Charles Hugh Smith's book, A Radically Beneficial World

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Hey, Just wondering if anyone here has read A Radically Beneficial World, by Charles Hugh Smith. Many of his ideas overlapped with mine while imagining and writing about a model community (Allsville, in my book Allsville Emerging -- read by virtually no one), except some very specific logistical ideas that might be applied to existing disenfranchised communities. He describes CLIME (Community Labor Integrated Money Economy) in last sections of his book. I've read most of it. A few pages to go.

Unplugging from the World Money System is one of many features that matches my ideas about what would be required to achieve an optimal community. Also, I really like his discussion about the "scalability" of his proposed CLIME system. I had the same idea when writing about Allsville. Need to start on small scale and then later expand once you see what really works and/or doesn't work. I also liked a small scale but large scope method of social transformation because of my holistic and "integral" leanings. As opposed to Roger Rothenberg's limited scope but large scale approach in his "Demos" (Read about in free online book Beyond Plutocracy). Charles' inclusion of MANY types of "capital," including even "spiritual" capital, as well as cognitive, symbolic, human, social, and other forms of "capital" is consistent with my own prescribed holistic/integral approach to social transformation.  I give more weight and priority to spiritual capital than the rest, but include the rest in the form of shared "resources," both human and otherwise. I've come to call the alternate to capitalism: Integral Resourceism.

  Charles Hugh Smith's model is a kind of community capitalism which makes sure that credit money is tied to actual labor rather than to speculation by elite investors who siphon away all the wealth. But he is quite fair-minded and forgiving. Those successful speculators are, after all, doing what the system or "game" requires. I think most of us here seem to agree with CHS that the world needs a new system. In line with Rifkin and others' ideas processed here. Part of the same new emerging zeitgeist.

Darrell, author of Allsville Emerging, co-author (with Layman Pascal) of about wholeness, and soon-to-be author of Christian Running (first of a three book series called The Christian Potentiality Series, which introduces the "depth-dynamic" approach to spirituality).