The Leap Manifesto

It’s now over two years since I wrote this. Let me be clear about what bothers me: it’s not some of the ideas within the manifesto which I more than ever agree with. It’s the partisan framing of the issues that bothers me especially in light of the fact the modern left strums precisely to the demiurgic tune. The manifesto omits that there is anything good about capitalism, the political right, or Christianity. So it’s as bias as fcuk…

My Four Pillars of a New Earth Commons is far better, in my opinion, as it tries to find what good within the whole spectrum.

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There is really only one party in Canada. The Liberals are now Illiberal and The Conservatives don’t conserve or practice conservation; the fact of the matter is they both employ and enact neoliberal economics which I’ve argued is a type of economic fascism.

So where is the opposition to this monoculture? Ah, yes, within the controlled opposition of the NDP with its Frankfurt School Leap Manifesto! This is, of course, the duopoly playbook of The Chicago School of Economics, combined with the cultural aspects of the Frankfurt School; and low and behold, when we analyze society from this lens we see that this is exactly what western culture looks like today, and I argue on this site that is no mere coincidence; and yes, this society now combines the worst elements of right and left-wing ideology! That is to say, Marxism without the ‘good parts’ and capitalism without liberty or a surveillance culture premised on the notion of the corporate empire.

To be sure, there are a few propositions within the Manifesto that are reasonably sound such as some type of Guaranteed Income, but this would need to be enacted with the dismantling of the social welfare bureaucracy and we all know this will never happen; not to mention that any type of Guaranteed Income has to be implemented with sound ecological practices and education which teaches the best aspects of human potential–and we all know this will never happen, either.

This Manifesto is in denial about energy and suffers from magical thinking about the relationship between energy and economy. *The fact of the matter is that there is not even 1- 500 person town in Canada that exists wherein all people use clean non-polluting high-tech energies, yet we are told the whole country will somehow enact this ethos! I say show me the money first! Let’s see this ‘test town’! And I’m not talking about Lasqueti Island; it would have to be far more technical than that and not premised on only the wealthy having access to land and tech.

The biggest flaw in this Manifesto is the idea that the capitalists are simply going to lay down and agree to give up their largely unmerited wealth garnered from the global casino which they’ve enacted via economic liberalism and neoliberalism. Nope, the New Earth Commons is a far more realistic way forward as it captures the essence of the issue which is scale combined with giving as many people as much choice as possible. The fact of the matter is that capitalism became unsustainable sometime around 1950, or when about 2-billion people bought into the system, and in fact, this is when this particular system should have been capped.

*NOTE: I’ve suggested in other posts that it was the universities and academies themselves which should have been the template for sustainable living under a new economic model. What did we get from them instead? Corporate privatization within the field of education serving and creating the debt finance machine of the neoliberal model.

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