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Cliff James Biography

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“So, at the turn of the third millennium, you have chosen to base your principles on a collection of contradictory texts – written by various men years after the death of your man Jesus – that have been edited and selected out of hundreds of other documents, and bound together into one hotchpotch volume, under the orders of a political primate, Pope Damasus. And, you’re still content to condemn the living love I feel here and now, because of that dusty accident of bad editing? Why?”

“I begin to see how a post-money society would work in practice. When we are in paid employment, we are exchanging our labour in return for money in order to live within a money-based society, nothing more. Both sides in the labour-salary exchange are motivated by self-interest. But when we volunteer our labour for a cause, for a better world, we are not so much exchanging our labour as investing it directly into the world we want to see. Notes for Utopia: there will be no money when we get there.”

“I belin to see how a post-money society would work in practice. When we are in paid employment, we are exchanging our labour in return for money in order to live within a money-based society, nothing more. Both sides in the labour-salary exchange are motivated by self-interest. But when we volunteer our labour for a cause, for a better world, we are not so much exchanging our labour as investing it directly into the world we want to see. Notes for Utopia: there will be no money when we get there.”

“Have you ever wondered why we bury and cremate our dead? Nothing to do with hygiene, it’s just so we don’t have to see the reality of death. You know, the Zoroastrians used to leave their dead in open places for the birds to eat. Now that’s a far more honest way to go, don’t you agree? Everyone can see what happens. It makes us live our lives more potently. That’s how I want to go, at my end: openly. Not ashamed of death, but embracing it.”

“The border of a nationality does not exist ‘in-itself’ in the same way that, say, a mountain, a shell or the moon exists. The border of a nationality is a condition that exists, if it can be said to exist at all, in the mind of the one who passively accepts it as existing. It is a ready-cut cloth, a costume, a fabricated flag, which is used to cover our nothingness.”