Das Coopital

by Zbignew Zingh

copyleft 2007

IN THE BEGINNING... roving bands of people gathered fruit and plants and hunted proto-chickens, until one day they discovered that they could eat more regularly if they cultivated the plants that they ate and domesticated the chickens. Thus was born agriculture, more or less, and everyone contributed their labor in equal measure to the number of chickens they wanted to eat. It was hard work, but there was a chicken in every pot, and, perhaps, a little pot in every farmer. Life was good (except for the chickens).

It did not take too long, however, for some people to discover that those who were bigger and stronger than others could do less work than everyone else by stealing someone else's chickens. Sometimes, the bigger, stronger people stole the chickens outright kicking sand in the weaker farmers' faces saying, more or less, Whatcha gonna do 'bout it, Chickenhead? Or, they engaged in the original protection racket demanding that smaller chicken farmers hand over a portion of their hard-earned eggs and poultry in return for the bigger guys (yes, it is almost always guys in a dimorphic species like human beings) not beating them up and stealing all, rather than just some of their chickens.

Soon, this protection racket led to another protection racket: a different group of large, strong chicken farmers who realized that chicken farming was damn hard work and they could eat just as well if they went into the business of protecting all the smaller chicken farmers from the other big guys who were chicken thieves and racketeers. Thus was born a warrior class of chicken hawks who, in return for being given a monopoly of violence plus a substantial tax on the chickens and eggs produced by all the other hard-laboring chicken farmers, protected the majority working class from the terrorism of the bad guy chicken thieves.

Over time, however, it became difficult to distinguish between the chicken thieves who terrorized the chicken farmers and the warrior class of chicken hawks who were supposed to defend the chicken farmers from the terrorists. Either way, the chicken farmers labored harder than ever because if they did not produce more to satisfy the thieving bad guys, then they still had to pay the same number of chickens and eggs to the warriors who did not labor in the chicken coops at all (because they were dedicated full time to weapons and battle training to fight off the bad chicken thieves). The warriors eventually became institutionalized; they became an upper class out of which evolved an aristocratic caste of hereditary chicken kings and queens, a "nobility" and, eventually, "leaders."

Caught between three rackets - the thieves, the warriors and the aristocratic leaders - the lowly chicken farmers found themselves pressured to work harder and harder and harder, all so the others could live off the farmers' excess chickens. To ease their desperation, however, the elites (now fully evolved into a leisure class of rulers whose main task was to discover and/or create bad people against whom the chicken farmers could be protected) created religious institutions. The prelates of these religious institutions assured the lowly, hard laboring majority of chicken farmers that if they obediently gave up lots of their chickens and eggs to the rulers, and also gave a lot of their remaining chickens and eggs to the religious prelates, then... not in this chicken shit world... but in a paradisaical after life, they would be rewarded with easy living in the clouds, a literal Land of Cockaigne (1), lolling about while chickens took care of themselves, laid eggs on command and generally jumped into peoples' bellies fully cooked without lifting a finger of work.

Now with the Leaders, Warriors, Prelates and Thieves amassing such huge amounts of poultry, they needed an alternative means to collect and preserve their chickens in order to avoid being overwhelmed by their wealth. After all, taking care of chickens was for peasants and wealthy people were definitely no longer peasants. Thus, more or less, did banks come into being, very large and secure chicken coops, so to speak, where these people who had grown wealthy plucking the wealth of those beneath them could put all their eggs and their chickens, without having to take care of them themselves. In return for depositing all these chickens in the banks, the banks gave the wealthy people chits, that is money, that they could exchange one day for chickens. Meanwhile, as the price of keeping the wealthy people's chickens safe and sound, the banks skimmed off a percentage of the chickens and eggs for themselves. Naturally, with more chickens being skimmed off for the banks, the ordinary small chicken farmers had to work still harder just to keep their peckers above water, so to speak. Eventually, the money that stood in for the chickens became the medium of commercial exchange itself. Initially, the faith in these commercial exchanges rested on the assurance that behind that money stood the value of the wealthy people's chickens that had been extracted from the excess labor of all the peasant chicken farmers. In short, people had confidence that a piece of money could eventually be exchanged for a chicken (or at least a piece of a chicken during inflationary times), and the chickens themselves represented the congealed labor of the original chicken farmers.

In time, the banks and the wealthy people had accumulated so many chickens that they began to leverage their chicken wealth by loaning chickens (or chicken money equivalence) to other people who were also trying to increase their accumulation of chickens. Thus was born chicken coop-italism. Unlike the chicken farmers who actually produced the wealth itself by their labor, the chicken coop-italist made money, that is more chickens, by leveraging his coop-ital and skimming off labor from people who originally raised the chickens. Of course, these wealthy coop-italists diversified their investments so that not all of their eggs would be placed in one basket.

Coop-ital was leveraged time and again against the labor of the original small chicken farmers. Eventually, the accumulation of coop-ital gave birth to industrialization as wealthy people wanted a way to continue to increase their flocks. Soon, they created Chicken Corporations, so to speak, which had all of the rights of the chicken farmers, but none of their liabilities. A whole new class of chicken farmers was born, now known as 'chicken workers'. The distinction between the proto chicken farmer and a chicken worker is subtle, but significant. A chicken farmer possesses a stock of chickens, coops, fields, farm houses, and reproduces chickens to get chicken equivalents, which he in turn exchanges for non-chicken goods. A chicken worker, however, possesses nothing that would allow her to reproduce chickens or any other goods, and merely exchanges her labor for chicken equivalents, some of which she in turn exchanges to get chickens. In practice, there are many shades in between the chicken farmer and the chicken worker. A coop-italist, on the other hand, is more easily distinguished. He usually has no direct dealings with anything remotely connected with chickens: he plucks chicken equivalents from the labor of others.

There also evolved a vast new middle segment of chicken "service" workers such as clerks, lawyers, consultants, insurance agents, re-insurance agents, psychologists, accountants, marketers, advertisers, administrators and bureaucrats whose livelihoods depended on the whole edifice of chicken production, chicken retail and chicken consumption. This middle (or petite chick-geoisie ) class of service workers unwittingly were committed to maintaining the status quo because they, too, lived off the labor of the chicken farmers even though they dreamed of becoming minor coop-italists themselves (by the exercise of pooling all their meager retirement funds in mutual egg funds). Because the "knowledge" of this class supported the economic hierarchy by continuing (knowingly or unknowingly) to service and endorse it, this class came to be known as "knowledge workers".

Still, the wealthy people wanted to amass more chickens, or at least more "money" which represented chickens. By this time, of course, the labor of the chicken-farming class had been augmented by cheap hydrocarbon fuels (energy that is) which, as a form of labor equivalent, further increased the production of chickens. A couple of centuries later, of course, the cheap hydrocarbon fuels began to become significantly more rare and more expensive to extract and refine (a concept embodied in the phenomenon of "peak chicken fat", or the diminishing chicken return on chickens invested). As wealthy people continued to want to be ever wealthier, as the production of chickens by chicken farmers hit a practical wall, and as cheap hydrocarbon energy and chicken fat production began to peak, the inevitable result was that the chicken equivalent money began to represent fewer and fewer chickens. Indeed, money became so inflated that it soon represented only tiny bits and pieces of chicken beaks, chicken livers, chicken lips and gristle.

Faced with the prospect of diminishing profits arising from leveraging off the original chickens produced by the lowly chicken farmers, a new type of chicken thief came into being - the chickonomist and Wall Street financier. The chickonomist and the financier came up with new ways to amass chicken equivalents. They created the Chicago School of Chickenomics led by its chicken-headed mentor, Milton Friedchicken. These chickonomists sought to privatize everything, to make life less secure for chicken farmers and to squeeze the middle class of "knowledge workers". According to the strange notions of the Chicago School of Chickenomics, people under stress are more innovative and more productive. They reasoned (in a manner of speaking) that chicken farmers and chicken workers would thereby be "freed" from the shackles of government business controls and social security, "freed" from the encumbrances of unions, and "freed" to work two or three jobs simultaneously 80-90 hours a week at less than subsistence wages. Spouses would also be "freed" from the chores of child care... so that spouses, too, could work two or three jobs 80-90 hours a week at less than subsistence wages (in addition to raising their kids). Children, too, would be "freed" from tax-payer subsidized public school education so the kids, too, could work two or three jobs for 80-90 hours a week at less than subsistence wages. All the chicken farmers and chicken workers, therefore, would be (so they were told) free, free, free at last! (Well, their labor, at least would become free).

All the while that they were setting labor "free" and unraveling all the usual social safety nets, the chickonomists and financiers dangled the prospect of easy living in front of the middle class of knowledge workers and chicken farmers and seduced them into buying huge, ticky-tacky(2), energy-inefficient, and virtually identical suburban McMansions? that the knowledge workers and lowly chicken farmers could buy in installments over a long period of time. These were the so-called sub-crime mortgages, and the chickonomists assured the cuckolded chicken farmers and knowledge workers that they only needed a few chicken nuggets as down payments to buy their McMansions?. Consequently, millions of dumb cluck farmers and knowledge workers agreed to buy outrageously overpriced houses by agreeing to pay out trillions more chicken equivalents over the life of their mortgages than any of them could afford. Worse, the same chickonomists and financiers encouraged these highly mortgaged chicken farmers and workers to now take out equity loans on their McMansions? so that they could load up on Christmas gifts for their own precious little chicks and buy lots of useless electronic trinkets that would be obsolete before the Christmas packaging was torn off.

The chicken farmers and knowledge workers were also distracted with mindless entertainment like professional cockfights and bird-brained Hollywood chicks and lottery wish-bones and the like. Of course, none of these chicken farmers or workers could possibly raise the number of chickens that they needed to pay off their debts. In fact, in order to pay all the chickens they had obliged themselves to pay over time, their precious little chicks, and their little chicks and their chicks' chicks' chicks would all be mortgaged for generations to come just to pay off the interest on these oppressive loans.

The financiers, of course, were not concerned by any of these future problems because they took the billions of chickens pledged by the dumb cluck chicken farmers and workers on their heavily mortgaged houses and sliced and diced and packaged all of them up into millions more bonds secured by the mortgaged chickens, or as the case may be, just a few pieces of chicken. In order to camouflage the quality of these bonds, the financiers mixed in chicken breasts with necks, thighs with wings, gizzards and bone, and then they mixed in a good deal of chicken shit that they otherwise could not shovel out of their chicken coops, thus making sure that the ostensibly good pieces of chicken obscured the garbage that nobody wanted. The banks, in the meanwhile, wrapped up all these chickenized debt obligations (CDOs?) into other financial instruments which they then tucked away into Structured Investment Vehicles, aka "SIVs?", which would be their way of burying the whole mess off the books while still claiming to have highly valuable chicken collateral that was, ostensibly, worth a whole lot.

This, in turn, caused investors (who always seem to applaud slick and tricky ways to "make money" out of thin air) to have great confidence in the banks and the economists and the financiers, so the investors pledged their own chickens (extracted from the labor of the poor chicken farmers, of course), in return for shares of these apparently very profitable institutions. The rating companies played along assuring one and all that these chickenized debt obligations (CDOs?) were triple-A rated investments backed by highly valuable McMansions? purchased with future payments of chickens. Everyone on Wall Street, in turn, marketed these mountains of highly rated chickenized debt obligations (CDOs?) to hedge funds, foreign banks and investors, retirement funds, teachers unions, money market and mutual funds.

Meanwhile, the wealthy coop-italists discovered that they were having a hard time making a profit anymore because energy derived from petroleum and chicken fat (the virtual equivalent of "labor") was getting way too expensive. Moreover, the damn lowly chicken farmers and the knowledge workers were already laboring way beyond their capacity and could not be forced to work any harder than they already were. The coop-italists and their corporations tried racing around the globe ensnaring other poor chicken farmers whose labor they could exploit. Inevitably, however, they still could not make profit at the same rate they had profited before due to the fact that incredibly overworked chicken farmers tended to commit suicide, revolt ... or, more often, just drop dead from exhaustion. Worse, the rising cost of energy made the manufacture and transportation of everything too expensive to be profitable. All the while, the supply of money - the chicken substitutes that were supposedly being held in the vaulted coops of the central banks - became so inflated that it required more and more of it just to exchange for a single rotten egg.

By this time, the central banks' chicken coops were full of little more than chicken droppings and practically weightless feathers. The entire economy had become "financialized" to such an extent that the majority of the world's economic activities were based on very little more than electronic chicken digits flying around the world's chicken coops in poultry perpetual motion. When the wealthy people began to realize that their wealth was essentially comprised of just so many feathers, they began to feel a little like headless chickens themselves, so to speak. These headless chickens, led by a particularly chicken shit group of strutting roosters called "Neocoops," determined to lay hold of all the diminishing energy resources all around the world. The Neocoops created or exploited various "emergency" situations such that a lot of Chicken Littles ran around crying that the sky was falling, demanding that the Neocoops protect them from the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Islamofascist chicken terrorists, or whatever. The Neocoops also "fixed" the elections, so to speak, so that when the poor chicken farmers flocked to vote in their annual election rituals, only chicken hawks, turkeys and vultures would be elected to Congress and the White House.

Furthermore, in order to squeeze out still more profits for themselves, the Neocoops, together with their confederates in the chicken shit mainstream media, whipped all the poor chicken farmers and the middle class knowledge workers into jingoistic war frenzies in which all the poultry workers of the world would fight one another over meaningless issues like whose chicken religion should have dominion over another chicken religion, whose chickens would be raptured into heaven and whose chickens would be skewered and barbecued, which chicken farmer had the biggest cock, and the superiority of white chicken meat versus dark chicken meat. In the ensuing kerfuffle, the Neocoops and the corporations gathered up all the eggs and even more of the excess chickens left unattended by the poor poultry workers who were fighting one another.

Ultimately, however, the whole world wide chicken economy inevitably grew unstable and started to wobble like an egg, so to speak. All of the wealthy people, the leaders, the investors and the corporations began to worry about how to prevent some pretty fragile economic egg shells from breaking, thus creating a massive world wide omelet (cooked especially quickly due to global warming). In order to bolster flagging confidence in the chicken economy, the chickconomists and financiers tried injecting mega-billions of "digital chickens" into the monitory system through financial finagling and interest rate manipulations (thus fueling more inflation). They tried using various tricks to jury-rig the stock markets so that they always went "up" even when the news was all "down". To instill "confidence", they trotted out the cackling former chair of the Federal Egg Bank, Alan Chickenspan, who had helped create Wall Street's Humpty Dumpty eggonomics. And they tried using government (that is, fiat) money to bail out corporations which had loaned sub-crime mortgage money to the chicken farmers (in the guise, of course, of a bail-out of the poor indebted chicken farmers).

It was in these circumstances that a few, and then a few more and then more and more of the world's chicken farmers and chicken workers began to seriously question the whole political-economic structure in which they toiled. These folks began to wonder why, if their labor was the basis for everything else, why then did the people who did the least work always end up with the majority of chickens? Thus, these enlightened chicken workers began to form small self-sufficient communities that would be interconnected through electronic media with other communities of chicken farmers and chicken workers around the nation and around the globe. Globally, these chicken farmers and workers more and more often refused to labor any more for the large chicken corporations, and they refused to employ their services in support of the larger chicken economy. In essence, they either went on strike or they simply engaged in a personal but wide-spread refusnicism .

The chicken farmers and workers, however, refrained from creating rigid, forcibly collectivized and authoritarian top-down "planned economies" like some communist chicken states had tried years before. They also refrained from becoming too doctrinally "independent", too nationalistic or tribal, all of which could lead to easily picked off and isolated little islands of individual chicken farmers. Instead, they organized themselves into regional cooperatives and world wide free range chicken farms and Open Egg intellectual enterprises where each chicken farmer's knowledge, effort and intellectual endeavor stood on its own merit and contributed to the overall betterment of themselves and the larger community. As hydrocarbon fuels became more scarce and more expensive, it also became sensible and cost-effective for people to more directly acquire information without the mediation of "knowledge workers", thus further emancipating everyone from the shackles of the chickenized world.

The chicken farmers and workers created and agreed to abide by a General Poultry License (GPL) that opened the doors to creativity without privatizing it. The chicken farmers became not individually, but collectively self-sufficient, including the means to forcibly defend themselves, as necessary, from the world's chicken plunderers. As the world chicken economy cracked and splattered like an egg in a frying pan, the enlightened chicken farmers held their own and thrived amidst the splatter.

And so the story would end, so to speak, with the chicken farmers living happily ever after. But this is, in many ways, just a story, and just a chicken or egg story, at that. So no one knows where the story really starts or how it ends, or when it starts, or if it ends. And that's the essence of the story, is that the ending isn't written. All the chicken farmers and workers get to write it on their own. How they want to write it. If they want to.

NOTES:

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockaigne (2) http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/MALVINA/mr094.htm