Article IV
Regarding Exploitation Of, and Injury To, the Worker-Consumer Class by the Owner-Shareholder Class, and the Necessity of Worker or Common Ownership of Production
Problems To Solve
The amplification of destructive production and consumption that benefits the ruling class (owner-shareholders) while increasing burdens and injuries for the non-ruling classes (worker-consumers):
- Exploitation of natural resources and labor, often at the expense of the well-being of workers, local communities and surrounding ecosystems
- Socialization of business risk and public funding for research and development of profit-making innovations
- Rewarding pathological behavior (i.e. “business as usual”) and divorcing business ethics from prosocial norms
- Privatization of public goods
- Engineering artificial demand through marketing and advertising, as complemented by concurrently engineered scarcity
Pervasive, devastating and self-amplifying injury to all human beings, and most acutely the non-ruling (worker-consumer) classes:
- Toddlerization and infantilization of consumers - creating excessively dependent consumers who cannot care for themselves and externalize all problems and solutions, then become habituated to chronic consumption and commercialized addictions around those commodities
- Accelerating changes in technology and a forceful expectation for everyone to adapt to them immediately
- Enticement and reward for operating at the lowest common denominators of moral function (animalism)
- Ever-expanding marginalization, disenfranchisement, criminalization and incarceration of anyone who challenges the capitalistic status quo, or who can’t (or won’t) operate within it
- Snowballing physical and psychological diseases and dysfunction directly attributable to commercialized programming of diets, stress and conspicuous consumption
Increasingly global homogenization of human culture, caused by:
- Greater economies of scale through monopolization and mass production
- Lowest-common-denominator marketing appeals
- Allure of U.S.-style consumerism and its inherent “newer-is-better” frenetic meme
- Technological standardization and proliferation
Design Principles Applied to Create More Distributed & Diffused Wealth & Power
- Disrupt “business as usual” & pro-capitalist PR campaigns
- Eliminate corporate personhood & right to free speech via Constitutional Amendment
- Institute greater direct democracy at all levels of government
- Create citizens councils via civic lottery
- Migrate away from shareholder ownership of production to common and worker ownership
- Eliminate corporate monopolies
- Create new community-centric schema & structures for enterprise
- Create non-profit infrastructure & essential services sector of competing enterprises & social credits system (i.e. a Universal Social Backbone)
- Enlist the wealthiest elite as change agents
- Migrate away from private ownership towards common ownership (i.e. a Level 7 property position)
Design Principles Applied
- Civic Engagement at the Community Level
- Expanded Direct Democracy in All Levels of Government
- Commons-Centric Production and Worker-Ownership
- Collective Orientation to Freedom & Civic Responsibility (Integral Liberty)
- Minarchy, Subsidiarity and Polycentric Governance
- Egalitarian Efficiency & Diffusion
- Sustainable Design
- Critically Reflective Participatory Action
- Revolutionary Integrity
- Ending the Tyrannies of Monopoly and Private Ownership
- Change in Property Orientation and Valuation
- Self-Nourishment and Moral Evolution
- Precautionary Principle & Pilot Principle