Winton: And so I'm continuing on from Steven's talk this morning about
Winton: work or camantha and I just want to reinf sort of bad
Winton: re-emphasize how important this
Winton: reinterpretation of the path is, because work is such an important part of
Winton: everybody's lives. I mean, we spend
Winton: perhaps the most time as awake energetic individuals and the working day. and so is very much part of our
Winton: spiritual development and our spiritual practice.
Winton: And we all know about labour. We spoke about yesterday
Winton: what the Bible calls earning our daily bread by the sweat of our brow. and then goes on to say.
but one lives not by bread alone.
Winton: And so let's explore that proposition.
Winton: And so it's also
Winton: useful that to Stephen in the handout
Winton: has referred to Gotamas
Winton: reference to the internal self-creating activity of work.
Winton: So
Winton: He also, of course, cites Hannah Arendt
Winton: and her concept of human of us humans as Homo Faber.
Winton: the creatures that create things.
Winton: and I'm pretty sure she's she's probably onto a theme that was first brought up
Winton: by Kalmarx
Winton: in his 1844 manuscripts.
Winton: Now in Karl Marx was a young man just setting out to
Winton: overthrow all known authorities in the world, and he got into this issue of Homo Faber.
Winton: and he referred to. He referred to it in another expression of his called species being
Winton: that work meaning.
the ability to create
Winton: ability to create with tools mainly that was specific to human beings
as opposed to the rest of the animal kingdom.
Winton: And it's interesting that he explored this idea as he was scribbling away on a first draft of something.
Winton: and then he
Winton: He got caught up in other events going on in Europe. and he consigned this
Winton: these manuscripts to the attic.
Winton: as he put it, to the gnawing criticism of the rats
but, as it turned out.
Winton: the rats had few criticisms, and so, over a century later the 1844 manuscripts saw the light of day, and their publication was something of a sensation.
Winton: And
Winton: I hope I can mention the name of Karl Marx without
Winton: frightening the horses, because we we were able to talk about. Make your belly and remain calm the day before yesterday.
Winton: and,
Winton: The the reason I am fairly familiar with this stuff. Is that UN quite unbeknown to me? There was a a massive
Winton: Reclaiming and reissuing of Marx's thought.
Winton: Marx isthought in the 19 seventies, when I just happened to turn up at the London School of Economics as a graduate student and found one of my teachers was a
Winton: leader in this movement called Ralph Miliband
Winton: and the kind of Marxism that was being revived had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on in the Soviet bloc.
Winton: It was pretty clear that when Marx was invoked by Soviet authorities it was a case of misleading advertising.
Winton: because There was really nothing in Marx's writing that could
Winton: that could beautify or excuse what was happening in the Soviet bloc and further east.
Winton: So so we we all learnt about. We all read the 1844 manuscripts and other pieces of Marx's writing, and of course the great classic capital in 3 volumes, and
Winton: Ralph Miliband used to refer to him as the old boy, and there was quite a cult around the old boy.
Winton: The old boy did a lot of his research in the reading room for the British Museum in Central London, and there was quite a lot of competition
Winton: to go there and sit in Seat E. 5, which we all knew the old boy had sat in and then we.
Winton: And then, of course, we went and did homage to him in
Winton: Highgate Cemetery, in in Northern London. But the
Winton: the idea that in in his early Marx was that Human beings are
Winton: essentially creative, and
Winton: what happens when they sell their labor to an employer was that they alienate their creativity.
Winton: their work ceases to be theirs.
Winton: it ceases to be an expression of them. And therefore this is a theory of alienation. So basically, what workers did
Winton: in factories and so forth, was
a form of alienation, a form
Winton: of reduction of one's human capacities and and a
Winton: and a shrinking of the human condition. So
Winton: I'll certainly be coming back to this in relation to the work of of Martin Hegelund.
Winton: however, mentioned already in terms of secular faith. He was the secular faith author.
Winton: But I just want to talk about how
Winton: how this alienation became intensified as capitalism became more and more mechanized
Winton: and so we move swiftly forward to the late nineteenth century. to an American
Winton: engineer
Winton: called Frederick Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Winton: who wrote a book called Scientific Management.
Winton: Now Taylor
Winton: was the inventor of the assembly line, and the acme of his of his discovery was Henry Ford's assembly line
Winton: assembling T model forwards, and Taylor's idea was that you could make
Winton: and make workers much more productive
Winton: if you if you broke the
Winton: production process up
Winton: into tiny little moments. Tiny little pieces.
Winton: and each worker then took charge of one of these tiny little pieces like bolting on the rear bumper bar of a T model forward or securing the steering wheel to the steering column. So basically, workers were being
condemned
Winton: to
Winton: this kind of endlessly monotonous, tiny moments of work
Winton: bolting on the bumper bar.
Winton: bolting on the steering wheel. And that was so. Every
Winton: ounce of creativity and charm in the work was squeezed out of it and and
Winton: This system was called
Winton: Averism, and it led to another ism called Forwardism, because Ford was the classic example of how it worked, and it became a socioeconomic system in that
Winton: these workers who were treated like trained monkeys.
Winton: At least had a wage. You can't above
Winton: other workers, so that in time they could, if they were abstinious and responsible with their money they could actually buy a T model forward, and and thus they could become what became known as the literature. As instrumental workers. They, they, their working days, were spent in alienated labour.
Winton: totally charmless, and yet they apparently were satisfied with the fact that they could
Winton: acquire a certain amount of personal wealth like a motor car, and maybe even in time.
Winton: a house to live in.
Winton: So so in this way Taylorism became forwardism.
Winton: The wages that the slightly better paid workers in the car factory made created a demand
Winton: for the product.
Winton: There was a bit of money in circulation, so Henry Ford could sell his cars and so
Winton: what is important here, I think, is the way, what is the motive behind this? And it has a lot to do with the central
Winton: problem. Let Heg Loan
Winton: is raising, and which is
Winton: that is time we are mortal creatures. We measure out our lives in time. So
Winton: what was also clear about about Taylorism was that the the line kept on the assembly line kept on being speeded up.
Winton: so that so that the work become much more and more intense, and more and more things could be produced for less and less outlay in terms of workers, wages.
Winton: and Marx
Winton: when he when he when he himself
Winton: stopped focusing on the issue of alienation
Winton: and moved on to that is often that's often called the humanist Marx. He then became the political economy Marx and he was. He became less interested in that in the alienation issue. He didn't leave it behind. But he began to explain how
Winton: this business of kind of of of conceptually
Winton: covering up the time a worker spent
Winton: in terms of what part of it was necessary
Winton: for the worker to create value
Winton: that would replace.
Winton: hurdle his wages.
Winton: and any other on costs of employing him or her, and what part of the working day and the value created during that part of the working day went straight into the pocket of the capitalist
Winton: whom Marx tended to call money bags, and so the more the more
Winton: money bags could she could squeeze
Winton: the amount of necessary labour, time necessary to reproduce the worker and her or his family, etc. And
Winton: and by the same token increase the amount of surplus time
Winton: that the worker is still on the job.
That meant higher profit rate, and that's what it.
Winton: What moneybags was after, of course, was increasing the rate of profit.
Winton: And so
Winton: this, this
Winton: surplus time and those values that it created there was created during that time was called surplus value.
Winton: This is Marxian economics, 101. So what does this mean in terms of
Winton: what's what's happening today, for instance.
Winton: now now nowadays, with with neoliberalism? Of course, the picture has become slightly more complicated because
Winton: it's no longer
Winton: Moneybags, who was an industrial capitalist.
Winton: interested in making, in having things made and selling them on the market to whoever had could afford to buy them. He was not making them
Winton: to satisfy human needs. He was selling them to make money.
Winton: So this is the dissociation
Winton: From the production system, on the one hand.
Winton: from human needs on the other, which is basic to capitalism.
Winton: And this this step is often
Winton: misunderstood that that we think that what is being produced
Winton: and is turning up
Winton: in our lives as cars and air conditioners and refrigerators. Well.
Winton: it's not. It's being. It's but they are all being produced for it to be sold, not to be used
Winton: if they get used. Well, that's another story. But Moneybags isn't interested in whether they're used or not. Now, with sat neoliberalism.
industrial capitalists like
Winton: Money bags
Winton: was. It were eclipsed
Winton: by finance, capital banking.
Winton: all sorts of institutional employers and people who were who were just investors looking for to buy and sell
Winton: stock at the highest profit. So when
Winton: to to sort of. Make a long story as short as possible. When finance, capital
Winton: eclipsed industrial capital.
Winton: It imposed this new system called neoliberalism, and the point of that well, there are a number of points of it. One was globalization, which was a political project, often
Winton: sold as a natural
Winton: wonder, but it was very much a political project, so that capital could move around the world
Winton: easily if there was a better profit to be
Winton: to, you know, to be to be made in Turkey instead of instead of Britain. Then all the money went to Turkey. There was to be no barriers
Winton: to where capital could go to seek
Winton: the Heist return. So this in turn created
Winton: huge, knew
Winton: activities in finance in the finance world.
Winton: and which were absolutely unproductive.
Winton: No food or cars or clothes come out of Wall Street or out of the capital C, city of London.
or out of the European Common Central Bank.
Winton: the relationship of finance.
Winton: But the financial system to the real economy is a purely extractive one.
Winton: It's absolutely unproductive, as are the other creatures of neoliberalism like managers. Suddenly there all these managers appear. They're an invasive species in university life, and many other places where suddenly the life of teachers and academics and lots of other professions were taken up.
Winton: Filling out forms for managers, you know,
Winton: for things that were often called orders, or something like that. But, as you're probably aware, many teachers complain bitterly that so much of their time is spent
Winton: filling in forms, not teaching, not
Winton: reading, books about how to improve the syllabus, but in
Winton: in giving an account of themselves to these creatures called managers
Winton: and
Winton: So when we get back to this issue of human need.
Winton: we see that there's a huge number of people
Winton: who are taking out lots and lots of money out of the economy and and putting nothing back in return.
Winton: They're basically parasitical. So and at the same time, of course, working hours are increasing.
Winton: There's no way in which technology, which is
Winton: actually reducing the amount of necessary labour time and
Winton: reducing the socially necessary time it takes to feed and clothe and house people. While that's going on. We've got, you know, terrific technology to do that. We're all working longer and longer, and those who are working who are selling their labour.
Winton: living on salaries and wages. Their their standard, their wealth, income, and life chances are reducing at as against those who are milking the system
Winton: through the through the financial system. So what
Winton: Martin Hegelund is saying. Well, let's get back to
Winton: Marx's basic propositions
Winton: and saying, Let's imagine an economy now
Winton: which
Winton: enjoys the productivity improvements that have been created under industrial capitalism. and then think about what we, what we really need.
Winton: You know, how many new shirts do we need, and how many new cars and all the rest of it, and and think about how how much
Winton: socially necessary time
Winton: would be spent producing those things. Assuming we're all going to have to to work
Winton: to some extent to
Winton: to support ourselves, to support our
Winton: our dependence, and it put the many people in society who are not in a position
Winton: to support themselves.
Winton: So
Winton: we put all the human conditions of society there, and see how how much necessary, socially necessary
Winton: time it would take to produce what's necessary for them.
Winton: And then, if we, if we abolish this present system.
Winton: I was just thinking hypothetically, we would all have an awful lot of free time.
Winton: and that is the time we can spend meditating, reading, getting educated.
Winton: we would be. We would be enjoying what he calls ultimately spiritual freedom. no longer engaged in
Winton: alienated work, but in a position to
Winton: achieve, to pursue our human goals. Interestingly, he doesn't seem to realize this, but
Winton: John Maynard came. He just came up with the same idea.
Winton: After the Second World War.
he said.
Winton: we have mastered the arts of production. Now we should dedicate ourselves
Winton: to the arts of life.
Winton: Think I've quoted that earlier. And this is he's getting at basically basically the same idea. So
Winton: perhaps I'll just make I made some notes.
Winton: I'll just read them selectively about where Headland ends South.
Winton: He says, the first principle of his new system, which he calls democratic Socialism, and I should say that what he means by that is that
Winton: the production system
Winton: is a public affair.
Winton: Ray's publica gets back to civic republicanism.
Winton: so these, the production system is a public affair, and therefore it should be.
Winton: It should be governed by the public. and
Winton: at the, at each point of enterprise, or each factory, each place where something is being produced.
Winton: it should be the how it is run should be the business of the people working in it.
Winton: Industrial democracy, economic democracy. So the first principle of democratic Socialism is that we measure our wealth.
Winton: individual and collective, in terms of socially available free time.
Winton: So this is the number. One measure of wealth is
Winton: is, how little time we need to spend
Winton: reproducing the material preconditions of our lives, and
Winton: how much
Winton: greater is the time that we can spend in our free pursuits.
Winton: in our free time, where we are expressing
power. human, potential.
Winton: And he says that a second principle of democratic Socialism is the means of production, are collectively owned, and cannot be used for the sake of profit.
Winton: Clearly every every enterprise, every factory, every farm. needs to have an operating surplus.
Winton: There needs to be a reinvestment, a repair and
Winton: and modernization of equipment.
Winton: But that doesn't have to be profit. It can be just simply taking the operating surplus and reinvesting it straight back into
back into the
Winton: productive enterprise.
Winton: And it doesn't have to go to the Cayman Islands or any other tax haven, or to buy a house on the harbour for 75 million dollars.
Winton: It can go just straight back into into the productive enterprise or back into the pockets of the people who've actually generated the wealth. In the first place.
Winton: and then
Winton: the third principle is
Winton: from each according to her ability, to each according to her needs. Leonard equated that last night on the screen.
Winton: So that that would be the basic basic idea. and
Winton: so at at all points where decisions were being made, they would be made in in the public realm, whatever the that realm was, but's in the enterprise be those working in the enterprise.
Winton: If it's at a regional level, it be made by people in the region, if it's made by national at the national level in terms of economic policy, etc. It would be a question of a democratically elected
Winton: government
Winton: where obviously there would be quite a lot of politics going on at all levels. But that is, you know, this is who we are. We're political animals as well.
Winton: So
Winton: as he says, because we are fragile, embodied beings. We need shelter, nourishment, and health and health care not only to survive, but also to maintain our spiritual commitments.
Winton: Likewise we need tools and various forms of infrastructure to pursue our spiritual projects.
Winton: Now, what he's proposing of course, means that there would still be jobs that are necessary to be done, but they may not be done by alienated labour.
Winton: You know some people like curing other people, and to become doctors and nurses, and some people like thinking up new buildings architects. So they're expressing they're not, and that's not alienated labor. Then.
They're expressing their species being.
Winton: And so
Winton: what jobs would be left for alienated labor they put should be shared around collecting the garbage and all that sort of thing.
Winton: but clearly we would be in a much better positioned as
Winton: to make sense of our lives and to pursue our
Winton: our spiritual aspirations in such a world. And that's what Hegelons argument is. Now. He's not setting up any kind of
Winton: Utopia, and certainly marks. And if it did anything like that, he bitterly criticised.
Winton: The French Utopian Marxist, the French Utopian Socialists
Winton: for doing just that. And you know, when people talk about Marxist Socialism.
Winton: they don't know what Marx actually wrote. He he was against all those sorts of blueprints and Utopias, because
Winton: how systems change transitions. how they work.
Depends upon
Winton: what people decide at the time and the kind of institutions they've inherited.
Winton: You know, it's the beginning of
Winton: one of his famous historical essays, the eighteenth Brew, mayor of Louis Bonaparte. He says.
Winton: people make their own history.
Winton: but they do not do so as they may choose, but in accordance with inherited conditions. So how this would work out, of course, would depend upon
Winton: existing institutions existing
Winton: are desires and obviously pre-existing resistance to what's being proposed.
Winton: which at the moment is formidable. But
Winton: Anyway, it's a sort of a counterfactual to the problems of work we've been exploring, and that Anna Arrent herself was also exploring in the 19 fifties. So perhaps I should leave it there.
Winton: And People can ask questions of my comments.
Winton: Texas.
Winton: that's right. Yeah, I'm the runner. thanks, Rana.
Winton: Very interesting. Thank you. Wynton have also never really heard Buddhists speak about Marx
Winton: or someone who is interested in Marx adopt a Buddhist ethical kind of way of life. So for me, these 2 Venn diagrams coming together is a cause for joy.
Winton: One question I've had on my lips for all Marx, or people who kind of subscribe to Marx is this problem of greed
Winton: and the tragedy of Commons in particular. How does a system
Winton: that Marx would
Winton: agree with, or any kind of neo-marxist deal with the problem of me, taking more than I need because of some artificial scarcity, whether real or imagined.
Winton: Well, I would.
Winton: I would conjecture that greed originally arose. I got this idea. I must say, comes from Stephen in 2,004 that that really greed, hatred.
Winton: and delusion. I
Winton: evolutionary factors. We wouldn't.
Winton: We wouldn't have been such a successful species if we hadn't had greed, hatred, and delusion. And greed. Greed is a is a response to insecurity. It's agreed to. It's it's, you know, if if you
Winton: if you're worried about where your next meal is coming from. You're going to be greedy.
Winton: But if you're living in in a society which
Winton: is going to provide your next build. Anyway, you don't have to be anything like a greedy. You don't have to be greedy at all, and a lot of things that we are greedy about like private things that are privatized like
Winton: transport, and and you know even health to some extent, if that's all, provided you wouldn't.
Winton: you wouldn't need it, having lived in
Winton: in Sweden in the heyday of its welfare status, could see this. I mean, a whole lot of young people just didn't want to buy a car because they didn't even want to get a license
Winton: because they had a public transport system that worked.
Winton: And and you know there was a real kind of rejection of consumerism going on because
Winton: everything they really needed was going to be there anyway. A good health system, good education, free university. Why be greedy?
Winton: Because they can. Okay, sorry.
Winton: Yes, you said, why would they be greedy? And I say, because they can. You know, it's it's like everybody's bashing the system.
Winton: holding up signs. It says, Down with capitalism
Winton: when they should be holding up signs that say, down with greed.
Winton: because I don't care what system you come up with? If if there is, why don't you call it free time
Winton: free time? Okay. If you if that system were developed, you can bet that somebody will develop a market for free-time futures.
Winton: Okay, it doesn't stop, you know. It's like everybody is pointing at the wrong in the wrong direction.
Winton: and they should be pointing at developing morals, ethical standards at a much earlier age. showing showing the the effects of greed on production.
Winton: on mental health and drill it into people. It's it's like.
Winton: How do you stop greed? And it's and it's what causes all the systems to fail.
Winton: Yeah. And I think that's really an argument from human nature. And I and I
Winton: I feel extremely skeptical about any
Winton: reference back to human nature. I mean, if we were all as essentially greedy as that.
Winton: Why would there be gazillions of dollars spent on advertising to make us greedy?
Winton: I mean, why wouldn't, if if we were all greedy. We we wouldn't need an advertising system to to sell goods. We'd be scrambling after them anyway. And the point is that that advertising is simply
Winton: eggy new song is saying, you know that our lives are
Winton: incomplete without
Winton: the latest 6 cylinder, Suv, or whatever it is, it's not. And if if that idea was already in our heads. Then then the manufacturers of these things are wasting an awful lot of money on advertising.
Winton: So it is.
Winton: I mean, you've you've covered the whole of the whole world in in in in in 2 Si mean, it's so much
Winton: to talk about.
Winton: yeah,
Winton: as somebody who spent 12 years on a kibbutz. and in my younger days
Winton: I've seen firsthand how this can work
Winton: in a smaller society. Where.
Winton: even though there is specialization in work because it's efficient, you still have to sow the crops. reap them, and and make a reasonable living out of it in order to provide the education and the health care and everything, and and the social amenities that the society has.
Winton: The mundane stuff was always distributed on a on a roster basis.
Winton: so I would know that I would have my 3 months washing dishes every 5 years.
Winton: But the so these kinds of things were were distributed.
Winton: But
Winton: how do you extrapolate, extrapolate outwards, and do that on the in the larger society all the experiments so far have failed, even though Scandinavian countries and Australia, to
Winton: to a reasonable degree, has social welfare kind of
Winton: legislation in place which compensates
Winton: But how you you you you move past Tim's basic greed. And I like the idea of having, you know, free time futures. So maybe the problem is, if you, if you turn it to morality becomes a thing that you maybe you've created. Morality futures.
Winton: that the
Winton: the ability to to advertise and to push products. And I like the fact that you said that they're only interested in what was the sales, not whether they were used or not.
Winton: You probably read a book in the
Winton: the 60 s. Called Design for the real World, by written by Viktor Papinik.
Winton: who, he said that advertising design is there, and if I can remember it correctly to create
Winton: a desire
Winton: to buy something don't need to impress, and that you don't use that you won't use.
Winton: Hmm.
Winton: We've got a question online. We'll go to Leslie then. Yeah, Leslie.
Lesley Synge: Oh, hello, everyone. Firstly, I'd just like to say my energy has been a bit scattered because I've actually been quite involved here in my zoom world, here in Brisbane, between labor for survival. And you know the work of actually thinking and meditating. I had a little family of mice die in my vacuum cleaner.
Lesley Synge: and the smell was really strong. So I had to actually take some time out
Lesley Synge: zipping back and forth. Just fixing that. So I actually emailed this this morning after Stevens
Lesley Synge: session. And this is what I wrote.
Lesley Synge: I look to Marx. He talked about alienation. When we are alienated from our labor, we suffer.
Lesley Synge: And then I quote, in 1844,
Lesley Synge: Marx said the worker, has a feeling of misery, not of well being is physically exhausted and mentally debased. As soon as there is no physical or other compulsion, work is avoided like the plague.
Lesley Synge: So, Winton.
Lesley Synge: I don't really know what question to ask, except to say, I think this is very important, that you publish something.
Lesley Synge: something more about this whole area, you and Stephen, because I really think you're onto something.
I'm just thinking also back to Stephen's
Lesley Synge: dichotomy.
Lesley Synge: If you think of the rice farmer laborers in the fields of Cambodia building ankle. What
Lesley Synge: they were probably not that alienated from what they were doing.
Lesley Synge: They weren't. I don't think, slaves.
Lesley Synge: I think they were pleased to be doing some work for the King that they felt was meaningful. Well, this is all a bit of projection, but you know they weren't slave labor, as far as I understand. So therefore we're often not alienated from
Lesley Synge: our our work. So it's a really fantastically rich field, and thanks very much for your contribution.
Winton: Thank you, Lucy.
Winton: Thanks, Swinton, fascinating! Just back to the point that Tim was raising there. I thought, I mean that the whole question of institutional change versus individual transformation.
Winton: So that reminded me of the quote by EO. Wilson, the sociobiologist, which goes something like this, the problem with the world is that humans have
Winton: cardiolic brains.
Winton: We have medieval institutions and godlike technologies.
Winton: What's your take on that?
Winton: Well, look, I mean, I've already said, pretty averse to generalizations that seem to me to come back to human nature. I mean, we are
Winton: very malleable creatures, and we and we're highly socialized. and it depends upon
Winton: the you know what sort of society we're socialized into.
Winton: If we're socialized into a society are
Winton: based upon generosity and sharing and making sure everybody's needs are taken care of.
Winton: Ii think we would.
Winton: behave very differently to the way that we've been behaving under capitalism, and one of the one of the things. One of the many insights in Marx is
Winton: that capitalism is the only
Winton: mode of production in history which actually generates unemployment
Winton: unemployment
Winton: that it is. It is in
Winton: it is. There always has to be what he called an industrial reserve reserve army, there to depress wages.
Winton: you know workers have to be desperate. They're cut off from
Winton: any direct access to a livelihood is thrown off the land. And the only way they can survive is by selling their labor, and they should do so on capitalist principles
Winton: are under conditions of unemployment where they're competing against each other. I mean, this is, you can look that this is the argument going on right now in Australia about interest rates.
Winton: that we've got an unemployment rate under 4%. And that is not enough.
Winton: We need more people to be unemployed
Winton: in order to bring down the level of inflation. So in this
Winton: I mean being unemployed is a terrible situation to be in.
Winton: And yet we need people to be in this situation for the system to keep going.
Winton: So if we were in a society where that logic did not hold. We wouldn't be as desperate as we are now.
Winton: so just quick! Follow up! So on Leonora's point the other day, if she could, she would give 2 appeals to people, the mindfulness pill and the compassion pill. So you you
Winton: you don't think We will necessarily need to go down that path.
Winton: No, perhaps we should.
Winton: grateful coffee. Now I'll come back in half an hour. Follow-up discussion
Winton: when we come back. Ayla has a question. So when we come back, Ayla can head off the conversation. Okay, great.
Winton: I should make a comment, do you think?
Be happy?
Winton: Yeah, welcome back.
Winton: and then we have
Winton: Ayla. Is that right? I'll know the screen. Hmm! Right
Ayla Curtis: unmute Rookie era.
Ayla Curtis: Hi, everybody! Hi, Winton! Thank you. For the amazing talk.
Ayla Curtis: My question, I think, is about time, and I'll kind of wander my way there. But I wanted to start with David Graeber. Who? Who? Yeah, I found, really, I guess, quite inspirational. His writings in recent years. And I actually have a quote on my wall here that I take a lot of comfort from which, says the ultimate, hidden truth of the world, is that it is something
Ayla Curtis: that we make, and we could just as easily make different
Ayla Curtis: which I find quite inspiring, because I think it goes back to this idea of of like imagination. So we've kind of imagined this system and through this shared imagining we've
Ayla Curtis: supported it and encouraged it. and reading the dawn of everything.
Ayla Curtis: I guess I really opened my eyes to this idea that this is a shared imagination that we've created and sort of it's been enforced by the system itself and the people in power to encourage it. So this idea of human nature being
Ayla Curtis: inherently greedy like, I don't think is necessarily right like it certainly may be a part of it, but there's also this part of human nature that's inherently social and communi communal and and compassionate. So I struggle with I this idea that we focus on.
Ayla Curtis: This greed is a big part of human nature rather than
Ayla Curtis: the community side, and this compassionate side. And yet reading the dawn of everything was just really eye opening to me to see that we could imagine something different based on this
Ayla Curtis: different flavor of humanity that's been so important and influential as well. It's just that we're kind of in this system that probably. you know, encourages and rewards.
Ayla Curtis: greed and power. And some of these traits that maybe aren't so healthy.
Ayla Curtis: but it's kind of led me to kind of question my time, and where I can contribute to the world to sort of facilitate this shed, imagining into something different, and living more compassionately, which is where I guess the the dharma comes into it.
Ayla Curtis: So for me, that sort of turned into a lot of personal practices and involvement in the Union movement, because that seems to be an
Ayla Curtis: a movement or a group that's facilitated a lot of great social change in the past. But I guess my question is around, or one like.
Ayla Curtis: why are we not focusing on this other side of humanity and this
Ayla Curtis: these probably you know, these incredible traits of compassion and kindness that probably have contributed to human survival a lot more than greed in my humble opinion.
Ayla Curtis: and in your experience, linkedin-like.
Ayla Curtis: where's like, where's a good place to put our time
Ayla Curtis: to, I guess. Be really effective at that, to use some kind of wanky managerial terms, but you know, like my time is short and limited, I feel like in this time of crisis.
Ayla Curtis: There's not a whole lot of time like there's this imperative behind it, and and kind of knowing what's going to be
Ayla Curtis: helpful, I guess, is is difficult, like there's so many ways to do it, and
Ayla Curtis: it just seems like
Ayla Curtis: there's not enough time to do that. So it's a bit of a tension for me.
Ayla Curtis: yeah. So I don't know like what the question is around that, but for me it comes up as time like, where's an effective place to put my time to actually facilitate this shared imagining. And and we've spoken a lot about creativity and art which is so important. But then there's this sort of activist
Ayla Curtis: role that we have to play as well, so gets a bit confusing.
Winton: Yes. Oh, thanks for posing the question, however broad it is, I mean, I think it's a question, you know, where do we? Where do we put our time? Free time? We have, I think, right now it has to be. It has to be a priority for
Winton: climate, action and environmental action in general, but also
Winton: the unbelievable
Winton: level of
Winton: relative deprivation and social exclusion in our own country, probably in our own suburbs, in our own cities. And of course, in the wider world, you know, the
Winton: we really do have to think in terms of the global north and the global South.
Winton: just things like buying a T-shirt, you know.
Winton: there's this strange impulse to go and find the cheapest T-shirt. And without thinking about. You know the supply chain. It probably leads back to a sweatshop in
Winton: somewhere like Bangladesh, where you know where one is sporting, appalling
Winton: labor conditions. So I mean, part of it is just living more mindfully
Winton: but also getting organized, I think, and and has to choose. This was, I guess, the message from Lenori session last night was, you know, you. You really need to choose where you're going to be effective. You can't be effective
right across the board.
Winton: And I think the other thing just from the way you started, was. I really think we need to be extremely skeptical about sourcing anything to do with
Winton: human behavior in terms of some sort of human
Winton: nature or human essence. You know, I mean, people in this society are peculiarly greedy and
Winton: and indifferent, but when something happens like a like a a bush fire, you know you've got volunteer bush fires fighting in fire while their own homes are being burnt down.
Winton: you know, 10 kilometers away, and you got all those heroic stories about what happened in the floods. So something is going on there. That's so.
Winton: you know, slightly healthy, and and I think it really does depend upon as Marx himself said, you know, social being determines social consciousness.
Winton: If we are living in. In a society with a strong community sense, then we are likely to to reach out to people who are in need.
Winton: If we're living atonized lives in the big city.
Winton: you know. We're we're we're fighting a war of all against all. Then we're probably
Winton: going to
Winton: revert back to good old dossier moral indifference about what you know. There, there.
Predicament, whatever it is.
Winton: Yeah. So
Winton: skepticism about human nature, I think, is is also a good rule.
Winton: I'm Carol. And so a couple of things, firstly, of this thing of free time, and I think in the early twentieth century Bertrand Russell wrote a little paper called in praise of Idleness.
Winton: and it was the same thing, but he made the point that you have to have a certain level of wealth in order to be able to have free time.
Winton: Sometimes looking around at how people use their free time, so much of it goes in watching TV and playing computer games and being spectators rather than acting like, you know, kind of makes you wonder.
Winton: But the other thing I wanted to say was. I think it was 2,014. Naomi Klein wrote a book called This Changes everything, and it was her argument
Winton: that you cannot
Winton: address the climate crisis without changing the neoliberal fundamentalism and industrial capitalism. And the whole book is the argument about, you know, basically, if you don't change the system, you don't achieve anything.
Winton: And so where do we put our time? And yes, you know eat less meat and drive an efficient car. But to be effective, we have to change the system.
Winton: And if you think of
Winton: the single State capture where your very wealthy corporations now basically have captured government, so why hasn't our left wing. Government banned all coal mines and its state captures because these huge organizations have too much influence on them. The only way to break that I see is activism in getting together and looking at the.
Winton: at the organisations that really are
Winton: doing such a good job and join those, you know, 350.org, or the Climate Council or extinction rebellion, and so that we can kind of get this mass volume of people
Winton: enough to change to change the system, because without that I don't think we're gonna get anywhere.
Winton: It's important to start building counterinstitutions. Also, I mean a growth in
Winton: the cooperative movement would be a good way to go, for instance, I mean because cooperatives they're not driven by the profit motive. But it's also in terms of mobilisation mobilising against
Winton: the most tired.
Winton: the most dangerous aspects of the system. It's also interesting to
Winton: pick up the
Winton: The dissidents from the system are known as Twiggy Forest Town. said yesterday that anyone there's still digging up coal and gas has blood on their hands. I mean, this is coming from it.
Winton: Know a mining name. It's it's just amazing. So I think it's also important to kind of
Winton: prize off like oysters, you know. Prize them off the system like that.
Winton: Thank you.
Winton: Part of this, I think, is changing the way the story is told.
Winton: You can have the same events happen, and with one set of reporting. They go nowhere.
Winton: and with another set of reporting they seem either quite counter cultural or the start of something or a significant challenge. So one of the things. One of the areas that I think is
Winton: is important in developing and not yet developed is how we build a bridge between the very high level ideas that you were talking about initially. and the way in which we want the changes that are happening and the things that are occurring
Winton: to be reported and heard and understood.
Winton: and there was a really good example here which was the earlier mention of the tragedy of the Commons.
Winton: Now the true story of the tragedy of the Commons is, it was a flip phrase which was invented, I think, in the 1970 S.
Winton: And took off because it was a nice, neat phrase, and it fitted into the capitalist mindset and what they wanted to believe.
There's a one called Ruth Ostroff.
Winton: who got the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2,016 for a lifetime's work, in showing that there was no tragedy of the Commons.
Winton: that there were, in fact, at least 10 quite distinct different ways in which Commons had been managed very successfully, and described the kind of rules that you needed around them, in order for them to succeed.
Winton: Problem. There was not anyone could have got that knowledge. The problem was the phrase. The tragedy of the Commons came out of the blue. And suddenly someone had to spend a lifetime's work undoing that mischief.
Winton: So I think the way we tell the stories and books like the graver book are very helpful, because they give echoes that we can riff off as we tell the stories, and we can say, of course, if you say I've done this in conversation. Sometimes you say, of course, what happened in the Iroquois was
Winton: when you want to introduce something quite different. And people are really interested because it's all a bit exotic or something, whereas if you bring out some kind of hypothetical
Winton: they think it's just
Winton: dreaming.
Winton: So somehow.
Winton: there's still a big task, I think, in linking the high level to the low level, to the action. And I guess I'm wanting to highlight
Winton: importance of the way we tell the stories, and I don't know if you've got any comments or good examples of that. But
Winton: well, I mean, there is certainly
Winton: one of the things I'm I'm I'm really surprised at is how few people have picked up the Mondragon
Winton: system. Mondragon, in northern Spain is the whole region which is
run on cooperative lives.
Winton: So you've got like, you know.
Winton: So several industries, some of them, which can export and and it's all owned by the people who live there. There's no ex. There's no external capital. They've got their own bank. You can have a cooperative bank, I mean, because
Winton: productive enterprises require external finance from time to time, and if you can get it from a bank that is working in the same cooperative system instead of
Winton: a capitalist system.
Winton: Then, you know, you can sustain this over time. Now, you know, most people haven't heard of Mondragon, but it's a really big deal. It's a
Winton: I mean, I
Winton: it's a while since I checked in. But it there were about 90,000 people living in that area and living in this way. So you know, they weren't all
Winton: counter cultural hippies, and I mean they were technicians and and industrial workers and so forth. So I mean, I think that bringing forward. Those kinds of those kinds of examples is really good, and and also the
Winton: What this was mentioning
Winton: a Kibbutz is always on a
Winton: visited a kibbutz in
Winton: 2,000 that was making really high tech stuff, you know, and and exporting
Winton: and but it was still
Winton: a Kabuz was still running on those sort of cooperative lines at a time when
Winton: a lot of kibbutzim were were collapsing because they got too much into debt. And and you know the bankers took over and and they couldn't keep going. But this one was
Winton: really successful, you know, was, it shows how
Winton: you know productive efficiency can work just as well under non capitalist conditions.
Winton: We've got Linda online.
Winton: Hi.
Lynda: Hi, everyone!
Lynda: Hi, Wynden! Look! First of all, I'd just like to acknowledge and express some gratefulness to everyone. Engaged in this very inspirational discussion and process. It's been wonderful, it I feel as I've been in an intellectual desert for years, and to gallop back through time into the various histories and personalities has been just so richly rewarding. It's been wonderful.
Lynda: I guess the the comment I want to make, and also then it raises the question, so the comment is,
Lynda: yes, there's so much to do. We we, from what people have expressed and outlined, we are all to varying degrees of emphasis, very aware of what the problem is. We also have outlined very clearly some of the the different approaches that may be complementary while tolerating, you know, differences of opinion
Lynda: for me, listening to people's earnest plea, for how do we deal with the magnitude and implement many of the solutions, the magnitude of the problem, and many of the solutions
Lynda: that are quite practical, but need to overcome so many barriers. And one of the critical things that stand out to me is control of information.
Lynda: communication, misinformation.
Lynda: governments captured by capital. Yes. Huge problem. honesty in politics significant issue. But I draw on my experience of being intensely engaged with the recent referendum, particularly in the last 2 weeks, where I spent many hours a day.
Lynda: actively campaigning. Now this was over 40,000 volunteers
Lynda: engaging widely, you know, round kitchen table conversations right into telephoning into enemy territory. Analysis of the results when the dust was settled, showed that 51% of Australians actually voted in favour, and this was, despite
Lynda: a heavy biased campaign against the positive aspects of what a yes vote would bring.
Lynda: That whole issue was basically sabotaged through misinformation and lack of control
Lynda: over information. And so my question is and we may not.
Lynda: I suspect we'll we'll go back over the same ground. Of how do we address this? Because it we seem to have lost this fight.
Winton: Yes. Well, you've certainly named a major problem.
Winton: particularly in this country, where about, I think, about 87% of the mass media is owned by the Murdoch mob
Winton: and
Winton: So you know, we
Winton: we grimly have to defend what is not Murdoch, ie. The ABC. And to some extent
Winton: the former Fairfax media. But
Winton: and and I certainly think there should be. Yeah, we should be clamoring for much tighter controls on social media in terms of
Winton: spreading disinformation, hate, speech, and all the rest of it.
Winton: Some. There's also a basic problem of education, I think, behind.
Winton: But you know, to taking an example of the
Winton: observe of the referendum, and it sort of falls a bit outside what we're talking about here at the moment. But
Winton: the fact, I think, that the vast majority of
Winton: Australians haven't. The faintest idea
Winton: are what the historical sources of
Winton: indigenous disadvantage are.
Winton: And you know it.
Winton: It's it's still people are horrified when you talk about
Winton: the aboriginal genocide, when it when what happened here is so clearly within the definition of genocide in the 1948 UN Convention on it. And so until, and what was interesting about the the
Winton: both the yes and the no campaign. Neither of them mention that
Winton: it was as if
Winton: you know, our indigenous disadvantages had no had no back story.
Winton: It was just something that was happening right now. And until we get through until people understand the back story. We're not going to get another kind of result
Winton: if this ever comes up again, which is probably
Winton: are probably unlikely. And part of the problem. Part of that problem is also that 48% of Australians were either born overseas or had one parent who was born overseas and who have a very and probably the vast majority would have a very shallow idea of
Winton: of the historical process that we are.
Winton: that that that has produced what we have now. So
Winton: anyway, that's it's a bit of a diversion for what we're talking about, but it but it does illustrate the fact that
Winton: you know, I suppose.
Winton: first and foremost.
Winton: that it is a fundamental problem that that you know, an outlandish, far-right outfit like the Murdoch Knob, runs 87% of our mass media.
Winton: We've got Steven over here.
Winton: I'd like to offer another metaphor for how we might frame this
Winton: discussion, and particularly focusing on climate change. And that is the metaphor of a jujitsu.
Winton: of turning the opponent's strength against
Winton: him or herself
Winton: using the power of the opposition to undermine the opposition.
Winton: And this
Winton: idea was first sparked in my mind by an essay I read last year by Bill Mckibben. He's an environmentalist writer who often appears in the pages of the New York Review of books which I
Winton: read somewhat religiously
Winton: and usually his. You know he's, you know.
Winton: telling us what a terrible situation we're in.
Winton: But in this essay he admitted that he saw a sign for optimism.
Winton: and that was because he started to observe that more
Winton: and more investment is going into green technologies
Winton: that the price and the cost of solar panels, and so forth and so on, is going down, down, down. This is how capitalism works.
And
Winton: Mckibben was suggesting that
Winton: where the push really needs to go, and I think a lot of what everyone is talking about here is pushing in the right direction, but perhaps not
Winton: noticing that where the the tipping point
Winton: might be. And this is the term Mckibben uses an economical tipping point, a capitalist tipping point
Winton: where, in other words.
Winton: instead of bemoaning the fact that these people have the profit motive.
Winton: actually recognizing that that's where you can do the jujitsu turn. you actually make the green
Winton: technologies, industries and so on. Profitable. Yeah. And if you the more that that happens, and this happens by many, it happens on governments putting more and more constraints on fossil fossil fuel emissions, and so on. It happens because of people out on the street campaigning against it. It happens, because of critiques of the kind of society we live in, and so forth, and so on.
Winton: Mckibben felt that we might accelerate towards that tipping point.
Winton: maybe sooner than we might have expected.
Winton: and I was reading on the BBC news just this morning.
Winton: How the the cost of of solar panels in particular, take particular, is dropping. The
Winton: increase in use and demand for electric cars is rising, that there's many indicators that are are accelerating towards a kind of change. But the real point of change will be when the capitalists who hold all of the into the finance sector decide that fossil fuels are no longer going to be profitable.
Winton: and at that point they'll start investing, and even the
Winton: fossil fuel companies themselves, perhaps, and this picks up on Bernard's point that he raised a few days ago that we need to get the polluters to switch their investments from fossil fuels into
Winton: other technologies.
Winton: Again, I wouldn't assume that this is just going to happen as a matter of course. I don't think it will unless pressures are exerted. But however awful the capitalist system, as we have it, might be neoliberalism. So on do we given the urgency
Winton: a matter of a few years? Do we have the luxury of being able to envision alternative economic systems
Winton: rather than acknowledging that the present one is going to be for around and trying to use its logic to subvert it.
Winton: What what you say to that?
Winton: I think one would be waiting longer for capitalism to reform itself than actually
Winton: introducing something new at
Winton: one of the one of the values of Marx's work was to think in terms of how
Winton: socioeconomic systems change. So he had. His historical model was that there is a basic relationship between
Winton: the direct workers.
Winton: the means of production that they use, whether it's agricultural land or machinery and and and the machinery itself. So it's it's it's 3
Winton: 3 groups that are in in this relationship. So you know his thematic account of
Winton: historical changes that humans began with what he called primitive communism, in other words.
Winton: tribal groups where there were no classes, to slave society, where certain people made other people into their private property and made them work
Winton: to feudalism where you had, I mean, in in all these class
Winton: societies it was always the property in the means of production that gave the ruling class its power. So in so in feudalism, you had the feudal barons and lords who owned the land, and and let it out for
Winton: rent or rent in natura
Winton: to the serfs or the peasants. And then you have capitalism. Where again, you've got a ruling class that doesn't work, but in control of
Winton: the means of production, and and the direct workers are
are excluded from control
Winton: of the means of production that they themselves set in motion. So
Winton: What Hegeland is is suggesting. And in fact, many other sorts of Socialists is, if you, if you put
Winton: the actual workers in control
Winton: of their of the means of production, then
Winton: classes will
Winton: will erode, because there's no longer
Winton: a ruling class that that owns and controls the means of production. And but what what is is significant? Here is the hinge points.
Winton: You know that they are that they are long historical processes. Capitalism really began about the thirteenth century in the Italian city states, but it didn't really go anywhere
Winton: until until the beginnings of agricultural capitalism in in England with wool trade.
And eventually, of course, industrial capitalism comes, and
Winton: capitalism then consolidates as a world system. Now these transitions take
Winton: a long time, but while the transition is going, the old system is gradually disintegrating, and the new system is gradually crystallising.
Winton: and I think that some, that kind of idea of transitional periods
Winton: is what should be the kind of
Winton: the the.
Winton: the, the global pattern that we're looking for. So sure, you know, if we can get capitalists to
Winton: to invest in green technology, etc. That's great. We're going to need everything we we can get our hands on to overcome this crisis because it's really on top of us.
Winton: But at the same time we can start developing. It's not a question of switching off
Winton: this particular mode of production and turning the other one on. There's this transition period, and I think I mean agreeing with Wolf going straight, that I talked about earlier, that that neoliberalism, neoliberal capitalism, is on the ropes.
Winton: and but it's going to take a long time before the transition works its way through, and how it works its way through is going to be in the development of of things like cooperation, cooperatives, ways of
Winton: reorganizing
Winton: both production and distribution.
Winton: Unless I'm very skeptical about the idea of
of
Winton: green capitalism, because while, while there are going to be important examples of that, like
Winton: dear old twiggy forest in Western Australia and his hydrogen plant. That's that's important. I mean. Everything's important that's going to make a difference. But it seems to me that it's not an eitherall proposition.
Winton: do we? And a lot of the things we have to do
will be
Winton: post capitalist if you like.
Winton: I think it'll be really dangerous for us to wait until
Winton: whole lot of people
Winton: who are extremely rich, decide. They can become even richer
Winton: by investing in green technology. There aren't going to be many examples of that. And at the moment
Winton: fossil fuels, fossil fuel industries are hugely powerful
Winton: and hugely powerful on on the in terms of
Winton: public persuasion. You know we've got
Winton: a ha cop going on conference parties going on. As I said before, in a Petro state.
and the chairman is saying, there is no scientific evidence. To suggest there's anything wrong with
Winton: digging up more coal and gas. I mean, this is
Winton: this is the power problem we've got
Winton: or on it. He's actually with qualified and withdrawn that statement.
Winton: Say he's qualified and withdrawn now, has he? Oh, let's go. Yeah.
Winton: Hmm.
Winton: all right, we've got question. Q. 1, 2, 3, 4. So Vivian online.
Vivien Langford: Oh, yes, Wynton. I'm just glad you said it's on the ropes, because I was just going to draw your attention back to that. You said that I think on day. One neoliberalism is, the project is on the ropes.
Vivien Langford: but I want to know how to push it towards collapse. You know that
Vivien Langford: not the whole system, not everything, but because that frightens people, but the parts of it that are manipulating us. I went to a webinar with Scott, Ludlam, and some people who are all working on these various think tanks that manipulate opinion, and go and brought this thing. But the narrative.
Vivien Langford: the Overton window, is another thing that was invented to just beguile us and change our our thinking about things. But it wastes a lot of time, and there's something called the Atlas network of groups, you know.
Vivien Langford: including Murdoch, Media, and so on, that can unseat governments that can play on libertarian sentiments, and so on. And a lot of people just read about this in the present. Just so worrying. Meanwhile, at the Climate Action Group level that I
Vivien Langford: sort of work on all the time.
Vivien Langford: II feel. People feel that mass mobilization like we saw at Newcastle, the coal port, Mass mobilization, 2,000 people this year, 10,000 next year. That sort of thing people feel
Vivien Langford: surely that will disrupt. That will push
Vivien Langford: but I feel it has to be a little bit more
Vivien Langford: entering the corridors of power, and I liked your story about Mac Machiavelli with you know, being very flattering to Cesare Borgia, and having his man at the back on a horse rushing off in the night with the total revelation about what was happening in that court. Well, I would like to have a
Vivien Langford: know somebody inside those cough meetings with Sultan Al Jaber and the others in those secret meetings, because not even journalists are anywhere near that.
Vivien Langford: and have some one with a horse out the back to leak it all to the press, so that we can get an idea of their strategy. Because from the Scotland, Webinar, he said, these people are so they put so much money into strategy. Whether it's advertising disinformation memes, it's very well cashed up and savvied, and we are still at the level of.
Vivien Langford: you know, going around with placards and massing in numbers and saying, This is people power? Ii just feel
Vivien Langford: I'd like some examples from you, not just the alternative, like Mondragon and the Kibbutz. But what are some ways and strategies that that you think through history have worked?
Winton: I don't think I can produce more persuasive
Winton: ideas of that, except I mean you there. Any any examples I can give would be
Winton: pretty minor in comparison to the the the enormity of of the task. But I was just
Winton: in the tea break, I mean, I was thinking about one at one time
Winton: in Sweden when when I was doing research there. There was a real push back by the
Winton: labor movement, which is stronger, was the strongest labor movement in the world at the time against
against
Winton: you know, alienated labor.
Winton: And and they began to experiment in getting rid of assembly lines. And, for instance, in in A
Winton: in one or 2 of the Volvo factories. They got rid of the the Assembly line and and set up production teams, and then they just gave these production teams all the bits and pieces you need to make at motorcar and said, just do it any way you want.
Winton: and you can swap jobs any way you like, and we'll provide you. We'll provide skill development, you know. If somebody gets sick of
Winton: bolting on the bamboo bar, they can, you know, learn to
Winton: to program the engine and things like that. So that that was that was a very successful experiment.
Winton: and.
Winton: strangely enough, increased productivity. But then along comes neoliberalism. It's all all over Red Rover. There's no more of that going on anymore. So, but that's an example of where you can work against the the logic of the system. But you've got to have.
Winton: as Machiavelli would say, you know. You can't be a prophet unarmed. You've got to have
Winton: real muscle, which is what the union movement had there.
Winton: It really does take a countervailing force to get that sort of sort of thing up.
Vivien Langford: Yeah. And there's a very strong, nonviolent, direct action. Ethos. And we're here to talk about ethical
Vivien Langford: ethical behaviour in our lives, how we live our lives, taking on some of these parts of the crisis. I just
Vivien Langford: want to know a bit more about if something's crumbling, if it's on the ropes.
Vivien Langford: where's the best way to put our action to push it over.
Winton: But I mean the point of it being on their ropes is that a lot of its goals have been lost like one of its great goals, was small government.
Winton: you know, and this is the whole business of austerity policies which we've seen in, particularly in
Winton: in Britain. And here and all around the world. You know that. Suddenly it was. You couldn't do that anymore, because everything collapsed in 2,008,
Winton: and the government. The State had to step in and massively.
Winton: massively shore up
Winton: the banking systems around the world. So suddenly
Winton: governments had enormous public debts, and then, and then the pandemic came along.
Winton: and and again the State was hugely involved in preventing social catastrophe in that. So nobody talks about small government any more, because it doesn't mean anything.
Winton: You can't have a small government anymore.
Winton: So in that way, you know, the the wheels are falling off.
Winton: and maybe I'm sort of coming back into convergence with what Stephen was saying, that that
Winton: the system is weakened. A lot of its logic
Winton: is is unworkable just on its own terms. So if the State is back, if Big business, if if the big State is back, then this is a time to push
Winton: to whatever quasi-democratic means. We have
Winton: to get the State on side, too, and try, and
Winton: I detach it from the
Winton: from the
Winton: influence of things like, you know, fossil fuel industries. After all, you know the precedent for these, for
Winton: the fossil fuel industry campaign to keep its business running is is big tobacco. When we were
Winton: when we were banning
Winton: smoking products and trying to cut down on on people smoking. I mean it. It really did cut into their profits. And they really did fight back hugely, pretending, you know, that they'd invented a cigarette that didn't cause
that didn't cause cancer that had magical filters in their cigarettes.
Winton: That meant they were no longer kind of carcinogenic, every trick in the trade. And this is what we're seeing again with fossil fuel industries, you know. They're probably going to invent a fossil fuel that actually decreases the amount of carbon in the air next tomorrow. But that's what we up against. I mean a really slippery and extremely well resourced
Winton: opponent. Can I? Can I jump in here? There's
Winton: There's a pathway that takes Steven's ji jitsu move of kind of taking the the values and the goals and the aspirations of capitalism and the might of of what you're talking about the leverage that we need. And that's this whole switch, your super. Change your super movement, and I just want to explain it a little further, because it feels like there's maybe a gap in understanding. And maybe before I launch into this and make sure I'm not kind of talking in the wrong direction. Who has changed their super
Winton: to an ethical funds.
Winton: So just a cockat, we're talking 7, 8, 9 of us. Something like that. Yeah, so
Winton: so perfect and changing the back. Exactly. So there's a thing that occurs in Australia, where we're talking about like we don't have the leverage. And those capitalists should invest in these things. The reality is in Australia that
Winton: more than 50% of the Asx 200 shares are held within pension funds. So they're effectively held by the public. And now this is not the same everywhere, but in Australia we have the capacity to be able to move our super around. We have like a huge leverage, and so.
Winton: where. effectively like investing in
Winton: currently, we're investing in things that are fossil fuels that are weapons based, that are, you know, things that gambling, etc. And we've all got that on our hands, but it doesn't need to be that way, like the biggest leverage, and the most evidence-based leverage is to switch our super. And in a group this size, without a doubt, we've got at least
Winton: 10 million, probably up to 30 million dollars worth of investments right here. And you imagine that over extrapolated over an audience the number of people that marched in 2,019 at the climate marches was around 130,000, and I'm not sure if it's true now, because there was obviously a big swing of wealth over this kind of Covid phase. But at that time, if 130,000 people divested or reinvested their super into an ethical fund.
Winton: effectively robbing the coal mines of capital to open up the new mines, and it would have immediately overnight.
Winton: Yeah, funded the green transition that was required like that quickly.
Winton: which is wild and wild, that we didn't do it in some ways, and wild that the opportunity is still there and wild that we're still talking about. What can we do when there's such a clean, obvious solution in this. And it it doesn't.
Winton: It doesn't break the system. but it brings the the bomb
Winton: people to, but because they're suddenly like, Oh, we need to quickly dismantle and rebuild the new industry around what has been shown here. So I just want to kind of put that out there that there's really obvious solutions, and some of them around reducing consumption of certain products, and especially meat. And one of them is, you know, changing our super. And I just want to kind of put that out there for like still haven't done that yet.
Winton: Stop there.
Winton: Yeah, II couldn't agree more. I mean, I think that. But but what what that means is
Winton: the prophet motive is being
Winton: dethroned, and
and the
Winton: you know, the investment funds are actually being directed in a political way, in other words.
Winton: in a in a way that is ethically driven. And so you you
Winton: yeah, it's exactly what needs to happen is the socialization of the capital market.
Winton: you in the room will try and get around. Okay. I'd like to bring some light on the point that
Winton: Steven on the question of Stephen and and
Winton: and the answer.
Winton: the transition, the transition is taking a long time. N.
Winton: Don't make any mistake. It will take a long time. And it's not because the capital is lazy. it's because simply the technology is not there.
Winton: We should realize that
Winton: that there is no technology
Winton: to transform the carbon industry into a non-carbon industry.
Winton: The technology is not ready. People are working on it.
Winton: Solar Panelau. getting more efficient.
Winton: are getting cheaper, but don't believe that is because you put 10 m² of solar panel on your roof.
Winton: It works.
Winton: The government. Take your energy, pay for it, and you have a battery.
Winton: It doesn't work like that at the mass scale.
Winton: and the technology is not there. Hydrogen is not there. Carbon capture is not there?
Winton: Evie is not there. I mean, you know how much
Winton: a battery for an electrical car take to the nature?
Winton: No, the technology is simply not there, and we will need time to
Winton: come up. wheeze
Winton: one technology and 2 technology which makes sense in terms of economical terms.
Winton: And that is not the capital which is lazy.
Winton: It's it's it's simply not possible to switch overnight
Winton: from a carbon to a non-carbon ministry
Winton: which sector it is
Winton: transport
Winton: energy generation
Winton: chemical process. Steel making.
Winton: There is simply not a technology which makes sense for time being.
Winton: I guess. My only comment to that was, we're not.
Winton: I don't think many of us seized technology as the answer.
Winton: I think it's a question of radically reworking patterns of production
Winton: and and and distribution. I mean, for instance, one thing that would need to happen, I think, would be
Winton: a sharp rise rise in taxation. So we could put a lot more resources into labor, intensive
Winton: activities like medicine.
Winton: education, social work, things that really people need really, things that have been absolutely de funded and allowed and and shrunken and allowed to fall away. So it's a it's a question of of re.
Winton: of rearranging production as it is, and we probably wouldn't be making nearly as many cars and the rest of it. But we would be reemploying people
Winton: in labor intensive
Winton: active public sector activities, that really matter and that are really needed.
Winton: we'll go one more in the room and then back to Aila.
Winton: I've changed what I was. Gonna say 3 times. Okay,
Winton: one is. I'm not sure if people have heard of Saul Griffiths. But
Winton: just to put it very simply, you know, he's his idea of electrifying everything.
Winton: making sure electricity is from renewable.
Winton: And and
Winton: that's the way in, and it's a little bit dismissive of carbon. But that's just one way to do it very, very quickly. Get everybody onto electricity and to get all electricity. That's one thing. I want to go back to the fact that we really don't have much time. And
Winton: you know, I really want to vote you for Prime Minister, Winton, you know. Seriously, we need more people thinking that way. But you know we have a democracy, as you know, as much as we all roll our eyes.
Winton: If we want change to happen really quickly, it has to be big change and quick change.
Winton: Now.
Winton: you know, during wartime. We can see that governments are capable of changing quickly if they have to.
Winton: And
Winton: One way of doing this for people who are saying, Well, what do I do
Winton: is to get everybody really to work on their Mps and senators again. It sounds a little bit trite, but if everyone did that they want the votes and the till movement has upset them.
Winton: This is just an idea for the answer to what can I do? And the answer is to not be an individual to to get together with your mates and work on your Mps.
Winton: And that will bring huge changes. I think it's already brought the trigger mechanism in last Thursday night at 100'clock the trigger mechanism got pushed through. I like to think it's because so many of us, and you know, I've got 2 groups of people who visit Mps really hammered the Alp about the the water trigger, and now it's a way of Tanya stopping, fracking.
Winton: and the Alp didn't do that willingly. It was really pushed from ordinary people like you going to your Mps.
Winton: you know.
Winton: Write, call, visit, just visit. Just roll up and tell them what you want. They have to record it. They have a little system of recording that even if your letter is, you know my name is such and such. I'm a retired, such and such. I want you to represent me, and they have to write it down.
Winton: They get 200. They want. You vote if they get 200 of those people saying we want the water trigger, or we want the Eppc act to be changed.
Winton: you know, and I've seen this in Adelaide. You know we've got very lethargic Alps actually joining with a band of other not so lethargic Alp to get the water trigger through.
Winton: So if you want to know what to do, get together with your mates and write, visit or Ring
Winton: Mps, it's very powerful. If thousands of people do it, we can stop
Winton: coal oil and gas, I think, and not sounds idealistic.
Winton: But I think it's possible, yeah.
Winton: And so, just to answer Vivian's thing. I was a group of 10 Sasr people who went to Atlas Run Center for Independent studies last Thursday.
Winton: It's an Atlas funded organisation, and we Spray canned their foyer. We couldn't get up in the lift, because, of course, you can't get up to the first floor. We Spray canned their foyer. We spray canned all the glass in front of their. We threw paint bombs on their windows, and we had. My husband was dressed up as their boss
Winton: can't remember his name now, but we did that, and they took notice. They've been tweeting really terrible things about Xr. We've bothered them, and I really still recommend going on the streets and doing that it will shift the Overton window.
Winton: So, you know. Think of creative things like that, and just do it. Talking about courage. Sorry.
Winton: 3 things too many.
Winton: Ayla online is next.
Ayla Curtis: Thank you. And thanks for that contribution. Very. yeah. Couldn't agree more about writing to your Mp, but yeah, still.
Ayla Curtis: taking those direct actions, my contribution now is really quick, and it kind of goes back to steven's point about jujitsu and how to move to maybe a post capitalist future. There's a wonderful author called Kim Stanley Robinson, who typically writes Sci-fi, but his books are all sort of based on how we can, how we can move
Ayla Curtis: to post capitalist future in quite practical and I think, realistic way. So if there's anyone interested in. In. I don't know sci-fi books, maybe less so in some of the more.
Ayla Curtis: probably I'm lowering the tone a little bit, bringing a sci-fi author into this conversation. But I've just found him to be incredibly insightful and yeah, quite practical in the suggestions he offers around, how he could move to a post capitalist future, looking at all sorts of different tools and mechanisms like
Ayla Curtis: finance capital. So how we can use that against itself to move to
climate.
Ayla Curtis: climate, friendly future and social movements, different political structures, different.
Ayla Curtis: business structures like Co. Ops. He's booked the ministry for the future kind of ties it all nicely together, and actually provides a bit of a pathway from now until you know some imagined future that we're all talking about. In a really engaging. And and yeah, I think quite practical way.
Ayla Curtis: Team Stanley Robinson, if anybody's interested.
Winton: Thank you, Eila, thank you for that. We've got Reena online next.
rena czaplinska-archer: Oh, I just have A small quote which I have been using for the last 30 years in conversations like this.
rena czaplinska-archer: And it was
rena czaplinska-archer: actually came from a story.
rena czaplinska-archer: Gavin Gavin is very good at this, but The story about fighting the dragon
rena czaplinska-archer: wait for the dragon to shrink and sort of not fighting the whole system all at once. The quote I was going to quote was from Margaret Mead. Never doubt that a small
rena czaplinska-archer: number of committed citizens can change. The world, indeed, is the only thing that ever did.
rena czaplinska-archer: And I wanted to quote some examples of such things happening in Post First World War, Germany? Well, as I'm a republic.
rena czaplinska-archer: a created Bauhaus.
rena czaplinska-archer: which came from a commitment of one convinced individual. That's Gropius, a whose
rena czaplinska-archer: inspiring, inspiring figure, inviting number of great artists to come and join his Weimar Bauhaus school.
rena czaplinska-archer: That didn't come from Government
rena czaplinska-archer: initiatives. That was individual group.
rena czaplinska-archer: They did have, and they still have impact. And the other thing I wanted to mention I have in I didn't join
rena czaplinska-archer: I tried to join, do something about my super, but instead, what I did on a smaller scale. I changed my electricity supplier from
rena czaplinska-archer: whatever I was in Australia, or something into something which was cop from Byron Bay. It went past last year in June. was very disappointing.
rena czaplinska-archer: I don't know if anybody else has had that experience, but I wanted to do that. I'm not saying that
rena czaplinska-archer: as an example of what do or not to do. But I really like the example of thinking about what we can do ourselves within our our
rena czaplinska-archer: footprint where we live and within our scale, and if
rena czaplinska-archer: their only way is to join a large organization and then become a secretary or
rena czaplinska-archer: box person, or something, and talk or write, or something. That's one way I myself, I of I was. II actually started with
rena czaplinska-archer: during covet speaking up about various
rena czaplinska-archer: decisions of the government about various things they were doing in here, and recognize suddenly that I'm surrounded by and within a system that has no
rena czaplinska-archer: no resources in urban planning and and urban planning, thinking, and allows anybody with lots of money developer to decide about the shape of the streets and the shape of overshadowing and the shape of what happens with public transport as a result of it that's overcrowded or nothing is happening.
rena czaplinska-archer: And so I started speaking about this to my neighbors and writing letters. Before I knew it, I got invited to be advisor on this thing, to the gum, to them,
rena czaplinska-archer: To the council. So I am an unpaid advisor, and I don't know that I'm making any difference, but but I'm inside it.
rena czaplinska-archer: and I can see how
rena czaplinska-archer: I can see how slow the system is working, and how somebody like me, who is very impatient, and I like to put my energy into something that works.
rena czaplinska-archer: I'm just just talking about what we can do ourselves. And I'm I'm doing that. I'm I'm I'm really interested in in joining in with other people and creating something. But what I have done is I have initiated this
rena czaplinska-archer: painting group and drawing group and going to the desert. II recognize that I myself as an immigrant. I don't know enough about geography of this country, and I don't know enough about history of this country, and I know don't know enough about
rena czaplinska-archer: very much about anything about this country, except for I live in Melbourne and Brisbane, and maybe I've been to Lauro, and I have done some bush walking in Kimberly. But I mean and I put myself on a learning curve by actually going travelling and painting and drawing and looking at places. And you know,
rena czaplinska-archer: I think we're talking about taking agency, you know, being
rena czaplinska-archer: not leaving it to others to decide about my health or about my knowledge, and and I have to rely on somebody. I go and learn myself. I go and walk it. I go and talk it. I want. I'll go and see it.
rena czaplinska-archer: I go and look at it, and
rena czaplinska-archer: well.
rena czaplinska-archer: it changes me.
rena czaplinska-archer: That's where I am. It's just small steps. But now. thank you.
rena czaplinska-archer: Thank you. This was a comment. It wasn't really a question
Winton: out of time.
Winton: So maybe
Winton: I know people have got lots of ideas that we're still going
Winton: on those ideas, and we will then, no doubt come up again that we have other opportunities. so perhaps we'll leave it there and
Winton: come back in 53 min to see.
rena czaplinska-archer: Thank you.