John Dumbrille on protecting ourselves

In education and employment insurance and job training, we have to move away from systems of compliance, social conformity, rote learning and regular brain calaesthenics. We need something else. Something bringing real connection to things and to ourselves, something about real value, something about being entrepreneurrial, non co-dependent. If we can assimilate these qualities and pass these on to our children and co-workers we will create wealth, by any defintion. Becoming a farm of cheap labour is not inevetiable for us. But we can avoid it only by learning to build up experiential capital, and then protect it in an appropriate way. We dont need to pull a Disney and assume all value within a copyright, but innovation needs to be rewarded to a limited extent. It can be done. Social democrats need to first discard archiac and unfair notions of our entitled “right” to a better deal than ppeople in other countries . We need to learn how to provide new value. Job welfare and the education system needs to be overhauled in this light, if we want to reform, not destroy, what could be a social welfare system that actually works.