Leisure In an Economy by The People
As for leisure in America today, there is no leisure. As the dynamo of vampire capitalism speeds up using more and more blood to keep itself going, the American people from the bottom up and top down are working longer and faster. For the most part, if we have any extended time off from work, it is not called leisure, it is called unemployment, and we spend that time in misery. What little leisure many of us have from thankless, unrewarding, dumb down jobs, is not leisure. It is an escape into mindless entertainment, alcohol, drugs, and digitalized relationships with people we never see, touch, or hug, and our minds are reduced to one sentence tweets.
In our America of political and economic democracy where we directly participate in all the most important decisions that affect our lives, our nation, community, and our livelihood; leisure is not an escape because there is nothing to escape from. Increased leisure is about family, community, self-development, and self-realization, having fun, learning how to play again, and getting back to our dream world where it all began. Basically, we are going to work ourselves out of a job. For example, if we automate a whole industry, we are not unemployed. We all own it. If increasingly, more and more Americans have more leisure time to work on what they want to work on, we can assimilate a new wave of immigrants, and they too can become part of the New America as equal partners in our direct and participatory political and economic system. They are no longer the cheap labor of vampire capitalism that is used to keep working Americans divided, fearful, and underpaid.
However, we can only absorb so many people at any one time into the dream of a new America here in the United States, but we can export that dream to our neighbors by going into partnership with the workers in those countries and thereby planting the seeds of prosperity where no one needs to go anywhere but home to feed their families. In addition, by exporting our dream for America, we may have planted the seeds to a United States of South America based on the principles of political and economic democracy and a political and economic system by the people. So, as you can see, we have a lot to learn,and we need the educational system to support our dream of a new America and a new world.
Democracy - The University Of Life
“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression of body
and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of Days.” – Thomas Jefferson
In our system of political and economic democracy, at every level, workers, consumers, and citizen owners are represented and participating in all decisions involving our economy and political life with the right, at all levels, to initiate policy and to recall representatives and appointees who do not serve the common good. Supply and demand are filtered through the whole body politic, and economic entrepreneurship and investment in our economy is funded by all of us from above and below. It is an intricate system of checks and balances, debate and discussion, decisions made at all levels of our political and economic life that reflect our wants and needs, the hopes and dreams of all of us. Our political and economic democracy is our university in life and the education and training ground for true democracy. Essentially, we will be living the dream and making it real as we go along, knowing that no one of us has the answer and that the answer is with all of us.
(The above is an excerpt from Learn or Die: The New American Revolution by Marcello Tino)
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