Commonsism/Comparative Ideology

The phrase "comparative religion" is fairly common; less common is the phrase "comparative ideology". On the face of it, this discrepancy is both unnecessary & dangerous. We are living, like it or not, in the Age of Economic Ideology, yet we approach religion in a comparative or ecumenical fashion absent from our consideration of economic ideology.

The economic ideologies of the last few centuries run the gamut from capitalism to Marxism to anarchism to single tax to ethnocentric nationalism to social credit to steady state: an incomplete list within & without which myriads of fusion ideologies -- such as anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-communism -- exist.

Commonsism (a neologism for purposes of placing the issue into sharp relief), as a particular form of comparative ideology, suggests two things about the above ideologies:

1. The economic ideologies of the last few centuries are an attempt to address the societal disruptions which have arisen in response to inclosure of the Commons & the later-and-overlapping Industrial Revolution... Put another way, these societal disruptions have arisen due to the absence of a Commons which previously underpinned society.
2. The commonality between the economic ideologies opposed to capitalism -- from Marxism to anarchism to single tax to ethnocentric nationalism to social credit to steady state -- is the attempt to reformulate the inclosed Commons in a format appropriate to the times in which the reformulation is to occur.

A Commons, stripped of its particular historical associations and distilled to an abstract essence, is the common inheritance the absence of which necessarily results in societal disruption. The present, debt-ridden economic system regards reformulations of the Commons as unwanted disruptions of the free flow of Capital.

It remains to say in what way that each of the above ideologies represents a reformulation of the commons. Briefly, Marxism's reformulation of the Commons is redistribution of wealth; anarchism's reformulation of the Commons is redistribution of wealth & power; single (land) tax's reformulation of the Commons is the taxing of a resource considered the common inheritance of all; ethnic nationalism's reformulation of the Commons is the linkage of privilege with a common socio-genetic inheritance; social credit's reformulation of the Commons is the issue of a national dividend on the basis of a common inheritance of industrial & other techniques; and steady state's reformulation of the Commons is that of the Earth's being a common inheritance both of the present and of future generations.

A treatise might be written on this topic, Commonsim, but the essential points have been made. Some reformulation of the Commons is humane; the present system, leading as it does to a Babel & a shattering of Babel, can & does dehumanize people, making atomized men into mere bricks. It matters little whether a mere brick has a high salary & all the trappings of respectability in the eyes of his contemporaries if he has lost his humanity & become the accelerating slave of the development of Machines, the flow of Capital, & the feedback loop between them.