Every essay here is written in the first person singular. My wage, my stake, my escape. A reader could be forgiven for thinking the whole project is a lifeboat for one. So let us settle the one question the manifesto left open. Is defection selfish?
Start with what a decent person has to give. Not money, few have any spare. Hours. The coaching of the under-elevens, the seat on the parish council. All of it is paid for in unsold time. Now look at the journeyman. Willing, capable, kind. And spent. His evenings are sold before the month starts, his weekend is recovery, his attention is rented out by nine each morning. He would gladly help. He has nothing left to help with. The wage does not only take your hours. It takes your usefulness to everyone who is not paying you.
That is the cruel arithmetic under the word community. We keep asking people to give more and keep building a system that leaves them nothing to give. Charity drives, volunteer weeks, wellbeing Wednesdays. All of it begging from the empty.
Now watch what happens when one person in a street gets past the line. Their hours come back for good. They are at the school gate at three. They can lend a deposit, fund a mate's workshop, sit on the board that nobody has time for, teach for free what they once charged for. And they can say no. At work, to the landlord, to the loan shark. A household that does not need next month's wage has a voice, and a street full of them has a say. The street's arithmetic changes because one household stopped being a cost centre for its own life. Capital income is the only thing that makes we affordable. Defection keeps you in the village. It is how you finally become useful to it.
There is a receipt for this, and it is a hundred and sixty years old. In the 1860s a Rhineland mayor named Raiffeisen watched farmers borrow from the usurer in town at ruinous rates, and instead pooled the village's small savings into a local bank owned by its own members. Neighbours lending to neighbours, the interest staying in the parish. A whole village that became capital together. The Genossenschaft. It is still standing, and it grew into one of the largest banking groups in Germany. Nobody called those farmers selfish for owning the thing they used to rent.
So the two are one motion. Your own escape, and the commons it feeds. The old word for the people around you was kith, your known ground and the folk on it, the half of kith and kin everyone forgot. You cannot serve your kith on borrowed hours. You serve it with your own, and first you have to get them back.
I do what I like and we serve a greater wellbeing. Both are true at the same time. No contradiction. I am me and I am we.