Peace Read Online Free PDF Page B

non-violent direct action and awareness campaigns of Greenpeace and politicizations of peace and sustainability in Green Parties are thus two recent manifestations of age-old concerns.
    Socio-Economic Peace
    The premise of socio-economic peace is that how we live and work with each other (or not) as individuals and groups is a determining factor of whether peace is actualizable, as well as forms it takes if so. No historical socio-economic system has a priori made peace impossible other than mercantilism because each conceives of peace in a different sense based on its means and ends. That many participants would agree that their socioeconomic systems preclude peace for them by misusing its means and misconstruing its ends is a fact worthy of fiction. In some cases the ways or conditions in which socio-economic systems are implemented, rather than any one fault in them, preclude the peace they strive for. Thus using the peace proposed by one system to evaluate others would produce radically different results than evaluations of quality and degree of peace based on criteria common to all and distinct to one. Doing the latter provides critically safer comparative grounds for making one more like another, substituting one for another, or combining the best features of all. The point is not to give immunity to a socio-economic system for the positions it places and hardships it confers to the disempowered, upon whom the peace of every system so far set in place has rested, but to put the disempowered in a position to non-violently empower themselves as individuals and groups.
    Full and Free Employment
    Mozi, Hesiod and Bentham concurred that useful labor is constituent of peace for individuals as for societies, and tied it to justice insocio-economic systems. For eons before them, as in our stage of globalization, a lack of remunerative work made chances of survival slim, let alone chances of peace. Receiving just enough to survive was a rife, worldwide rationalization for keeping vast majorities of populations barely above the subsistence levels of prehistory, and had this not been done to some degree no socio-economic system could lay claims to any peace, however deficient. Colonialism exposed this rationalization by exploitative oppressions abroad that made irrefutable what the powerful rarely acknowledged at home. Las Casas’ plan for a Land of Peace where native laborers work alongside foreign for their own benefit as for empire and god is a case in point. Another is Ricardo’s analysis of labor, which led to the conclusion that economic competition among individuals and nations can diffuse or be a substitute for war while supplying for the welfare of all. Industrialism and the diversified interdependencies it sponsored provided means to overcome agriculturally based exploitation, though not without entailing exploitations of its own. From socialist perspectives, the answer to the question of who owns peace is everyone, or no one. Full and free employment here does not mean that everyone does what they want for a living, an un-Platonic ideal, but that everyone can make a contributive, self-satisfactory living with commensurate compensation without being forced.
    Elimination of Discrimination
    Discrimination has always been based in prejudiced minds and adversative to peace in situations created by their manifestations. Anti-discriminatory responses along three lines have been put forth, related to the absence of explicitly political levels and items in the Pyramid. One is to change minds first and situations second, an instance being Abdul Baha, who saw prejudice as a cause of war and preached its elimination as a path to peace. As politics is a reflection of our prejudices in his view, their removal must be carried out non-politically, in his cause religiously. A second is to change situations first and minds second, exemplified by social justice movements from the non-citizen Socii to