Comensalism is not Communism.

Communists appear to start with the premise that private ownership of capital, assets and land is evil. So to avoid this evil, they hand over ownership to their government, and just a little while later, find themselves wondering how they came to have an evil government.

Communists also appear to want to control every aspect of their citizens' lives, in a highly centralised, dictatorial fashion.

Comensalism holds that if private ownership of capital, land and goods is evil, then it is an evil we should all have a duty to share the burden of; if not equally, at least as much as we are prepared to work for, and earn.

Comensalism seeks the greatest degree of freedom for the individual, with the single proviso: respect the right of all individuals to enjoy the same freedom, i.e. Do what you will, as long as no one gets hurt by doing it.

“Do Unto Others, as You would have Them Do Unto You”.

How can anyone claim to be free, if they don't have sovereignty over their own bodies?

Comensalism is not laissez faire Capitalism.

Capitalists will accuse Comensalists of despising wealth; nothing could be further from the truth. The Comensalist holds that wealth is wonderful; so wonderful, in fact, that everyone should have a chance at it. The Capitalists, on the other hand, seem to regard wealth as being like an infectious disease; one which they are nobly and selflessly determined to quarantine everyone else from.

Capitalists claim their system offers the greatest degree of personal freedom.

This begs the question: Which is the greater freedom?

The freedom to exploit your fellow people without scruple or mercy, or

Freedom from exploitation.

Comensalism acknowledges the great, perhaps inevitable success of the natural system. As nature demonstrates exhaustively, it is never wise to put all your eggs in one basket. Diversity is the greatest buffer against universal extinction.

In recent years, we have come to appreciate the necessity for bio-diversity. We must now come to appreciate the need for economic diversity.

Capitalism, a system based on, and wholly dependent on competition, ignores the simple fact that all competitions inevitably end up with winners and losers; at which time the competition is over.

The successful capitalist, while loudly proclaiming the greatness of competition, seeks always to eliminate competition, forming monopolies and cartels, buying out or merging with competitors; thereby reducing economic diversity.

The current 'one size fits all' globalisation doctrine, peddled by the Capitalists and their banks, can only be a recipe for disaster, resulting in a world wide corporate dictatorship, in which -instead of one person one vote- only rich shareholders have a vote, according to how many shares they own.

Inconceivable? This is basically the system under which the Australian Constitution was written.

A terrifying future.

Accountants tell us we should distinguish between 'good debt' and 'bad debt'.

A 'bad' debt, they say, is borrowing money to buy a depreciating asset, i.e. If you borrow money to buy a car for $30,000., you pay back around $40,000 over a period of years, by which time the car is only worth about $10,000.

A 'good' debt, they say, is borrowing money to buy an appreciating asset, such as real estate. In this instance, you borrow (say) $200, 000 to buy a house, pay the very best part of $400,000 with interest over a period of years, but with the reasonable expectation that by the time you have paid the 380 odd grand, your property will be worth that much; possibly even more if you have at least maintained or perhaps improved it.

In truth what is being said here is bad debts are ones which we pay ourselves, whereas so called 'good' debts are ones we force our children to pay for us, in the form of grossly and continually inflated housing prices.

If we look at the increase in wages over the past forty years, compared to the increase in real estate prices, it is no mystery why we currently have a 'housing crisis'.

If we carry this persistent disparity forward another 40 years, we find a world where the banks and the very rich own all the land, and we are reduced, once again, to serfdom.

In America, in 2008, it has already begun.

We are selling our children into slavery.

Paying interest on money has been condemned as ‘Usury’ by intelligent people for thousands of years. Plato, Aristotle, Cato, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Aquinas, Muhammad, Moses, Philo and Gautama Buddha all denounced the practice.

Jesus Christ could be said to espouse pacifism, asking his followers to love their enemies, and turn the other cheek, yet even he reputedly drew the line at bankers, driving the money changers from the temple with a whip while yelling: “you have turned my father’s house into a den of thieves!”

Make no mistake, charging interest on money is nothing more than a deliberate penalty for being poor. It is a simple mechanism for transferring real wealth from those who already have too little, to those who already have too much.

Comensalism is about democracy.

No one gets to choose their place at the table.

For countless thousands of years, in many different cultures, we have been trained to offer respect, even adulation, to certain people. Many of us have been trained from birth to disdain, or even despise other certain people.

How often have you heard the claim from 'successful' people, that they are 'self made'?

How did they do that? How did they organise to have themselves born?

I ask you:

Who among us managed to choose their own parents?

Who chose their own gender?

Who chose whether to be short or tall, dark or fair, quick or slow?

Who chose the country they were born in?

Who chose the name they were born with?

Who chose whether they grew up in the city or the country?

Who chose the neighbourhood they grew up in, or the schools they went to?

Who really chose to be who they are?

And how many among us are proud?

Proud to be athletic; proud to intelligent; proud to be a man, proud to be a woman, proud to be white, proud to be black, proud to be rich…

For that matter, how many of us feel shame?

Too short, too tall, too thin, too stocky, too poor, too dumb; how can we feel shame for something that we have absolutely no control over?

We all know that no one on this planet is ‘born equal’, yet this is our equality; this is the one thing we all share in absolutely equal measure:

Not one of us chose to be who we are.

These people who claim to be ‘self made’ take personal credit for everything they have achieved, and everything that has happened to them, while completely ignoring the accident of their birth; the simple fact that they were fortunate enough not to be born in a country where the odds were that they would be dead, before they reached the age of five. (In 2003, more than 10 million did).

How did these 'self made people' create their own abilities? Their intelligence? Or even the drive and determination to exploit those abilities to their fullest?

Psychologists argue about the ratio between ‘nature and nurture’; in the end it doesn’t matter.

Because we have no say in either. As the Jesuits say:

“There, but by the Grace of God, go I”.

Comensalism recognises that we all eat from the same table; at the moment we only have one world, and we should all have an equitable share in it.

We must recognise and accept the fact that our resources are finite; therefore the larger the slice of the pie one of us takes, the less there is for the rest.

As Gandhi put it: "the rich must learn to live more simply, so the poor can simply live".

While it is true that some are more productive than others, for a whole host of reasons, it is also true that we all have different wants and needs, so dividing up the world absolutely equally is -arguably- neither necessary or desirable.

Perhaps those who are most productive should be materially rewarded; but how much is enough?

Each year over 8 million people die because they are simply too poor to stay alive.

More than 800 million people go hungry every day.

The gross domestic product of the poorest 48 nations is less than the wealth of the world's three richest people.

Capitalists claim they ‘create’ wealth. Bill Gates, currently the richest man in the world, did not create wealth. He created an operating system for computers, which he sold -very successfully- to the rest of the world. Did he sell his product at a fair price? At one point, in 1999, Gates was reputed to be worth more than $100 billion US dollars.

That is one hundred thousand million dollars. Meanwhile, almost half the world's population (3 billion people!) live on less than $2.50 a day.

It is often -more and more frequently- claimed that Banks have the ability to ‘create’ wealth, with nothing more than the stroke of a pen. Banks do not, as many assume, merely gather funds from rich investors and depositors and then lend this money out again.

Under license from governments, banks are allowed to lend considerably more than they actually have, on the understanding that not everyone will want their money back, in cash, at the same time.

The Great Depression, early last century, was a result of just that occurrence; people lost faith in their banks, tried to all take their money out at the same time, and the banks collapsed.

The truth is, while banks do provide the mechanism for ‘creating’ wealth, they do not and cannot create wealth themselves, simply because they are not real. All they can do is create (or 'multiply') money, which can only make each unit less valuable.

Only producers can create real wealth, by sweat and toil, when they convert resources into goods.

We create bank wealth or credit, when we go to a bank and sign a promissory note to pay back more than we actually borrow.

In the banking world, our promissory note, our IOU, our mortgage, becomes legal tender.

And because that note may span a period of twenty five years or more, and involve perhaps double the amount borrowed, all prices must rise.

We borrow from our children to make bankers rich.