050: The World of The Golden Square, Part I: Definitions & Foundations

The Future Is A Mixtape

We stand at the precipice of apocalypse – together bound by “The Legacy of Domination” to a dystopian world in the midst of full-melt collapse. The death-drive of empire can no longer hide behind a facade of limited bourgeois comforts, as the parade of twenty-first century catastrophes lays bare the macabre realities of a social order designed for maximum hierarchy. But another legacy of human history travels with us as a persistent revolutionary beacon – “The Legacy of Freedom.” While the pharaohs of our neoliberal capitalist hellscape continue to insist that there is no alternative – that the ultimate achievement of human potential is a do-or-die Battle Royale waged in the patriarchal pyramid scheme they call the market, the wise among us have always known that egalitarian, non-market social relations – “baseline communism” as David Greaber called it – are what makes society possible in the first place. To institutionalize freedom, we must first guarantee the right to live by provisioning an irreducible minimum to all. And though the nations of the world have long acknowledged that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services” as stated in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), all of these same nations have absurdly failed to make this a binding reality. Because to truly meet these minimum standards of human dignity, it would require the full decommodification of all of these basic needs. Alas, a deeply rooted ideology of scarcity continues to hold us back, like a dark ghost squatting on the future. To get to the radical root and finally unlock the post-scarcity future that is our common inheritance, we must re-make the world with The Golden Square as our new common sense. But what would it mean to organize the world based on the universal, unconditional, and life-long provisions of free Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education to every person on the planet? For this half-century mark of the podcast, Jesse & Matt venture beyond the urgent and undeniably rational demands to decommodify our basic human rights, and begin to imagine what it might actually feel like to live in The World of The Golden Square. It’s one thing to recognize the clarity of this Idea-Shape’s moral demands, but it’s perhaps more tantalizing and propulsively utopian to actually envision the profound implications of living in a world designed to meet those demands. With this episode – the first of a three-part series – our exploration begins by tracing the definitions and foundations of a world built to ensure freedom from want and the right to well-being for all. Building another world requires smashing the denials from those above us and who haunt the insides of us. The World of The Golden Square is indeed possible – a world without property, without paywalls, and without physical borders separating humans from humans, flowers from flowers, water from land. Join us on this journey.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places:

[e-mail]

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram