Our Economic Woes and Opportunities

Greetings Comrades,
A happy Monday to you and all your relations. After a wonderful weekend of nourishing "struggle", I felt obligated, indeed duty bound to share with you the fruits of our labor. A major aspect of our efforts was the examination of the prevailing economic crisis, our economic survival and what opportunities obtain therein. What resulted was a reaffirmation and clarification about our personal and collective human experience, of which economics is but one aspect.
Actually there was only three of us that gathered together and teleconferenced one sister into the conversation. It very quickly became clear, that what we are struggling with is beyond an orthodox construct of economics. Interestingly my wise brother had pointed observed that our economic solutions had to be linked to our spirit, the energetic dimension of our being. The poignancy of this point blew with refreshing brilliance into our deliberations.
We began, by affirming that the material conditions we face individually and collective, were untenable and out of this consciousness a new vision must emerged to move us to where we need to be. Initially we discussed the validity of the goal of economic sustainability with our collective and our community. The objectives towards that goal seemed quite obvious, do like our ancestors did, struggle collectively, develop co-ops, share our resources, "su-sus", box hand, think about, creating community housing, share our living space. Well this is not rocket science, the models exist...Maroon communities, the efforts of Marcus Garvey, the nation of Islam, Hebrew Israelite Nation, cooperative and intentional communities thrive in several areas of the US and beyond. The material resources, the knowledge, even the need exist. So what is the problem.
The question of trust emerged in our discussion, because even as we identified simple, affordable collective proposals the need for a functional level of trust, the need for sincerity, for comradeship marched into our consciousness with unrelenting pace. Why should we trust each and invest our hard earned and already short financial resources with each other, even if we all claim the same cultural identity, one love etc.
Now we could have proceeded on faith and said that, we will just have to trust each other. However, bearing in mind the admonition of that great sage that " we should tell no lies and claim no easy victories", we humbled ourselves. We agreed that in order to secure the trust needed to pursue an effective economic solution, we needed to build relations withs ethics and integrity and that this would be our essential investment. We believe that we need to invest time, intention and effort in getting to know each other to , know our comrades and as we "ground with each other" ( a la Walter Rodney's Groundings with My Brothers), clarity and trust will result and allow us to invest precious resources with each other.
Over the next few weeks this collective will do just that, build our relationships, so that we can create a healthy, nourishing way of being, that will allow not only to cope with the prevailing economic crisis but to facilitate the development of a sovereign, liberated community, made so because it will and can only come from our souls and from us nurturing each other as we move forward as comrades.

Peace
Sizwe

PS as we struggle to deal with our very real challenges over hear consider the plight of our relations on the continent and elsewhere.
The link above is the article dealing with the plight of that sister in Burkina Faso. As a people we can really tolerate a lot of trials and tribulations , but things are really dread.