benny

You seem to forget inheritance.

Being proud of having been the first to appropriate (natural) wealth is I think at the root of welfare bashing. To me, welfare has to be conceived as compensation due to late comers who have no longer access to the best properties.

Basically Madoff will die as an inmate because he was a cynic and opportunist. Redistributing financial wealth from the new to the old is a nonstarter. Redistributing wealth the other way around is what welfare is all about.

Recall: to be a welfare recipient, you have to be the owner of a specific citizenship.

A free man is a rentier (owner), not a worker.

Slaves are full of irony, but only in their precious little private domain.

How would you call someone who pretends to ignore the fact that the Labor Theory of Value has been replaced, several decades ago, by the Law of Demand and Offer? To me, he may be called a cynic.

More cynic than the Bush–Cheney teem, you die.

Thanks! By not being outrage by my views on work, I think one is proving he is not a frightened opportunist and cynic. To me, those who still value work in their public discourses are mainly exploiters (rentiers capitalists) or would-be exploiters.

I think the whole economy is nothing more than an illusion that is used by those persons occupying the highest social positions to prevent the masses from overthrowing them. To me, neither labour nor automation is economically necessary. The main goal of communist China is political; right now, it wants to capture Taiwan. To achieve that China has to buy the silence of the USA. So, China has accumulated huge amount of US dollars to be able to blackmail the USA over Taiwan independence. Chinese workers are only a political instrument here.

I think the time has come for a new kind of political party because the world population seems desperate for a new kind of leader. To me, all the political leaders you mentioned have seduced the population by their high level of narcissism. Up until now politics has been nothing more than a disguised vanity fair. Following the idea of universal singular, the new kind of leader should be able to solve political conflicts by revealing and diffusing the emptiness that is hiding behind politicians’ vanity.

I agree with you. Leadership is fundamental and it seems to be missing in CAMP. That is why I have mentioned the concept of singular universal. My understanding of contemporary political philosophy is such that I consider a singular universal and a leader as synonymous. Jesus was a singular universal, the leader of a religious movement. Neo in the movie Matrix is also a singular universal, a leader. Leadership is paradoxical: people want a leader as scapegoat (when crisis occur). A people is made up of huge (unconscious) transfers of affects and the leader is someone occupying the locus from where these affects can be articulated.

The problem I see here is that raw materials can be moved around the world more easily than people. The welfare programs we have in Canada are intimately linked to the fact that Canada is full of natural resources and to the fact that getting the Canadian citizenship is hard. To solve this problem I think we have to look at economists that are also philosophers. In fact, the father of liberalism, John Locke, gave us the solution: the so-called lockean proviso. He has simply mentioned at what conditions someone can appropriate a natural resource.

Yes Oleg times have changed. Anthropologists have shown that our ancestors had no concept of work; performing religious rituals was the livelihood of our ancestors. We can still appreciate this by looking at the sacred cows in India.

I cannot agree more with you. To me, not only is work an outdated modern concept, but it was a stillborn concept right at the beginning of modernity. Right from its inception, work was entirely dominated by capital. Surplus work is thus the only concept that is sound. Work that is entirely captured by capital is surplus work. Surplus work is overwork but it is also much worst than that, it is work turned against workers. Work turned against workers is simply a kind of expropriation. In other words, work turned against workers accelerates the automation of production techniques. For a few capitalists to appropriate all incomes generated by automated production, what is sadly needed is to trap all other people in a position where they have to kill each other to enter a constantly shrinking labor market. Methodism has grown from a small Protestant sect to a worldwide chase against the unemployed. Capitalists believe that none-workers are wasting their life (missing their "calling") by not accumulating wealth protestant-style. Since Hesiod's WORKS AND DAYS, the Western world has tried to solve political conflits by putting the masses to work. Humanity now sees the result of this solution: for having fear to share the natural resources directly through politics, we have spoiled and polluted nature. The polytheist Hesiod was always using the plural form of work(s); John Calvin has imposed the singular form. Regrouping the various human activities necessary to maintain our metabolism allows Protestantism/capitalism to exploit human energy systematically.

At first glance, CAMP seems to me a very good initiative but not innovative enough yet. I think that the more dynamic a democracy, the more geared towards consensus it becomes. In other words, the more direct a democracy, the less representative it needs to be. To me, CAMP will be able to leave its mark on Canadian politics by integrating two new ideas about politics: deliberative democracy (see Jurgen Habermas) and the concept of "singular universal" (see Slavoj Zizek).

I think it’s time for a new party but only if this party is run by people who understand how one more (political) division is essential for a healing or therapeutic social process.

I think that to find out what should be the purpose of a welfare program, we have to take seriously the outrage many feel (me included) about the top-down bailout plans that are now implemented to get over to current economic meltdown. In this optic, to me, welfare has to be conceived has a bottom-up universal and permanent bailout program to prevent extreme economic fluctuations.