The Humanist Party

A more mutually beneficial society, designed for the greater population and not just the 1%, can be brought about simply by changing the pattern of ownership over your personal needs in what I call ‘distributed capitalism’ – Have you noticed that your view on capitalism largely depends on what stakeholding or ownership you have of capitalism ie. the means of production. Well, I maintain that those with most ownership of capitalism have always and still now overly influence the process of governance by their lobbying, their political funding and their direct employment of our MP’s. If we had a system of governance where this influence were not possible then the social landscape and divisions in society would not be so extreme. Think about how you spend your money over the course of a week and who is taking a profit from that spending, ie what profit is taken out of your basic needs? Your food, your accomodation, your energy needs, your travel...etc Now imagine if you had some of that money back by owning a part of that profit. Well, there are ways of achieving this.

 

Let’s consider the energy you use. If your household produced its energy needs from rooftop and wall mounted solar panels and small wind turbines then you would not have to continually pay for energy bills ie you would have ownership, you would make the profit. If some of the basic food we consume was grown from your window box, up your south facing walls, in your front or back garden, in your communal gardens, in your local thoroughfare, in your local park etc and you had ownership of that process then you would be one of the people reaping the profit margin that would otherwise go towards the coffers of one of our multi-national food suppliers. Incidently, this would also ensure that you eat fresher produce not pumped with preservatives because you would eat it when you needed to. In this country, we have 71% of our space dedicated to growing crops or rearing livestock but that only produces 60% of our consumption. We are relying on mostly 3rd world nations to send the excesses of their labour to us and a huge profit margin is taken by the owners and distributors in between and of course by the city slickers in their futures market. The whole system relies on cheap fossil fuels for transportation but as we know the depleting supply has an ever increasing demand made upon it from the populations of the developing nations, meaning that imported food will only ever get more expensive. There are more examples of distributed capitalism that I will come to later.