Tag: Collective Flourishing

A drag called Moan-opoly !

 

A drag called Moan–opoly !

 

The idea here is not to bemoan, but a nudge to make things better. Because, we are all in it together. Remember, one of my earlier blogs- collective flourishing? 

 

It will not be far fetched to say that monopoly is a metaphor for inequality.
Marx predicted that competition among capitalists would grow so fierce that, eventually, most capitalists would go bankrupt, leaving only a handful of monopolists controlling nearly all production, business and markets.
Our utility company, especially if it’s a monopoly, locks in an inherent, unfair and perennial advantage, giving it ample power to ignore customers and all of us suffer because of that. They actually send you emails with subject line screaming THIRD REMINDER, ten days before the due date and makes you feel that you have defaulted on their payment by months. So, what if you are a customer with them for 15 years plus? You can moan till the cows come home.
If all of the housing real estate in a locality is owned by one landlord, little surprise that rents go only one way – north. The less said about the service, security and the facilities, the better.
When the state or federal government controls the education of all of our children, they have the dangerous and illegitimate monopoly to control and influence the thought process of our future citizens. 

“Google illegally maintained a monopoly for far more than a decade,” Kenneth Dintzer, a lawyer for the US Justice Department, argued in opening statements in the State VS Google antitrust case. He added that Google’s dominance has allowed it to ignore privacy criticism and become sluggish when it comes to innovation, including in the development of AI products. That’s the other fallout of being a monopoly– complacency and taking customers for granted.
“Own it all“. The official monopoly slogan- So, yes, Adam Smith (often identified as the father of modern capitalism), nailed it. He added ” The essential feature of capitalism is the motive to make a profit. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
A bit of a backstory if you permit me. Don’t miss out on the irony of it all. In 1903, Lizzie Magie, an American board game designer( and part time political activist)filed for a patent for her latest creation, The Landlord’s Game.  Magie also taught political economy and held the belief that a single tax system should prevail for all owners of property. She believed that the world around her at the turn of the twentieth century had become more unequal because of rapacious mercantilism, and wanted to spread the message that a more equitable form of taxation would be a remedy to societal ills.
Magie’s The Landlord’s Game picked up some steam amongst the politically progressive demographic but never got into the mainstream. Until such time in 1932 when Charles Darrow who was playing it one night(and desperately needed money) decided to tweak the game and decided to sell it. Parker Brothers bought the rights to the game, under a new brand name Monopoly.
Magie was initially thrilled to see her version of the game in production but having been paid just US$ 500 and no royalties, she became increasingly disappointed. She spent the rest of her life as a receptionist, earning barely above minimum living wage.
Monopoly remains one the most popular and profitable board games there is today and Darrow died a multimillionaire.
ENDS

 

Creativity: Individual Success or Collective Flourishing?

 

It was sometime in the late 90’s. A cold, blistery Manhattan evening. And the Friday bar hopping had done its shift ( of mind, body & soul). Good bhais( after a few drinks ” all the world are brothers “- Fakespeare)  and goodbyes exchanged multiple times over with friends, I headed to the nearest subway station to board the A train to Central Park West. From out of the shadows springs this unkempt man in an ill fitting New York Yankees hoodie and Harley Davidson tracks which had me stopping in my tracks, as if playing the childhood game called ‘ statue ‘. But, this was no time to take any liberties. As I stood there( no clue whether it was rooted by fear or was I sporting a false sense of spirited bravado thanks largely to the ‘spirit‘), the man broke into Lionel Ritchie’s ‘ Hello ‘.

 

Normal hellos are different, I am sure of that in spite of my state of inebriation. To tell you that his voice was exquisite would be an understatement. As he sang, he put his hand out begging for a few cents or dollars. He could have easily been on any Broadway stage and deserved all the spotlight. Not just New York, but cities around the world are home to the homeless, some of whom are incredibly talented. Here was this guy at the hands of a rampant, unjust and gentrifying urban market, doing what he thought he must in order to survive. He was using the talents he had to scrape by, so he could perform the following day, and every other day, over and over again.

 

We are all cogs in a system that tells us that we must be ‘ creative ‘ to progress. In hindsight, it appears that capitalism of the twenty-first century, turbocharged by neoliberalism, has redefined creativity to feed its own growth. To be creative in today’s society has only one meaning: to continue producing the status quo.

 

That said, it has always not been this way. Creativity has been and still is, a force for change in the world. It is a collective energy that has the potential to tackle capitalism’s injustices rather than augment them. Creativity can be used to produce more social justice in the world but for that it must be rescued from its current incarceration as purely an engine for economic growth.

 

Heralded as the driving force of society, creativity, allegedly, is the wellspring of the knowledge economy, shaping the cities we inhabit and even defining our politics and business. Then what could possibly be wrong with that?

 

My counterintuitive rant here is that we need to rethink the story that we are being sold.Creativity is a barely hidden form of the ever-expanding marketplace. It is a regime that prioritizes individual success over collective flourishing. It refuses to acknowledge anything-job, place, person- that is not profitable. And that changes everything: the places where we work, the way we are managed, and how we spend our free time.

 

It is time to lift the veil on this ideology to reveal a set of economic and political forces pushing all of us to bend to the needs of capital.
If radical candour is the flavor of the day( far better than ruinous empathy I dare add), the redefinition of creativity would be one that is embedded in the idea of collective flourishing, outside the tyranny of individual profit.
ENDS