Richard Lloyd Jones: What to do when we're faced with so many obvious problems in society? Some resort to drugs and alcohol to block it out. Others become depressed, even suicidal. Some turn on the TV or spend more time at the gym. Many of us just throw up our hands in despair. But a few are looking for and finding solutions. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, social activism and solutions.
Well, this, in a way, is a follow-up to last week's program with Dr. Cláudia Pacheco. She was talking there about society being on a dead-end street and how we've now reached some final conclusions about why that is and, furthermore, how we can begin to treat this source problem. Dr. Norberto Keppe's work gives us the knowledge and tools to do just that. His science of psychosociopathology helps us see why we're polluting and destroying and making so much war.
Most activists focus on stopping those things, and that's, of course, necessary. But if we don't address the why do we do that, which is in the human psyche, we'll be like the alcoholic who stops the alcohol but replaces it with cocaine or sex or fanaticism. Here in Brazil, at Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy, we're training people with the consciousness and psychosocial tools to make a difference in their communities, to become psychosociotherapists.
Imagine a journalist with the sufficient understanding of psychosociopathology to be able to analyze world or local events through this combined scientific, philosophical, and theological perspective that is tied to a universal reality of right and justice and goodness and beauty and things like that. He or she would report on events in a completely different way than we see currently. Today, the media, out of its fanatic adherence to a relativistic, so-called journalistic integrity, just throws all points of view together in one show and leaves you to pick up the pieces.
With an understanding of Keppe's work, the psychosocial journalist would understand a basic starting point. There is a universal reality of beauty, truth, and goodness, and any deviation from that could be seen by him or her much more clearly and then reported on to educate all of us. And that's just one area that would be impacted with this science. Well, we'll be getting together July 4th to 6th, 2008 here in Brazil to look at the science of psychosociopathology and begin training Psycho-Sociotherapist.
If you're interested, and I hope you are, write me for more information, rich at richjonesvoice.com. It's shaping up to be an incredible event, I think. Today on the program, I'll talk with Per-Erik Persson, a human ecologist from Sweden who works with the Jock Member Bank, a no-interest loan bank in Sweden. Per-Erik has written a book about social activism amongst ceramics workers in Argentina that's very interesting.
Per-Erik, to start, maybe bring us up to speed with the situation you write about in Argentina.
Per-Erik Persson: What happened was that Argentina experienced a strong era of neoliberalism, privatizations, and they were kind of the excellent student of the IMF and the World Bank. They imposed any suggestion that they made. And this left the country in a big crisis, especially in this region, Neocan region, which is southwest.
It's close to the border of Chile. It has mountains in the west side, the Andes, and this had always been a very industrial region. And now they were faced with massive unemployment, and the peso was exchanged one-to-one with the dollar, making it very profitable for people to go abroad, and also for the big, the rich people, the owners of factories and so on.
They tried to get money in Argentina and put it outside the country, kind of preparing for an escape, and that was exactly what this person, the Luigi Sanon, he gave his name to the factory, the Sanon factory. That was what he did. He got a lot of subsidies from the region and the state, and he got a lot of loans, but instead of really using the loans to improve the factory, he started to just put him in his own account outside.
And Argentina experienced the crisis in December 2001.
Gisanon tried to fire his workers during that summer of 2001, and the workers had then organized themselves and had a strong union inside the factory. They were like almost 300 people working there. It's an advanced plant, and they saw that there was not any money spent on maintenance. The company described a picture of crisis. They could no longer pay wages. Still the workers counted the number of trucks leaving the factory with ceramics, showing that they were still selling the same amount, so something was wrong in this picture, and they were producing something.
Richard: Yeah, they were producing. What was the crisis specifically? Was it about the these policies from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank? Is this yeah,
Per-Erik: the peso was one-to-one with the dollar, which is strong. It's considered being very strong. It is very strong, yeah, but in order to maintain this kind of liability, the country needs to be strong. But if the country at the same time sell all of its assets and sell it very cheap in and try to just lower their external debt, it's not helping the country to defend a one-to-one with the dollar.
Yeah,
Richard: it's our typical virtual economy. It looks great on paper, but the actual basis is not there at all to sustain it. So yeah, tell me a bit about you prepare to talk a little bit about the policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and how this really destabilizes many of these developing countries. It
Per-Erik: was it's incredible. Eduardo Galliano is a Uruguayan writer.
He has written an excellent book, the the world upside down, and he describes with a few examples really what happens, because Argentina was a country of much depth. After the military doctrine in the mid 70s, the country and the people was left with a depth, a debt that was given to people that had just taken power by imposing their right military. You shouldn't recognize that debt, but in our today's society it is recognizable as Argentina's debt, having nothing to do with Argentinian people really.
And so what the IMF and World Bank does is that they promote some kind of programs, adjusting programs for the society in order to be more profitable, and they also offer swaps. It's an word they use, and a swap is that you sell something in order to lower your your external
Richard: debt. Yeah, so they made swaps, for example, with external like a Spanish company, the Iberia
Per-Erik: bought all of the Argentinian airlines boeings for one dollar each, and this left the country without any assets really.
They sold their oil company very cheaply. An oil company will produce a lot of profit for a number of years, and yet they valued with corrupt agencies the company to a very small sum of money, and who's controlling those resources now? Those foreign companies. Yeah, it's foreign companies, everything is foreign companies, and And they, of course, they let off a bunch of people and unemployment turned really high.
And so there was a consumption crisis.
Richard: Now, let's come back to the specific case of the ceramics factory, because I think in looking through the work that you've been doing, the written work that you've been doing, that there are many global economic and development issues that kind of are focused in this specific case.
Per-Erik: Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure, because when I try to perceive the situation from Sweden, I mean, we are a lot of people feeling distress, out of hope.
We are constantly bound with bad news. We never hear a successful story. So this seemed to be a successful story. And the important thing in the story is that a group of people gained power, influence over something that was out of their influence. They don't have the right to do what they did. It's an illegal occupation of a
Richard: factory. They took over.
In other words, what you're saying is after the the owner was owner said I'm gonna fire you all, they said well surprise, we now run the factory. They took over control of the factory. I'm assuming not with guns, just with their presence of being there. Yeah, uh, and and this is interesting
Per-Erik: what happened then, because this is against the law as it were.
Talk about that aspect of it, because Just occupying a factory, you know. There's a great song that I always remember. It's like, I'm a criminal according to the law, but not according to the people. And you assume always that the law is written by the people, which is today more clear than ever that it's not.
Richard: That's very naive to think that.
Per-Erik: There are a number of...
Recovered factories in Argentina. A number of workers that out of necessity took over their former workplaces and are now controlling them by means of a cooperative. The problem with the law is that when you form the cooperative, the law gives you a two-year period to run the factory. But in the meantime, you need to repay any debts left by the former owner.
Corrupt owners as it were in this case. And that would be impossible for these workers. They would be working like 10 hours a day just to repay, and then what's left of their energy could be used for themselves and to maintain us. Interesting
Richard: parallel between what happens in the country, which has to pay these huge loans to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank from governments that were totally corrupt that made them in the first place, and the people end up socializing the debt.
It's
Per-Erik: the same parallel, isn't it? Really? Yeah, I didn't think about it, but it's very true. So they resisted. They did not want to form a cooperative. And so the judges decided that they should be evacuated. And they have tried to evacuate the factory five times. And every time they try, the people in the surrounding areas, the both small towns there, Neuquén and Centenario, they mobilize and stand outside the gate defending the factory, making it impossible for the governor to take the decision.
He could, but he is aware that it would be a massacre and he would have to use brutal force and has not yet been confident enough to do this. Oh boy, that's a strong story. Yeah, it's really. And when you interview the workers about it, it is very strong because you see the experience that they went through. These workers were not Che Guevara's nephews really.
They were arrogant, they were highly respected, had high wages. The factory was one of the most successful in Latin America and was very profitable, so the workers were proud. And going from this position of proud not understanding unemployed workers cutting off the streets, making public demands and so on, you see this change of these people when they have to stand on the street outside the factory, not being able to work, don't have any means, any income at all.
They have to they changed flyers for food. They didn't want to pledge, they didn't want to pray for food. They wanted to change something, and in this way they had to go outside the factory and find and build a support from the society, which they made very successfully. You
Richard: know, just in talking with you, Per-Erik, and reading your thesis, I can see that you're a person, and you talk a lot about it in your thesis, you talk about changing the world, sustainable future, taking action.
You think a lot about people solving their problems and trying to resolve them. What do you think about people in the first world who sit back and try to tell people in these developing countries what they should do with their situations?
Per-Erik: It's very easy, and I saw this, I recognized it in myself. I was hoping to find a consciousness towards nature, because they had a cooperation with the original people of Argentina.
And I hoped to see that the workers could then take decisions trying to preserve the environment where they were exploiting the clay, for example. Which I didn't find because they had more urgent matters to address, and I had really no right to judge them by this anyway, because what they did was more important than just address the environmental question at that moment.
And I saw many people coming to Argentina judging their movement, being disappointed by some of the actions taken, decisions made and so on, and I became aware of this, and it's helped me to understand that we should really try to make something our own by our own first, and then we can judge others if we want to.
We are very idealistic, but we live mostly in inside our heads. It's very easy to talk, and we can form millions of organizations just talking, but what's important is to make a change, so that's what I brought with me back to Sweden. I remember the
Richard: policy that was put forward by a British member of parliament to privatize the Amazon as the solution.
This is being proposed in many circles now. He's not the only one. I don't remember the name of the minister, but he proposed this as an idea. And I was talking to a number of Brazilian students of mine. They said, well, maybe it's a good idea. We're destroying the rainforest and maybe it's an idea we need to look at. And I said, let me ask you a question, my students.
I said, where are the great forests of England? What's happened to them? What's happened to the great forests of Germany? They've been destroyed by the policies that have been spread and are instituted primarily by the first world economic system led by the United States of America and before that, England. So this is a big issue that I think that we're talking about now.
How do you sit back and look at somebody else and tell them what to do? You need to get in with your hands and work in it. And it's not so simple, is it?
Per-Erik: No, it's really not. And that's a reason why I wanted to write about this factory. And after the thesis, I rewrote it in Swedish. So in a way to reach a broader public.
Because even though it is a story from a third world country, I hope that it could inspire some people in Sweden, workers of factories, to question privatization, to question whether it's really necessary to move the factory and move the production, to question this, which is today seen as something very logical and natural. And really, it isn't. And also, I focus on the law.
There is one law that I like very much, and I think most countries have it. It's the law of expropriation, which is used very much. It says that if something that is private needs to be changed, you need to use this for a common good. You have the right to do so. This is a direct conflict inside law, because you have the right of private property, and then you have the common good.
So in this law, you kind of have the conflict very explicit stated. And it's used mainly for infrastructural projects. Like you need to build a highway somewhere. This is in the common good, of course. Economy needs to be run and transport and so on. So no matter who is the owner of this private property, we can take control of it and build a highway over it.
In the same way, the workers in Argentina argue that the factory is a common good. It has been paid for by the Argentinian taxpayers. They have given loans, all the subsidies is state given, so why not take the factory and make it a common good and use the law of expropriation. In your
Richard: time here in Brazil, short time only, only a week, what have you come away with in terms of Norberto Keppe's view of the of the problem?
This has expanded your view. How are you seeing that now after being here for a week or so? I'm very impressed,
Per-Erik: and ever since I first heard about it I was very attracted by the idea to form a trilogical company, because we often feel trapped, we feel that we live in an unjust society, but even so we take very few initiatives to enhance our position.
The trilogical companies really prove that it's possible in any society. It has been proven in many countries to gain control, to form a rhythm in life which is more in accordance with what you can cope with, and you address all the problems that you face in life, and you address them as a group. You're not alone, you're not left alone with your problems, and I think it's been very interesting and inspiring.
Yeah, when
Richard: I first came here I felt the same thing. I I didn't know what was a what a trilogical company was. I came here for ideals, and suddenly there's a like a working structure where people are actually working together for themselves, not for some some share faceless shareholders anywhere or somebody who has all the money and so is controlling all the situation.
It's a very workable way to get people working together. The big challenge is that we have to find structures within which people can do that. And these people in Argentina are finding this. I'm sure there are many examples of this around the world, of workers uniting to take over the factories or take over the schools or whatever it is that they're doing.
And we're developing that here in Brazil too to take control of our company, our financial
Per-Erik: results.
Richard: Yeah, control of your situation. What's the way to deal with this argument? I'm only one person. Never going to change. What can I do? It's just a disaster. There's corruption everywhere. The laws are totally against me. How can one person fight that?
Per-Erik: Yeah, that was one of the strongest motivations behind writing the book, because my father wouldn't read it because it was a kind of academical language.
So I rewrote the book and I dedicated it to my father because he really has that feeling that it's impossible to do anything. Yet he has all these ethics. I mean, he criticizes and he does it in a good way, but he does not realize that he need to form friendships that are more than just friendships. We consider ourselves to have a lot of friends, but when it really matters, when you find yourself in a critical time in your life, who are your friends, where are they?
And I saw my father being sacked from his work. Anyhow, he was alone in this. And I don't think that the individualistic culture is sustainable. Throughout history, people want to be part of something. They want to identify themselves with something, with someone else. And we need to do this even stronger. We need to see through the identification with brands, with successful athletes.
Everybody knows the names of famous actors and you don't even know the name of your neighbor. And that's where to start.
Richard: Just tell us a little bit about the bank you're working with because this is, I think, a policy that you're instituting in this bank that really is one of the cornerstones of Norberto Keppe's economic policy too. Tell us a bit about this.
Per-Erik: Yeah, I work in something called the Jock Member Bank. It started with an organization in 1965 in Sweden that was against the use of interest. This can be studied in Dr. Keppe's work. But the interesting thing was that the person that started this organization, they weren't satisfied by just speaking about this. So they started to give loans without interest, proving that it's possible, which is a very strong argument.
And today, since 1997, we have the right from the Swedish government to call ourselves a bank. And we use no interest. You get no interest when you save and you don't pay any when you take the loan. You pay administrational costs because there are some. And we need to pay our professionals. But in the other way, you can trust the bank's services since it's approved by the government and follows the financial inspection.
And today we have 35 000 members. At the moment we are growing by 2000 a year in a time where interest in Sweden has been very low. It's a very inspiring work where we also educate members. Instead of use a lot of money on marketing, we have positions like the one I have, the youth coordinator, that educate young members about economy, and the person that gain trust in us, we know that they will speak about the bank and they will deliver the message.
Delivering
Richard: the message, yes, there are good things happening, and I know you want to be part of it. Keep listening to the program. We'll have lots more good news for you. Stay in touch, Rich at richjonesvoice.com. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next week.
