NZCP: New Zealand Communities Party

Healthy People. Healthy Planet. The Earth a good home for all.

This page introduces the political party I think NZ needs.  I am calling it the New Zealand Communities Party because I see its key focus as pursuing and creating ease of living for all kiwi’s – especially those doing the world a favor by living on a little.

Do I need remind you why economic growth is a failed and destructive agenda?

Time for a quick political history lesson.  Hang in there you might find it rather interesting.

Based on cheap energy via crude oil, economic growth has violently and utterly destroyed the health of communities and eco-systems globally.  The baby boomer politicians and economists born at the end of WWII were raised with the false belief that the word had endless resources and energy and an unlimited carrying capacity for our waste and toxins.  The top levels of political and religious leadership on Earth today are comprised of such men who still believe in these false ideas and who have no answer to the stark realities now contradicting those beliefs.  It seems that they persevere stubbornly and doggedly like the emperor walking the streets naked.  If we had had the sense to limit our populations as our wealth grew we would have quite a different planet today probably largely devoid of crime and disease.  However I have never been convinced that economic growth is anything more than the lateral (side) effect of population growth brought about by increased food production.  This means belief in and pursuit of economic growth is a rather facile form of ignorance dressed up in the complex and sophisticated finery of economic theory.

The NZCP promotes a new economic paradigm – the community corporation.  I will use milk production to illustrate how it works.

There have been two classic economic paradigms dominating the 20th century – Capitalism and Communism.  Both of these models are in fact based on cheap oil – a fact strangely never identified by the whole economic discipline.

In Capitalism milk is produced by an individual farmer who privately owns the land, livestock and capital assets to produce and sell the milk to a supply and demand market. The risks of this system lie in the vagaries of demand and fluctuating milk prices but also, and until recently less recognized, in the unregulated use of natural resources and the use of the biosphere to subsidize the farmer and the expansion of farming by freely accepting massive effluent and other waste to the severe detriment of waterways. There is also the risk of fluctuating fuel prices associated with oil dependence.

In Communism a super massive state run by a bureaucracy whose size is only made possible by cheap oil owns all the assets and pays farmers a standardized state wage to provide milk to a nationalized distribution system.  The risks of this system are the same as those for Capitalism except instead of a risk of fluctuating milk prices there is the inherently unpalatable factor of incarceration within the state.  Communism can’t work if the privileged and the highly skilled decide to leave the state so it must keep all citizens imprisoned.  This necessity leads to the even more unpalatable requirement to police and monitor the citizenry to ensure the political system cannot be changed.  These factors make state communism the worse of two evils since both systems create massive damage to the environment.

The interesting thing is that humans have only ever achieved significant outcomes and objectives by working cooperatively or communally and this is where we come to an interesting insight about capitalism.  Capitalism is effectively a form of privatized communism.  Corporations become powerful and wealthy by utilizing the skills and knowledge of their employees – they are privatized collectives and if they were states we would call them fascist because they operate within a paradigm that says a few elite should control and be served by many others who are effectively coerced through debt into accepting employment on the terms and wages stipulated by the governing elite.  From this analysis you can suddenly see why capitalism and fascism operate hand-in-hand. Capitalism has operated within democracies that have tended ever more to resemble private corporations and which, through the pursuit of capitalist objectives, have actively established and profited from fascist systems in South America, Africa and Asia.

The great Neo-liberal reforms of the 80s and 90s can be understood as a competition between public collectives run democratically (governments) and private collectives (corporations) run autocratically (autocrats means people who have total power – kings, dictators, Boards and CEOs).  Billed as the removal of inefficient state bureaucracies (in which there is some truth) private corporations literally stole the assets built and paid for by public tax dollars and then began profiting off the same public for services they had been providing themselves. As if that wasn’t galling enough they then returned to the governments they had strip-mined of profitable assets when they ran into trouble and required bail outs – to keep running – breathtaking arrogance which we have recently seen repeated in the bail out of the banking sector. The privatization reforms were all done in the name of efficiency but there is no law of physics or economics that says that state owned companies can not be run on an incentive basis.  They quite easily could be.  However it is probably true that competition in a free market will produce more innovation.

The main problem underlying both systems however is the unacknowledged dependence on cheap energy.  In actual fact a cottage industry that produces a few thousand pieces of ceramic ware a year does so far more energy efficiently than an industrial plastic ware factory yet we can buy plastic plates for a few cents. A plastic plate represents far more joules of energy than a hand fired ceramic plate does. Likewise a litre of hand milked unhomogenized, unpasteurized milk is far less energy expensive than a litre of milk produced by a modern industrialized farm and its down stream treatment and packaging processes.  Today we are seeing the monolithic advance of living costs.  There is a great deal of squealing and political rhetoric about this which all seems to completely miss the point – perhaps because those making all the noise have no answer to it – prices are rising because energy is becoming more expensive – because oil supplies are dwindling.  As this happens the vast sectors of nonessential professions will become more and more unsustainable.  This is likely to create more erratic behaviour in the stock market.  I think this is what we are beginning to see along with the crumbling of the vast house of cards that is western debt.

Hang on I was talking about milk wasn’t I!?

Ok – right smack in the middle of these two great paradigms of Capitalism and Communism is the most ancient of human social structures – the one evolution actually gave us to become whole, healthy and well rounded human beings within – the sharing, cooperative community.  It turns out that Capitalism and Communism are just distortions towards different polarities of the sharing community that were made possible by overloading our communities and our environment, not to mention our bodies and minds and workplaces and homes etc etc with energy.  I haven’t done the exact math but you can assume that one full tank of petrol in your car was produced by sunlight falling on thousands of kilometers of forest and ocean for maybe months or years or even centuries millions of years ago.  Your full petrol tank is literally the sunlight that fell on a square kilometer of ocean for a year to produce the plankton that eventually formed the oil we now run our cars and our world on.

So here is a new way to produce milk and by the way to provide homes without mortgages to people – imagine what they could then do with their time and money to create a better world…

The farmer is a member of a small nonprofit trust that has maybe up to a few hundred members (studies are showing that humans have an upper limit of a few hundred people with whom they can have meaningful contact*See footnote). She is paid around 75% of a share-milker’s wage by the trust and is provided a house for free that becomes her own private asset over time.  The trust buys the land, livestock and assets necessary for the small scale provision of milk to the trust’s members. Any surplus is sold for a profit which goes back to the trust.  Every member of the trust pays around $200 dollars a week to it and in return they are provided with a free house (probably of a small energy efficient design that may share some resources and assets such as laundry and water heating with other nearby homes) and also with a potential range of services and assets – vehicles, recreational equipment, insurance services bought in bulk packages through the trust etc.  Each community trust is democratically run and can decide on exactly what services and operations it wants to engage in.  Trusts may specialize in the provision of certain products or services much like guilds whilst others may operate with diverse professional membership and along the lines of shared faith or philosophy.  Ultimately Community Corporations (CCs) could significantly reduce the size of centralized government and its tax take by providing many of its services themselves.  I would imagine a centralized national council making decisions on defense, foreign policy and providing a judicial system for the nation as a whole along with education and guidance in areas of conservation and natural resource management etc.  Associations of CCs could buy and provide power generation and telecommunications assets to provide power and communication at cost to their members.

We will soon need to find a way to break out of the mortgaged based debt that keeps us running on the hamster wheel helpless to significantly change the effects of our consumption on the planet.  Whilst environmentalists have always made the mistake of criminalizing humanity at large the answer actually lies in making things easier for people.  No-one wants to trash the planet.  If we could save the planet and live better quality lives by working less and sharing the things we don’t all need one-each-of I think most people would jump at the chance.

This is why the NZCP would seek to replace the pursuit of economic growth with the pursuit of ease-of-living as this would be a practical way to address literally the whole range of social and environmental problems we are currently facing.

It is important for me to say here that what I have outlined above is a medium term goal and not something that would be instantly set up or enforced. There are many policies and objectives that could be pursued immediately that would pave the way for an easy transition to such a system. The next page, NZCP Policies, will outline the NZCP’s short, medium and long term political policies aimed at making life easier for all New Zealanders and paving the way for the establishment of CCs which would obviously use Trust law to kick off.

The question of starting this party depends on people responding to this blog with the intention to support such a party. Personally I have little desire to become a Wellington bound politician.

Adrian Tyler

*One of the problems created by cheap oil is the massive size of organizations it allows.  Hence we see massive governments and corporations.  In my opinion such supermassive organisations are incredibly inefficient and virtually impossible to achieve constructive outcomes within especially large democratic organizations.  We can see this in the dashed hopes vested in people like Barak Obama who come into the leadership of organisations and networks that are so large that their effects are far beyond the scope of a human to understand, plan for or manage.