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.

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 in socio-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.

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 the two Great Peace Rebellions, as for women’s suffrage, civil and worker rights. Of course, changing situations involves changing at least the minds of policymakers, but not necessarily those of prejudiced masses who must thereafter cope, in which case poli­tics is a means to an end not an end in itself.

Reduction of Wealth Disparities

Like structural harm to which they tend to be attached, wealth disparities are historically omnipresent obstacles to peace when they are prohibitive of individual or group actualization of items and levels in the Pyramid. Only when wealth disparities have been effectively assuaged from barring such actualizations can peace and prosperity, persistently linked in thought all through history, also be linked in practice. Partnership soci­eties do not necessarily preclude wealth disparities and can exist despite them, but only insofar as they counteract the inclinations of dominator societies to abuse wealth disparities and the power asymmetries wealth disparities can cause. In Mesopotamia, balanced geo-social configura­tions were keys to stemming decline due to latifundization and over­privatization, accentuations of wealth disparities which like all others if unimpeded become threats to peace. The Third Estate in France as the vehicle of its Revolution, and the Third World as the vehicle of the Non­Aligned Movement, are two sides of the same coin on different scales and positions on the peace spectrum. Contemporary critiques of globalism based on the reduction of wealth disparities between and within nations are thus historically justified in pointing out its menaces. Yet, imagining the management of components of peace as product lines of global busi­nesses, in which everyone has a stake and expects returns on their invest­ments, comes close to how handling wealth disparities can work today. Competing to meet unmet needs, continually improving their products to increase their market share, such businesses of peace would monetarily enrich stakeholders beyond their wildest dreams while non-violently satisfying their highest pacific hopes.