Recent Thoughts

So, this morning I was reading an article in this month's Harpers, where a woman had traveled to Cuernavaca with her daughter to learn Spanish. She noted the immediacy of the dead in the life of the host family. I started to think that maybe a great thing about having decidedly distant places for the afterlife is that the dead are not in the backyard complaining to you, wondering why no one cleans their graves, and generally being troublesome for the living. It may be that the progress of Christianity and its cosmology has allowed more freedom from the ancestors.

Second, I occasionally find myself thinking back to 'The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted' and the system of Individual Mutualism. When I was 12 (and read this), the existence of a long line of anarchist thinkers was far from my imagination, so any relation to historical mutualist theory was lost to me. I think I may want to add some of these 19th century thinkers, probably Proudhon more than Kropotkin to my reading list. It's a shame that anarchy and its philosophy have been hidden from young people by rather loud shouts from metal heads (do these still exist?). I think reading Chernyshevsky's 'What is to be Done' over my vacation this summer may have rekindled some interest in the matter. Any technical measures to bring this about should do a little reading into the history of mutual aid or friendly societies as they were known 200 years ago in the US. The big advantage of small scale local social units is that we won't require a revolution in the state to effect the kind of change and organization required to put these ideas into practice.

Unfortunately, the state and finance are balanced in favor of a debt driven consumption system, as anyone who has tried to get a mortgage for a coop can attest. My understanding is that a coop is owned jointly by the tenants, so unlike a condo, cannot be foreclosed at the unit level, only the whole building. This makes bankers hesitant to lend without security. It makes me wonder what other types of organizing property are prevented by the structure of lending and the legal system upholding property.