Making Money

Making money out of the freedom movement is corrupting? Depends how.

Recently, Common Knowledge hosted an event with Matt Le Tissier which was a charged event. Something that has upset people in the freedom movement. Hopefully, this blog will explain some of the thinking behind this decision and why it might be important to take this route in the future.

It was a ticketed event with several price points for the tickets. The more expensive tickets could be purchased online, but leaflets were delivered to local houses and nearby low income areas with sizable discounts to much as fifteen pounds off if you paid cash and could produce the leaflet. Therefore, there was an attempt to have as much of the community that was interested able to come to the event.

However, it was not free. Our guest required a fee and there were a lot of ancillary fees such as the venue, advertising and so forth that meant that money was required to make the occasion occur. We decided to use a community funding model which meant that individuals could pledge money - set at a limit to ensure a broad range of investors - and, if profitable, the investors would see their share of seventy percent of any profit or shoulder the losses if it turned out to be an unprofitable venture.

The reasons for a community model are fairly obvious: we wanted to avoid a generous benefactor in case it resulted in restricting our freedom regarding decision-making; it was a community agreed plan so why not have the community fund it; it meant more people had a stake in the enterprises’ success and it distributed money to a group rather than solely to an individual.

There was a little bit of criticism about the ticket price. It was, a few thought, quite steep. In our defence, here the concern was trying to balance the numbers that would come for such an event with actually breaking even. Another point of dispute, and by far the most contentious, circled around the word ‘profit’: it was not thought right that Matt Le Tissier should make money nor that anyone else should make money by some people in the movement. Many people with less gave of their time freely, why should wealthier members not do likewise?

This attitude strikes me as just a little unrealistic given what we know about the world. You do not need to be a Marxist to perceive that the basic reality of human life is economic - how do you put food on the table. Perhaps our guest is a little bit beyond just requiring the necessities, but do we expect some of our courageous, high-profile advocates of our freedoms to pay from their own pocket trips around the country to speak to community groups? It seems, to me at least, that if a guest’s name can bring a paying audience into a building then they are entitled to a fair share of that sum generated. And if investors are willing to risk their own money to fund such a congregation, then why can they not receive a share of the cash when it succeeds? The important thing, after all, is that something happens.

Whether it agrees with the model or not, I believe the wider freedom community benefits from an event like this in multiple ways. People at the event will talk to others buoyed with the sentiments of the evening; attendees will feel less marginalised and it provides a confidence to the local movement in being publicly seen. Money aside, these are intangible, almost priceless returns, ones that can, potentially, be built upon. Yet there is a deeper reason why this model, including the profit aspect, should be used; why it should be refined further to be more effective and why it is important that it or something similar be rolled out further into our economic landscape, since it is clear that the structure of how material resources, labour, capital and currency are interchanged is driving the majority of humanity to disaster.

The Profiteers is Sally Denton’s investigation into the Bechtel corporation: one of the largest corporations in the world, family owned entirely. It has ‘built the world’ from Hoover Dam to the Channel Tunnel to Honk Kong International Airport and many, many more infrastructure projects. It aggrandises power and wealth through close contacts with government and anyone in a useful position. The flows of cash their activities produce are all pumped towards the central point of the Bechtel family, a fountainhead that distributes money in accordance with whatever frothy and bubbling concern they happen to have at that moment in time. Admittedly, there is a trickle down to other tiers of society, although no one would argue that the net capital of the family is not increasing rather then diminishing with each project undertaken.

This is the function of the corporate structure. It’s most egregious in a privately-owned family corporation where gargantuan profits remain in the hands of sometimes a single family member (there are many global family corporations, like Lidl and Aldi, whose owners keep themselves below the radar, particularly so in Europe). But, although slightly less nepotistic, the system is not very different for public corporations. Their distribution model is wider because they have share-holders (powerful families being not insignificant investors) but they still aim to centralise and accumulate power and, soon or later, demand to have closed, rigged markets; whether achieving that hegemony of commerce by peddling influence with politicians or through corrupting government officials, they seem not to care.

It does not matter if you are a Marxist or a bleary eyed cynic concerning human nature’s weaknesses, the corporate structure that is constantly acquiring to firstly survive, then thrive, then, due to greed or necessity, corrupting the freedom of markets and circumventing judicial rules to ensure an empire, has within it the germ of Eugenics. In this model, some are more important than others; some are vastly more powerful than others - both groups clearly distinguished from one another. Furthermore, psychologically and socially within the hothouse of these institutions, some are seen as dispensable and others believe themselves to be necessary in governing how their fellows and underlings should conduct themselves. This is the core of the Eugenicist worldview. The only difference is that they gave this division a psuedo-scientific twist with hereditary ‘germs’ theory, now called genetics.

Given the magnitude of influence of the corporate structure, much of it a subtle conditioning by way of each individual’s lived economic experience, the people are prepared by their workplace for fascism. Their political opinions, unconsciously, reflect that reality.

Thus, it is no surprise that the most successful definition of ‘fascism’ is still Mussolini’s - the alliance of capitalist corporations and the government - as human socialisation, in the era of corporate hegemony, virtually requires it. What is less clear is that this political ‘alliance’ is easily dominated by the corporate side since they retain know-how and, with their economic muscle, can make the public government a form of decoration which, while being acceptable to the masses, yet functions for their interests alone. The traditional corporate structure retains power and exercises age-old precepts about the gradated value of human beings despite any appearances to the contrary.

Why do the majority of people partake in an organisation of society whose reality is harmful to self-esteem, to democracy, to accountability, to the environment and, as we can now see, to the lives of millions? The reason why it is so successful is that it pays. Fellow citizens are not reading books criticising the exploitation of workers, less so handsomely remunerated workers; they are more interested in how they will get paid, what they will get paid and how they can be paid more. The desire to avoid scarcity and improve personal resources is the motivation which calls forth the human energy that makes the corporation work. When converted into cash, it is this human energy that, once a cut is paid to its dispenser, the worker - never its true worth - is deposited into the bank accounts of the family owners or the global shareholders. The model bears more than a semblance to economic parasitism since it is rarely the beneficiaries of the corporation that actually run the company; and they certainly do not make the corporation function.

Why is any of this relevant to a tiny pin-prick of an event that involved a couple of hundred people and a insignificant sum of money in comparison to the trillions washing around the corporate groynes? Because, if the freedom movement is going to successfully counter the ‘alliance of corporations and state’, then it is a mistake to try and capture the state: it needs to displace the funnelling-to-the-top corporation model. This cannot be done unless the function of the corporation is understood and we learn why it has been successful over decades, even centuries. If we can do this, then replacing the family/shareholder model with a community model challenges not only a structure that is sociopathic, unempathetic, grossly insatiable and unreasonable in its demands, counters the beguiling and purchasing of our politicians and public officials, but it also destroys the psychological and philosophical foundation which their House of Horrors is built upon and executed through.

At the moment, we are a long, long, long way from doing this successfully.