Why is ACTIVE pan-European?

The key lesson of the previous industrial revolutions

As Max Weber said, capitalism “needs” bureaucracy and “has created an urgent need for stable, strict, intensive and calculable administration” this is because administrations provide one of the foundations of the social structures of the economy. Far from being mere passive providers of a general context for trade, as all entrepreneurs using hemp flower/CBD as a key ingredient in wellness or medicinal markets know, they have a direct influence on modes of economic competition, even when their genesis was directly influenced by doctrines of liberalism!

CBD oil would have relaxed him while writing Economy and Society

For even in those economies most open to market forces (“Free Mouvement of Goods, uh?), the categories in which “the spirit of capitalism” is expressed are largely determined by the bureaucratized diffusion of norms governing the legal frameworks within which entrepreneurs operate. Behind this promotion of a liberal viewpoint, the history of the EU is also paradoxically one of the emergences of new bureaucrats.

Jean Monnet would have loved testing new methods of CBD extraction!

The construction of the European Union long permitted the pursuit of industrial policies that supported the “national champions” of the various member states. They could send their experts to sit on the specialist committees (preferably with a scientific background in, say, chemistry or toxicology).

Historically hemp producers and manufacturers have been struggling to get their point of view across to Commission officials. Hemp was an overlooked crop but it’s now making a huge comeback thanks to the discovery of new usages mostly in the wellness markets

On the specific CBD front, the biggest challenge for our industry is to move on to Europeanised forms of representation. For instance, it should be a huge red flag that when CBD/THC levels in cosmetics are discussed none of us is invited…!

Now if you’re an entrepreneur using hemp/CBD as a key ingredient, think about the Industrial Revolution and apply to the European case an approach adopted by the entrepreneurial class at a national level, or rather the way that the entrepreneurial class became “national”.

It was only several years after the beginning of the industrial revolution that industrialists (initially in locally based, paternalist organizations) began to adopt “nationalized” forms of representation that enabled them to use the same political references as their government interlocutors.

Now that we know that the CBD revolution (medicinal+ wellness) is just starting Europe —let’s not wait!

We know that any effort of coalition is always complicated and never finished. The alliance of different representatives of the industrial entrepreneurs in a single organization required them to overcome:

• a minimum of contradictions, including cultural and jurisdictional fragmentations
• the effects of economic competition
• an “ideological unwillingness” to take up a position in relation to a new bureaucratic actor intent on intervening in business

Ultimately, as it has always been, our success depends on our level of reflexivity and our capacity for mobilization across fragmented units.

Are you working with CBD as a key ingredient? Do you have what it takes?

Write me now : laurene@tradeactive.org