Hopelessness: the Engine of Hope

Our lives are not our own.
From the film Cloud Atlas

 [W]hen the early Spanish explorers first saw what non-Native Americans now call the Grand Canyon, there was nothing in their conceptual repertoire – in their language – to enable them to perceive its dimensions accurately. For example, they thought the Colorado River, at the bottom of the canyon, was only a few hundred feet away. As a result, foot soldiers in full armor were ordered to reconnoiter the area – to run down and have a look around – and to the surprise of their countrymen, they never returned. This example illustrates how conception (what we think) precedes perception (what we experience through our senses) and how our expectations, beliefs, and values – all of which are carried by language – determine the way we experience our world.
Critical Theory Today, Lois Tyson (2006:257)

So, friends, we are about to enter 2013. Predictions are a dime a dozen, but there seems to be a fairly robust consensus emerging that the coming year will be very turbulent indeed. 

I don’t like predictions, nor do I seek them out; there is an inevitability to history, a vastness, that renders all prediction casuistry and chicanery in my opinion. And yet we would not be human if we did not try to impose sense on past, present and future events. Perception is interpretation, and interpretation is rooted in conceptual frameworks. Broad consensus is a vital battle ground, particularly in hierarchical, state-based social systems in which an ‘elite’ seeks to control as much as possible. Prediction is thus in part ongoing propaganda for controlling and shepherding ever-emerging consensus, to define ‘reality’ as it unfolds before our eyes. Currently, many pundits not normally given to ‘doom and gloom’ are predicting just that: doom. It is as if we are being spoon fed hopelessness under a glittering veneer of ‘business as usual’. Or it is as if we are selling despair to ourselves due to some collective cognitive dissonance we can’t (won’t) quite perceive. 

This is all standard fare, but deeper change is afoot than simple economic turbulence leading painfully but inexorably back to ‘normal’ – growth, Growth, GROWTH! of the economic realm. I believe we are transitioning from primarily ego-based interpretations of ‘reality’ – in which fear, control, ‘selfishness’ and ‘competition’ rule – to a paradigm in which we are far more consciously aware of the ego’s role in our perceptions and can therefore operate/react with greater consciousness and wisdom. A paradigm is emerging in which the sense that “our lives are not our own” is not reflexively dismissed as ‘socialism’, and money (whatever that is) is not a commodity to be hoarded, but a non-valuable record of economic transactions fostering cooperation and inventiveness in the interest of a growing commons which serves each ‘individual’. We are leaving behind one sense of what freedom is all about, and developing a different, perhaps more mature definition of freedom. Also up for redefinition are wealth, value and success; dessert, reward and punishment; obligation and responsibility; health and much else besides. We are not going through a simple economic downturn, but this has been true since 2007, and actually far earlier. 

There is no hope for the old system. Hopelessness is thus justified. I suspect many of us feel it. For many across the world, conditions are so terrible only suicide offers any hope of release from the pain. Indeed, hopelessness is pervasive enough, the absence of a clear, alternative vision palpable enough, to make it sometimes seem like the only possible way is down, forever. For that which is dying, the only way is down, but it is precisely this death which feeds the birth of the new. As Charles Eisenstein argues in his latest article, we are in the space between stories. On one hand we see decadence, decay, oppression, fascism, open corruption and criminality unimaginable even months ago. On the other we dimly perceive something vague. The former thus seems far more real, far more worthy of our attention. If we gaze at it for too long, we panic, do whatever we can to prevent its collapse. This is hopelessness, this is desperation. The new, the unknowable alternative, is so vague, so silly, so untried and untested, so impossible, it cannot inspire us. Hopelessness wins.

Ralph Boes* was interviewed in Basel on the 23^rd December this year (a few days ago). He describes a hopeless situation in Germany due to Hartz IV. He says many pregnant mothers on Hartz IV have committed suicide in despair. The pressure from the state system is so inhuman, so counter to the realities of people’s lives and the job market, that death offers the only release. And yet, just as we recently passed the winter solstice, just as we know 2013 is upon us, just as we know 2012 cannot be revived, we know spring must come. Of course, tired clichés aside, there is the matter of the timescale, there are the significant matters of war, environmental stress, fascism, dystopia. I agree that these are precarious times; I am not here selling some assured transition to flower-filled meadows alive with love and life. Boes uses the analogy of marching across a frozen sea. The weather warms, the ice breaks. For a while, marching forwards still makes sense, and swimming remains unimaginable, foolish. But at some point, after enough ice has melted, swimming becomes the only option. We are just about at that moment, and as we abandon what was once solid, what once stretched out all around us as far as the eye could see, we are called upon to be inventive and creative, and to begin imagining the new as we build it. Not just fringe loons like myself, but everybody, all talents, all perspectives. In this sense, we are becoming the 100%. 

Just as the Spaniards did not have the conceptual experience required to gauge the scale of the Grand Canyon, so we cannot appreciate the task in front of us. We are our habits, our patterns of thought, our beliefs. In this sense, the old travels with us into the new and does not die, but is transformed. Indeed, old and new are little more than opinions, perspectives. There are no endings, no beginnings, only ongoing emergence, and our lives are not our own. Hopelessness gives rise to hope as surely as Yin and Yang birth their opposites at each of their extremes. But hopelessness and hope are, at one level, ego-effects (as are all ‘opposites’), and dwelling on them, as on predictions, misses the point. How many of us make it through the turbulence is anyone’s guess, but that’s not the issue either, and applies equally to good and bad times. It’s not about individuals in the ego-sense, in the ego-perspective, and never really has been. We are wholly caught up in, and are generated by the infinite interconnectedness of everything, tasked with somehow making the ‘best’ of our lot, our ‘fate’, our biology, our history, come what may. 

There is free will, but it is not the ego’s plaything as ego would have us believe. Perhaps Jung had it right after all; “Free will is doing gladly that which we must do”, but I think there is more to it than that. As we are forced to let go of what we once held precious, as we jump unwillingly into what appears to be an inhospitable sea of endless uncertainty, the deeper meaning of free will becomes apparent; it is rooted in (and perhaps generates) circumstance, reflex, reaction, experience, bondage, limitation. And yet there in the ego’s blind spot, something gives birth to creativity and new forms, and we can be privileged to be part of that as one gift of interconnectedness. I like to think of this mystery as free will, but it is not ‘ours’ to wield. I see our egos as being on the receiving end of free will, not in any way as masters of it. From the ego’s point of view, ‘true’ free will is thus a paradoxical and magical thing, but a magic which destroys as it creates – forests, people, cities, civilisations … everything, causing both suffering and bliss, tragedy and good fortune, suicide and survival, hope and hopelessness, blandness and vibrancy: binary opposites as ego-effects.

To the extent that binary opposites exist at all, it can be helpful to see them as creators of both unity (“We”) and diversity (“I”). Our perceptions/experiences thereof, rooted in and shaped by slowly changing conceptual frameworks, are as much a part of their composition as is their endless, autopoietic spiralling. As the African word “Ubuntu” has it, I am because we are. I believe this wisdom is going to be increasingly helpful to us as we navigate the uncertainty ahead, as we deal with the exhausting see-saw of hopelessness and hope, as we build the ‘new’ from the collapse of the ‘old’.

The title of this article is thus deceptive, the content’s message purposefully muddled in a contortion of contradictions. Regardless of current or impending horror, regardless of imminent bliss or utopia, our lives are not our own. And yet we are indeed confronted by a daunting transition to something potentially ‘better’, we are indeed called to act, to be agents for positive change and to be creative through a transition that is, because of its enormity, very painfully disruptive. We must act despite the fact that this transition is far mightier than any of us as ‘individuals’, even though our actions can seem futile, a drop in the ocean. 

In this convoluted, long-winding way, I wish you what is most appropriate and beneficial both to you and us for the times ahead, and a creative relationship with your ever-changing circumstances.

Brace yourselves, it's going to be a bumpy ride. 

*Ralph Boes' 90% sanctioning was revoked towards the end of November. According to the employment agency, there had been an unspecified legal complication/error. Boes is eating normally again. We can reasonably read into this that the state does not want a public martyr in the Hartz IV colosseum and knows it is on shaky legal ground when it comes to Hartz IV.

Ralph Boes Update Plus

This is a translation of the beginning of an email I received recently from Ralph Boes:

“Berlin, 26th October, 2012

Dear friends,

It has happened at last.

After challenging the Hartz IV system via my Brandbrief, and after those I challenged tried for a long time to ignore me, I am now to be harshly sanctioned.

For starters, a mere 90% reduction of the absolute minimum needed to live! That works out to a princely 37.40€ (instead of 374.00€) per month to live from.

The punishment can, however, be made harsher still. A 100% cut, plus loss of health insurance and home, is in their power.”

Of course, this is what Ralph Boes wanted to bring about, yet I fear for him. He begins his political, public and state-imposed starvation on 1^st November, when the sanctioning takes effect (he asserts it is not a hunger strike, but a public demonstration of the violence of Hartz IV). He hopes to attract media attention. I wonder if he will get it, and what quality it might have should the media pay attention.

Should the authorities escalate and stop paying his rent too (as is their ‘right’), should they stop paying his health insurance, he would be as the other homeless of Germany, unable to get a job for lack of an address, with no right to any medical care whatsoever, and with the payments still owed monthly for health insurance now amassing an enormous debt to be repaid should they ever find work again. A 100% sanctioning is thus, more or less, a death sentence, an eviction from society (if you have no one around to look after you). 

Boes is a brave man. His fight to expose and right the injustices of this inhuman and unconstitutional system is noble. I hope he and his lawyers can take this battle all the way, and win.

Boes is at pains to point out that his punishment does not represent the will of employment agency employees, and calls for his supporters not to be angry with them. This is the machination of a system unable to adjust intelligently to new realities, primary among which is the cold fact that there is not enough work to employ sufficient numbers of people at a decent wage. If we are to live sustainably, efficiently and intelligently, we must first accept that our obsession with wages for labour, any old labour regardless of its consequences, is doing more harm than good. Again, it is not that there is no work to be done, but that there is less and less paid word to be done. Were the tax, benefits and money systems to be made sensible, transparent and simple, there would be even less paid work. However, what today constitutes paid work in this money system within the context of complex and obtuse tax law, and what may well become paid work in an updated system, is another matter.
 

My own interest remains transition to a resource-based economy, whatever that turns out to be. My definition of that transition is the concerted and purposeful demotion of money and promotion of wealth. Such a transition will require and generate new definitions of money and thus societal value, definitions we can only crudely sketch out at this distance. Today, in the UK, around 20% of employed people earn less than a living wage. Spain has reached 25% unemployment in its official statistics, with youth unemployment at around 50%. Greece is in free fall. Italy is teetering on the brink, ditto Portugal. Germany is not anywhere near as robust as its surface reputation would have you believe, and France is hardly problem free. Elsewhere in the world, the story is similar, with very few exceptions. Perpetual economic growth, which is basically the conversion of ecosystems and society into goods and services, is impossible on a finite planet. Debt-based, usury-based money systems require perpetual economic growth to function; if they are not expanding, they are collapsing, and that is a deadly design flaw. Add to this rapidly increasingly technological innovations (today only 163 million of the planet’s 7 billion humans are employed in factories worldwide, and this number is shrinking fast), the need for radical change is immediately apparent. (Did I mention peak everything?)

Many know it. The Pirate Party in Germany (Die Piraten) have accepted the need for a guaranteed income. Mainstream parties are in consultation with them or have their own proposals. The Vatican is seeking to become the first country to initiate a guaranteed income. Radical change is in the air, and yet resistance to new ideas is still strong. As I have argued in these pages before, we are the system. We are blocking ourselves, frightened of the unknown. We demand a perfect alternative, and failing perfection assert there is no alternative. But I have wittered on and on about this, and frankly, I am beginning to bore myself. Either we make it, or we don’t.

About five years ago, I posted on The Guardian’s website that we need a new cultural understanding of wealth. This was before I had heard anything of The Venus Project or a resource-based economy. My position has not changed. We still confuse money for wealth, at ‘best’ seeing money as an accurate—thanks to the divine magic of the free market price system—representation of societal consensus on where value lies, and how society should motivate itself and make decisions on what should get done. To survive the next few decades (time is really running out), we must redefine wealth via new money systems, new money distribution mechanisms, and a fundamentally different relationship with this beautiful planet. As New York drowns, as Spain and Greece burn with others waiting to join them in the fire, as the US wastes resources on yet another razzmatazz election, as billions struggle with hunger and deprivation and further billions live lives of horrible indignity and meek desperation, and as a shrinking few cannot decide whether to party like its 1999 or Do Something, we are in the middle of the very difficult challenge of profoundly changing how we live, what we want, and what we understand. Somehow we must develop new understandings and want something very different, something which allows diversity to thrive and be celebrated, while engendering cooperation and cohesion on an unprecedented scale. 

It isn’t going to be easy. No one has all the answers. Indeed, there is no Solution, no Silver Bullet, only the recognition that a new direction must be trod, almost blindly. But it is not the destination that matters—there is none—, rather the manner and steel of our departure.

Of Turbulence and See-Saws

It’s been settling down for me, turbulently, while ‘out there’ in the rest of the human world turbulence spreads like a cancer, warped and guided by the anomalies of the Olympics, politics as usual, media as usual, tragedy, terror, war, miracle, humdrum etc. As I repeatedly say, This Time It’s Different, and more than the usual grade of difference too. This is a personal impression I can unscientifically validate by looking for good news and bad news on alternate days to set up the see-saw of turbulence I experience internally, but I suspect a power struggle within the status quo is indeed raging, one which threatens (This Time It’s Different) to cut to the very core of the status quo, and rip it apart. The attempt to rescue the core elitist extractive dynamic (a.k.a. the state) via ‘reform’ risks breaking that project. Yet riskier still is blind adherence to the thinking which has generated this mess; the sociopathic pursuit of monetary profit and power for its own sake, an addiction to hollow control and self-aggrandisement I see as a cultural sickness clearly manifested in our politics, business and consumerist culture.

Events see-saw back and forth. The status quo farts out some new spin, some new fear mongering (sustaining an atmosphere of pervasive fear is so very important) to supress the surging emergence of the new paradigm, while within the strongholds of that very status quo, cracks appear. Articles in The Economist, The Financial Times, The Independent, The Guardian and a white paper from the IMF have identified the debt-based, high powered money/credit money system as responsible for our global financial woes, as calls for a guaranteed income find friends within the status quo in increasing numbers. This amounts to an identification of commercial banks as the primary ‘cause’ (let’s say outlet) of the financial crisis, and an acknowledgement that there is not enough ‘economic’ work for all, that technological unemployment is indeed one of our era’s key challenges. Radical is the new normal.

Recently, the CDU (Germany’s conservative/right wing political party) released a paper proclaiming a guaranteed income cheaper than the current social welfare system. The party’s Thüringen president, Dieter Althaus, is calling for 800€ per month per citizen. In Holland, a new party (Soeverein Onafhankelijke Pioniers Nederland, SOPN, “Sovereign Independent Pioneers of the Netherlands”) has formed to fight the upcoming elections on the 12^th September, and they have guaranteed income as their central policy. In Germany, The Pirates have fully adopted the idea, while the left’s traditional opposition appears to be softening. Ralph Boes (who is about to go on hunger strike in Berlin after being sanctioned 60% of his welfare, starting September) had a conversation with one of the left’s more prominent and powerful politicians for whom he laid out the VAT flat tax proposal as a means of financing a guaranteed income. The politician had never heard of the idea, and was apparently very excited about it. The left worships labour, and thus has traditionally been opposed to guaranteed income, until now. Brazil already has a guaranteed income enshrined in its constitution, is only lacking the legal and financial apparatus to implement it (a pilot study has shown amazing results). Across the political spectrum the idea is increasingly seen as the only way of saving the system. Which is dangerous.

Deep reform of the money system must, in my view, accompany a guaranteed income, as well as a very broad and open debate on the shallowness of consumerism. Not only is economic growth ad nauseum deadly, even if it were possible (as we culturally envision it: gadgets for all forever in ever growing quantities), it would destroy community and commons everywhere. Our current money system collapses if the economy is not growing, which is a terrible design flaw. But one of the many things that is changing, is our cultural relationship with consumption (in the US for example (2010 data), over 750,000 people live off-grid, a huge number). I believe more and more of us recognise the counterproductive addiction inherent in distracting ourselves with Entertainment and Gadgetry from the hollowness of our seemingly pointless lives. While we cannot know what the new vision/story will look like, we are surely looking for it, fumbling to define it, to bring it into being. So the danger of the misplaced and short sighted desire to reignite growth is perhaps not grave, yet we should stay alert to it.

And growing local food is finding strong support in ventures like Incredible Edible (spreading across the world as I write), which I find very exciting. A town in the Rheinland area in Germany (Andernach) has called itself the Edible Town (Die essbare Stadt (YouTube, German)). Fruit, vegetables and herbs in great variety grow all over the town, and anyone can harvest whatever they like. The entire project is sustained locally, with a mixture of volunteer work, 1€ jobs and local governmental funding. What I find most warming about such stories, is that the anticipated vandalism and other cynical abuse of the gesture (essentially free food for all) has not materialised. This is, for me, a reminder that people respond positively to generosity, to well-planned and well-executed endeavours to replenish the commons and strengthen community. Despite decades of community erosion, it is as if something in us is ready to take this idea up and run with it.

There are so many other positive things happening ‘out there’, but, like I said, this is a see-saw. What is dying (calcified elitism and exploitation as a perpetual growth dynamic) does not want to die, and will lash out, defend itself, attack all perceived threats as brutally as is required. And there are ecological and other environmental disasters awaiting us too. All is far from rosy, as a look at the world’s trouble spots will tell you. As I argued a while ago, the state can wait, while not being able to wait, which I see as an explosive tension. Yet it is the positive which inspires us towards new work, and from what I can see, the urge to the new is only growing. The cynical voices sound shriller and shriller, their arguments less convincing, die-hards are softening. A few weeks ago, Franz Hörmann (who’s star is on the rise again) addressed a conference of some 160 bankers, laying out his vision for a moneyless future, in which banks would act as repositories of business wisdom, working in partnership with the community to do what is best for the whole community. Hörmann said their response was enthusiastic. (And yes, business can be conducted without money as we know it. Business is simply about organising projects and harnessing human abilities into constructive action. A root and branch re-understanding of profit would go a long way in this department!)

Many in ‘power’ know this system is broken, and millions of ‘ordinary’ others too. A survey conducted by Die Zeit (a German newspaper, text in German) found roughly 80% of Germans want a new economics, principally one which needs no growth. Approximately 66% of Germans no longer trust market mechanisms to solve economic and financial problems. This is a sea change. What is needed, therefore, are practical and sensible steps out of this quagmire of self-annihilation towards a very different social agreement, vision, mode. Whatever ‘starts’ this change, will need to be quickly accompanied by other ideas. If ‘revolution’ indeed begins with a guaranteed income, it is up to us to press for deeper reform/revolution. One of the things a guaranteed income does give us, is time. Today, that is a precious resource. Imagine what Occupy could accomplish if they did not have to worry about money and jobs! Imagine what movements like Incredible Edible could accomplish. Imagine what types of volunteer work could flourish. 

There is no silver bullet, but I believe a guaranteed income is a very good ‘starting’ point. Accompanied by a revolution in the money system and attendant deep changes in our habits of consumption, this would indeed be, at least potentially, a set of measures to put us, culturally, on a path leading to a resource-based economics.

Update: Ralph Boes and My Busy Little Life

Hello all!

Oh, the irony. I step out of the machine only to bring the machine with me, an unwanted habit I am forced to maintain. Work has rather piled up of late, and since I ply new trade with new software to learn alongside its skills, I have had time for nothing but earning money--almost. As a newbie freelance translater, I have decided to make hay while the sun shines, and am doing well at it for the moment. This explains the paucity of posting in recent weeks. I still plan to cover how a guaranteed income might be financed, and will look at three alternatives as soon as I can.

On Friday evening (27th April), I made time to attend a meeting of the Citizens' Initiative Guaranteed Income Group, a ragtag bunch of hopefuls struggling against the steady current of stodgy and ignorant mainstream opinion. As a ragtag hopeful myself, I felt quite at home among them, though the intricacies of holding meetings in strict accordance with the German state's multifaceted requirements left me cold. They have a wierd voting procedure with arcane German terminology I have yet to learn.

Anyway, Ralph Boes was there informing his troops on the latest. He is still receiving Hartz IV income, still contravening all Hartz IV laws, still asking to be sanctioned, still full of fire and passion. His letter demanding to know why he has not been sanctioned remains unanswered. The group's next move on the Hartz IV front will be to set up a website listing sanctioned Hartz IV people who have died from the ravages of life on the streets. There are dead. In a real sense, being booted out of society because you can't find work (900,000 "customers" were sanctioned in 2011) is a slow genocide. As I pointed out in earlier posts on this topic, all applicants (defined as "customers" because the employment bureaus are in fact limited companies, they are not government agencies) are forced to sign an incorporation agreement before all else. If they do not, they are sanctioned. If you have children to feed, you sign away your rights, rather tear your family apart.

This model is attracting attention across Europe. It is a scandal, and I greatly admire Ralph Boes for his courage and determination. His reason for demanding sanctioning is so that he can starve in public. I was deeply moved to think this most humane of humans would put himself through that agony for others. He would starve in as public a way as possible, weighing himself every day on a scales in the street, communicate as often as possible with whichever newpaper expressed interest (interest is definitely growing), and thus draw attention to this hideous situation. It is utterly immoral to punish people, threaten them with death, kill them, simply because our economic power and other creativity has rendered the majority of human labour redundant. Murderers and paedophiles are treated better; at least they get home and board.

So watch out, fellow humans! This model is coming to a nation near you soon, and it takes people of Ralph Boes' courage and humanity to even begin to fight it. The state is a system born of an ethic which no longer applies. But it is a system with enormous self-sustaining momentum; it will grind all before it to dust and never think it is doing anything wrong. It is a machine evolved for growth and uniformity; inlexible, class- and welath-based hierarchies; anonymous violence and stubborn intolerance. And yes, the so-called Market is an embdeed part of its whirring machinery.

I hope to have more time for blogging after mid-May. Until then...

Ralph Boes, My New Hero (Part II)

(Part I)

We left our antagonistic hero with the task of drawing up the legally tight yet humane contract he would present to the employment agency at some reasonable later date. Three days after his suggestion to draw up said contract, he received an official letter from his employment officer asking him politely to put his money where his mouth is. It is far from uninteresting that the monolithic state can apparently be forced to deal with a human being as a unique individual, though the degree to which it can be so flexible is limited, as laid out below. The cracks, however, are showing.

Without further ado, I shall translate said contract for you in full:

Goals:

Considering the fact that industrialisation of human labour frees ever more people from work while paying ever less for it, the following goals are to be agreed:

The release of Herrn Ralph Boes from the coercion to ground his life’s meaning either in earning a living or in having to find paid work;

guarantee of the financial livelihood he requires for the constitutionally chartered right to exist and participation in social life;

recognition of the special social relevance of work which carries intrinsic meaning and has value in its immediate social utility, work which is carried out freely, self-determinedly, and as a labour of love (of cooperation, others, culture, environment …) and not (in the first instance) for remuneration;

furtherance of freedom and self-determination as founded in constitutional law, in particular also

1. respect and encouragement of human dignity,
2. the right to unimpeded personal development,
3. protection of the family,
4. freedom of movement across all Germany,
5. freedom to choose a career and the forbidding of compulsory labour,
6. the sanctity of the home;

and furtherance of individual creativity, such that release from work as brought about by rationalisation becomes a blessing opening new vistas for work, while holding the standard of living in Germany high, though production be outsourced. (Creativity is the raw material of the future -- Adrienne Goehle.)

Responsibilities of the Job Centre:

The job centre recognises constitutional law as well as those basic rights applicable to it in its realm of authority, unreservedly, and diligently fulfils, as an organ of the state, its constitutional duty to unconditionally respect and protect human dignity.

It recognises Ralph Boes as a free and honourable member of society, and works actively to protect his dignity from all forms of discrimination, sanctioning, and paternalism.

The Job Centre helpfully accompanies and supports Herr Boes through his freely chosen career or activity—as long as he meets the necessary requirements thereof, and as long as he so desires.

The sanctions in paragraphs 31, 31a, 31b and 32 SGB II shall not be used, since they invalidate core human rights and contravene constitutional law.

Bureaucratic appointments and necessities shall be kept to a minimum.

Responsibilities of Herrn Ralph Boes:

Herr Ralph Boes commits to meet not only claims made on him by his social life, but also those claims arising from his own life (also inner) and from his personal field, whatsoever it be, comprehensively and freely, and so doing, to also respect and protect his own dignity as well as that of living and non-living things around him.

As far as circumstances seem in want of improvement, he shall assist in their improvement with all available means.

In this context, Herr Ralph Boes continues to make himself available, as before, to hold, without remuneration, public lectures and seminars on guaranteed income. He urgently offers this service to workers at the job centre.

Notes on legal assistance:

No one is entitled to dispossess another of his or her dignity or legal rights! Whoever so acts makes him- or herself liable to prosecution, even if he or she acts on behalf of or is contracted by a governmental agency.

[…snip…]

Protect yourself as a worker at the job centre from recourse claims and actively respect human rights…

I’ve cut the rest off, since it quotes long passages from various legal sources, and because the core message of the contract’s final section is clear from the two paragraphs I’ve translated here. Boes is taking the fight to the state by reminding anyone enforcing the constitutionally illegal aspects of Hartz IV that they are not immune to prosecution, no matter how powerful they now feel themselves to be. Oppression cannot work forever.

All in all, I see this as a stealth quasi-guaranteed income through the back door. As the Germans say, from behind through the chest and into the eye! Of course, this is a contract which deals explicitly with unemployment benefit, but its terms are to a large degree those of guaranteed income (more on this in a following post), especially as it attempts to redefine what work is, and what work ought to be respected by the state. Guaranteed income frees the individual to do meaningful work; unemployment benefit is given only to those either looking for or taking on paid work, regardless of its social value. As the German constitution is founded on the dignity of the individual, so the logic behind the growing pressure towards a guaranteed income rests on individual human dignity, which must supersede monetary or waged-labour considerations. And at the heart of that assertion, which I fully support, is the powerful implication that money cannot measure value, or rather, that the market-based price-system cannot measure value flexibly enough in today’s conditions.

Boes points out the simple fact that if someone forces you to do work he or she deems worthy (simply because it is paid work), that if you do not you will be made homeless and hungry, such is coercion and is therefore prosecutable. He cites a case in Duesseldorf, in which a woman was told to continue as a prostitute in order to carry on receiving Hartz IV. After an enormous public outcry, she was allowed to stop prostituting herself, though she was sanctioned. I have yet to look into the details of this, but the point is clear. What matters is the money. Money first, dignity (might maybe arise) as a possible second.

So, Boes mailed his new contract, then had to wait twenty days for a reply. The employment agency sent back the old contract, though with two important differences. Under “Responsibilities of Ralph Boes” (a slightly different title in the agency’s contract) appeared the following sentence:

Herr Ralph Boes commits to meet not only claims made on him by his social life, but also those claims arising from his own life (also inner) and from his personal field, whatsoever it be, comprehensively and freely.

After that, the usual blah blah about restricted movement and other restrictions were there, but that sentence made it through, like a snowdrop heralding spring (to borrow from Boes). This is an amazing concession, a clear victory, though not yet by any means enough. Boes took his time before responding, and responded in length and with much fire. His letter is too long to translate here in its entirety, but the following section warrants your attention:

Dear Frau xxxxxxxxx,

I would urge you to never again sign nor even to present for signature such an “incorporation agreement”, as you have again presented here, since you thereby make yourself liable even by presentation thereof, and even more with each signature (or even application), to possible prosecution.

It would be far better to step into the domain of the Hartz IV people, than to allow yourself to be led, from the low level of security of your own livelihood, to adopt a constitution-contravening, inhumane, unethical and prosecutable position. Or, apply yourself earnestly, as required by your obligation to remonstrate (!), and pass decisions not conforming to the constitution up the chain of command. The higher, the better.

Other than in the DDR, in which there were hardly any explicit laws against injustice, German laws in effect since 1949 proclaim Hartz IV as prosecutable. It and its executors can therefore be retroactively punished back to its first hour of life. Today, actions against human rights can even be pursued at the European and international level.

The neoliberal, exploitative, inhumane era of Schröder, Hartz and Ackerman is over. The tide is turning quickly now. In only a short time you will all be standing in the dock. Even the lawyers of your house will not be able to protect you, for they were instrumental in undoing human rights — they will have to defend themselves too.

Them, ladies and gentlemen, is fighting words.

The second difference was that the contract arrived on Boes’ doormat unsigned. Typically, the contract arrives in duplicate signed by some representative, to then be signed by the “customer”, sent back, with a pre-signed copy remaining in the “customer’s”  possession. His employment officer’s unwillingness to sign speaks volumes.

Also voluminous is the silence. As yet I am aware of no reaction from the state. On the 16th March, Boes sent a reminder to his employment office, asking why he is still receiving Hartz IV payments. Why has he not been sanctioned? He wants to know whether; a) they have written a new law for him and him alone, or b) if they have written new law for all Germans. Again, no reply as yet (April 7, 2012).

If only my non-German speaking readers could hear the passion with which Boes tells his tale and reads out his letters. What I find most inspiring about him is the compassionate fire he is filled with. I hope his example is as inspirational to others as it has been for me. My own far smaller risk has given me many panic-filled nights, made me question my intelligence and honour. Ralph Boes’ example lends me the confidence and strength to fight on. Make no mistake, we are at war against a system and its defenders, whose former pragmatic and practical role is dead. Until we join full voice and in good knowledge of our position and its connotations the battle Boes (and many others) have begun, we will continue to be mere cogs ground down by great but quickly crumbling wheels. No need for foolhardy heroism. Do what you can.

As Boes says, the tide is turning, even though the status quo strains to make it seem otherwise. That said, the nakedness of their criminality is a sure sign of desperation. That, (and/)or unbridled sociopathy. If the latter, the great majority of us, endowed as we are with empathy, need to do what we can to put together a far freer and more open system in which the sociopathic few cannot exploit and extract, with institutional impunity, the dignity and labour of the many.

I will leave you with the delicious tidbit that, late last year, a certain Herr Johannes Ponada drew up his own “incorporation agreement” (as per Boes’), added freedom of movement across Germany (still denied Boes) and it was accepted. Another gentlemen in Peine fights for the same dignity, but has not made the same inroads. Not yet.

Germany, for all its labyrinthine bureaucracy, has a constitution which may well prove the soil from which a far more humane and sensible system can arise.

Ralph Boes, My New Hero (Part I)

[16.12.2012, corrected first sentence, which stated that Ralph Boes is a member of Die Piraten.]

Ralph Boes is a philosopher, author, was briefly a member of the Pirate Party (Die Piraten), and currently lives in Berlin. He has recently dedicated his life to bringing The System down. This he is doing by touring Germany and lecturing wherever people want to hear what he has to say. He charges nothing for this, but does it full time. The money he needs to financially sustain his chosen path he draws from the state under the Hartz IV programme. This programme does not permit you to work as you choose, but rather forces any type of work, often for €1 an hour, on those in need of its ‘largesse’. If you don’t work, you don’t eat, and the state gets to define, tightly, what is work, and what is not.

Some background on Hartz IV. Peter Hartz is an ex-chief human resources officer for Volkswagen, and a member of the political party the SPD. The SPD introduced the Hartz unemployment reforms in the mid 2000s under Chancellor Schroeder. Hartz IV is the lowest level thereof, Hartz I the highest. And though the idea of helping people back into work is noble enough, Hartz IV is so draconian it actually contravenes the German constitution, the first line of which reads, “Human dignity is inviolable; it is the obligation of all state authority to respect and protect it.” Hartz IV cannot respect human dignity, since it proceeds from the highly dubious premise that any work at all, no matter how poorly paid, meaningless or socially harmful, is better than ‘lazing around doing nothing.’ Working as a sweeper at a sweet factory is work, raising your children is not. Hence, a person who signs on the dotted line of the “Eingliederungsvereinbarung” (“incorporation agreement”—actually, it’s not an agreement at all; refusal to sign incurs sanctioning, whereupon the contract is forced into effect anyway, just as a prisoner is forced to comply with prison rules he has not freely consented to) must take whatever work is given, or be sanctioned (which begins with a 30% reduction of income). Signing this ‘agreement’ also means you forgo your constitutional right to dignity (and other rights) set out in the constitution. Being sanctioned three times typically means becoming homeless and penniless, yet still you must adhere to the ‘agreement’ you may not even have signed. The numbers of homeless are rising in Germany, while, just as in the Great Depression, the stores are full.

Sarkozy and other European countries are impressed with Hartz IV, and want to implement it at home. It appears to keep employment up, gives the oiks something to do at very low wages, and thus keeps one competitive.What’s not to like?

Ralph Boes ‘works’ as a self-employed, full time volunteer, telling any who will listen, all over Germany, that Hartz IV contravenes the German constitution, and that a guaranteed income of €1,000 for adults and €500 for children should be introduced immediately. Hartz IV forbids work as a self-employed, full time volunteer, and also forbids leaving the city in which you are domiciled. As such, Mr Boes is breaking every Hartz IV law, and should be sanctioned. Indeed, it is this he is inviting, but his eloquence—combined with the spirit of the constitution, perhaps—is producing interesting effects. He is (for now) silencing the state, and beginning to generate a following.

Boes’ focus on the German constitution’s foundational principle—that the state’s force must be deployed above all to protect and respect the dignity of each and every individual—is key, and, in my opinion, historically vital at this juncture. The state, thus far, has been an elitist system which operates for its own ends, which have been those of the elite, logically enough. The German constitution can therefore be seen as an anti-state and pro-democracy framework, since it places the individual right at the heart of state concern (not ‘The People’, but the dignity of each individual; no racism possible). That is the core value of democracy, and, as the state need not be democratic, indeed has yet to be democratic (for want of a democratic money system), the German constitution is in fact a threat to the state form as we know it. That Germany is becoming, as Boes says, the China of Europe, tells us very clearly what the money elites think of Germany’s constitution.

(As a side note, on 28 February of this year, the German constitutional court ruled the European Stability Mechanism “in large part” unconstitutional (source), and yet only a fool would bet against the mighty forces of state and money. The ESM grants a single entity financial power which would shame Hitler.)

Boes officially began his attack on June 7, 2011, by delivering an open letter (“Brandbrief”; literally “burning letter”) to: Chancellor Angela Merkel, then President Christian Wulff, Secretary of Labour Ursula von der Leyen, the Director of the Employment Agency F. J. Weise, and the manager of his local job centre, Thomas Schneider (you can read it in English here). The following paragraphs give a good flavour of Boes’ style and thinking:

At first glance, Hartz IV is nothing more than a well-intentioned attempt by the state to help those who have fallen out of employment to both survive and find their way back to work. The attempt is respectable and fully corresponds with the constitution. One could just leave them on the streets.

No less respectable—and at first glance understandable—is the goal of providing just enough support to enable self-help, in accordance with therapeutic principles. And it inspires high regard in an observer to see how much money has been dedicated, not only to ensuring a basic standard of living, but also to financially assist ‘reactivation’ and ‘re-qualification’ for those in need of such help.

But no matter how titanic the efforts, the results therefrom can only be a disappointment. The attempt to encourage self-help is wrong at its base. Our problem is not the unemployed, but rather the changed circumstances of production.

In the 1970s, perhaps even in the early 80s, the sources of the problem of unemployment may well have been different. They were to be found in the individual, since in the old Federal Republic, employees were sought desperately in all work areas.

Had we, at that time, given the unemployed the chance to change or advance their careers, as we offer them today, they would have been helped by such support to get involved in life again, instead of merely stagnating in that stable welfare system. Likely such measures would have delivered much. Then, the step out of unemployment would have been a step into a vibrant, meaningful—and as a rule well paid—working life.

How different it is today. The employment market is more than saturated. Today’s unemployed are not generally problem cases, on the edge of life because they themselves are somehow damaged and in need of therapy. The great majority of them are unemployed due to the enormous productivity of machines. The shelves are full of a great variety of goods, in amounts beyond anything humanity has hitherto witnessed, without need of human labour: that is the problem.

My questions on this last point are these: Why should we demand human labour remain the only way a population may acquire money, and, by logical extension, push on with perpetually growing economic consumption, when neither are necessary, and both are harmful? What good is it to adhere to obviously outdated concepts of work and reward when doing so threatens our existence? Whom does this blind insistence serve?

Ladies and gentlemen, we are stuck in a rut. On the one hand, we have sociopathic beneficiaries of this rut seeking to drive it ever on, come hell or high water. On the other, we have those incapable of imagining human dignity might be found in what they think of as laziness, or in motherhood, or in travel, or conversation, friendship, poetry, music, etc. On this second group history has much to say; multiple human cultures have wrestled with the problem of work and free riders enjoying the fruits of others’ labour. This time it’s different. Instead of slaves, we have machines. We can neither pay machines, nor could they go shopping if we did pay them. We should be demanding more ‘leisure’, not because we are ‘lazy bums’ (we aren’t), but because the circumstances demand it. Boes again:

We are reacting to the wrong time, treating yesterday’s sickness (which we didn’t even treat yesterday), while not seeing today’s. Like a doctor certain a patient has a lung disease whereas in truth there is insufficient air, we treat the unemployed with instruments long outdated, and through their misuse, turn them into instruments of torture.

The crux of the open letter is found in the following paragraphs, which read to me like a declaration of war:

From today, I openly resist every imposition on me by the state to accept any work I consider meaningless, and refuse to obey any absurd rule presented to me by any governmental agency. I reject too the fixation with “gainful employment”, long since proven illusory by reality.

I demand an unconditional right to a free, self-determined life, which I shall dedicate to any activity I myself decide is meaningful, not one exogenously prescribed for me — even if I am forced by economic and political realities to claim Hartz IV support.

I call all work, which arises out of an inner and sincere human wish, holy,

• regardless of whether it is carried out externally or internally,
• and regardless of whether it enables “earning”.

This is his declaration of intent, which I find part Paine, part Schiller. Indeed, after I listened to him interviewed, I said to my wife, “In this man, Germany has her second Schiller”; highly educated, fearless, unprejudiced and blessed with the common touch. Schiller, of course, had no Internet. Here’s hoping Ralph Boes can reach more people more effectively and immediately than Schiller managed, as he was hounded from safe house to safe house during his last ailing years.

Anyway, it is obvious, both from the letter and, e.g., his giving unannounced lectures on guaranteed income to staff at various Berlin job centres, that Herr Boes is unafraid of the sanctions he seeks. Not only that, he is also a patiently passionate man determined to take this fight as far as it can humanly be taken. He has buckets of courage backed up with deep training in philosophy and equally deep familiarity with the details of the relevant aspects of German constitutional law.

The state reacted with caution to the letter. Boes had to wait an additional six weeks for his (at that time) imminent interview at the job centre. He arrived to be directed to a pretty and highly competent Hartz IV advisor, whom he had never seen before. She informed him that whatever he writes in the outside world has no relevance in the job centre. A normal interview was to be conducted.

They went through the motions. Boes refused, once again, to sign the “Eingliederungsvereinbarung”. He insisted he was a self-employed, full time volunteer in the services of guaranteed income, booked to give lectures right across Germany to audiences who could not afford to pay him. This status (self-employed, full time volunteer) cannot even be entered into the Hartz IV database, since it breaks all their laws. As the Germans love to say, “So geht’s nicht!” Impossible to translate without losing its stubborn tone, its palpably threadbare imagination, but it means, roughly, “That can’t work!” Boes was then offered the obligatory five jobs, which he summarily rejected. By rights he should have been sanctioned.

Herr Boes and Frau X thus reached the expected impasse. Boes resolved it by offering to draw up his own, more meaningful contract. She accepted, and off he went, unsanctioned.

It took him a while, and he only managed to draw it up with the help of lawyers and others who all drafted and edited the document over the Internet over a period of weeks late last year, but complete the contract he did. It, and the so-far conclusion of this story, will be the subject matter of my next post. Stay tuned!

(Part II)