Now, some practical differences and applications. For those.who, as I do, work always toward a free and decentralized society and away from hierarchical authority, the difference is absolutely basic. It means, at the start, that your political life is spent in the crea,tion of ne\\'. ways to work, live, organize, co-operate rather than in trying only to. levy claims against existing institutions. This doesn't mean some sort of across~the-board refusal to take anything tainted • by" state ownership-it just means that it isn't the focus. For instance, in work that I dido in Washington, D.C., a neighborhood technology project, many of the tools used were obtained happily, even gleefully, from a license to purchase directly . from government surplus stores. Since then I have lobbied a time or two on Capitol Hill to get legislation that would make such surplus materials available to all community ~xpe,rimenters, or experimenters in communities. But that-was a means. The end was the community work. It is true, however, th::n the means can cometo dominate even the best of ends. Thus, every move toward getting, •rather than building, has .to be carefully kept in perspective as a tool, and a minor one, lest it get the best of you and become a way of life rather than -a way to a ne~ life. Housing presents a striking example' of the difference between rights and responsibilities at a practical level. , Much of the current-organizing involving housing, among. people! who claim to be .seeking alternatives; is calculated, instead, to bolster existing systems even though it may peel· off a little from them. It's like this: if you organize to get housing for poor people through, for instance,?, tax-supported ' program, the organizing probably will be based upon th_e right of everyone to have.decent housing. _What that means, in truth, is that you are sa¥ing that some people have the right to housing that is paid for by someone else. In order to establish the right of some to have housing, someone else has to build it, or cause it to be built. The result may be desirable, at first glance; a bunch of houses for poor people. The second glance will show that the long-range effect is to shor.e up a system in which an underclass of non-productive people (tpey . didn't produce the houses) becomes more and more a client class, forever dependent upon the power of the state to exact, on their.behalf, c~rtain resources from,certain othe·r people. November 1978 RAIN Page i9 • by Karl Hess I understand that there is a romantic belief in s9me quarters that these resources are extracted from people with too much and given to people with too little. The truth should now be obvious. It is the productive w9rking class that pays the most for all social programs. The idle rich are -scarcely touched. But, worst of all, the problems of poverty are not touched at all. Poverty is cured by wealth and wealth is the result of productive ac1:ivity such as thinking, or material work'. We~lth that is produced simply by claiming a right to wealth is no more healthy in the long run than wealth produced mereiy by a state-sanctioned claim on the title ownership of property-whether earned or not. (The old Populists usep to launch tirades against the two great classes of parasites -millionaires and bums. The exercise of rights can make a bum out of anybody, if totally disconnected· from creativity. It, of course, makes bums out of millionaires too, but in .anesthetic rather than worka_day ~ense.) ' The contrast is to see the problem of housing as one in which the desirable goal is to turn people away from being merely consumers of housing toward being producers of housing. f, Money is usually not the thing standing in the way. Take an inner city neighborhood where most of the people are _welfare clients. They will remain welfare clients until they either get jobs or become otherwise.productive. My own . preference is to work for a time when no one has a job, when everyone works either independently or in groups democratically orgli.nized by the participants-equal partnerships, co-ops, whatever. A basic economic fact of any welfare neighborhood is that there is disposable income within it. The fact is made clear by the proliferation _in su'ch neighborhoods of liquor stores, juQk food sellers, dope pushers, etc. I understand all of the arguments about poor people living lives of such misery that only drunkenness or appetite pleasures make it bearable. I also understand that unless poor people become productive through' mostly their own efforts, as suggested by such people as Jes~e Jackson and, formerly, by the Black Panthers, that they will remain poor-.even if pleasured by_drink, dope and fast food,. continued• J '
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