Integral Economics by Ronnie Lessem

Author:Ronnie Lessem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Political Economy of Freedom, Equity, and Sustainability
Publisher: Gower
Published: 2011-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

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Figure 11.1 Eastern Navigation via Associative Economics

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Associative Economics – Core Themes

The guidelines for the recovery of the social organism, including the economy, are to be found in the strength of our cultural life. In fact, it is necessary for cultural life – including art, science and religion – to nourish everyday material existence, rather than exist on the margins.

The continual inventiveness of human beings is ultimately the only source of capital. In that context, capital is an intellectual, cultural, even ‘spiritual’ force.

Capital arises not out of any single person’s intellectual effort alone, but out of the accumulated capacities of previous generations, and also out of other men and women at any one time. Therefore, capital is neither by origin nor destination the property of any one individual.

The great distortion brought by the free market is to turn the true end of economic activity (providing the goods and services needed by society) into a means of serving private goals, rather than releasing the spirit and mind of (wo)man to serve social ends.

Competition belongs not to economic, but rather to cultural life, in the sense of self-betterment. When it comes to economics, human beings should cooperate to fulfill each other’s needs, for it is in this, that each person will find his or her own true humanity.

Today’s globalization is presided over and used by the more powerful nations rather than as a single thing, belonging not to nations but to humanity as a whole. The challenge is not to change who is in power, but to overcome power as the basis of social life altogether.

Associative economics then is not a form of socialism: for socialism celebrates the state as the key economic actor, whereas associative economics is about independent agents finding together solutions that meet their mutual interests when serving humanity.

Associative economics is about making the invisible hand visible. It is about making clear that we will not achieve a healthy economic life unless we deliberately cooperate to that end, transcending the automaticity that market forces implies, and making ourselves the agents for the many processes that we normally want to place outside ourselves.

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