Commonwealth of Convenience

As anyone knows who has been part of a movement, a demonstration, a campaign, or a strike, struggles undertaken for the most limited and prosaic goals have a way of opening the most profound and lyrical sense of possibility in their participants. To experience even briefly a movement’s solidarity, equality, reciprocity, morality, collective and individual empowerment, reconciliation of individual and group, is to have a foretaste of the peaceable kingdom… Once we have experienced solidarity, we can never forget it. It may be short-lived, but its heady sensations remain. It may be still largely a dream, but we have experienced that dream. It may seem impossible, but we have looked into the face of its possibilities.

Ronald Aronson in his 1995 book Beyond Marxism reminds us that dreams help create our physical experiences. We dream and create, but we forget our ability to do so. Joseph Schumpeter, the mid-century Harvard economics professor, said that our dream of a perfect democracy would eventually lead to some form of socialism. In his book, Capitalism Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter said that there is a creative destructive factor innately association with capitalism.

Schumpeter’s dream of socialism is far beyond the social concepts of Marx, and his successors. It is a system described by William Morris in his 1884 book, Justice. Morris explained his dream system this way:

What I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all — the realization at last of the meaning of the word commonwealth.

Commonwealth is a familiar word, but most of us have no idea what it means. Morris defines it in terms we understand. A commonwealth is a utopian state where all individuals take responsibility for their actions in one way or another, and each person helps expand the system in a unified way.

Liberals and Conservatives want to experience a commonwealth of convenience that doesn’t make waves in their established and comfortable system. Both parties negate the true meaning of a people’s commonwealth. They fight against a people’s commonwealth using jaded words and iconic symbols that have little intrinsic value. They use prejudice and judgmental mental ovens filled with partial truths to produce half-baked results, and then take no responsibility for their inept results―it’s always the other party’s fault. They consider the people and their needs after they conform to the political lobbyists that control them. The tail of government is wagging the people, and the people lick the bones of a disintegrating system.

Perhaps it’s time to expand our constitutional power, and elect a group of social reformers who know the meaning of commonwealth rather than politicians who are shackled with the chains self-serving conformity and redundant thinking. Reformers are people who are not motivated by the fear that engulfs this wasteful system. They are not afraid to be part of a system that encourages and cultivate a stable commonwealth that serves the good of all.

When we look responsibility in the eyes, we see that most candidates stand on a platform of superficial change. They become pawns in a high-powered political party game that condones conformity, and ignores the voice of the people. Independence becomes dependence, and responsibility is shrouded in a veil of economic chicanery.