finds us acknowledging who and what we are as social creatures beyond economic slaves and masters.
Part three; How it happens at the Waitakere Transfer Station... or maybe even where I actually live, Manukau, simply because the vested interests at Waitakere cannot give up their individually lucrative stranglehold on selling dreams to the next generation.
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