Tuesday, January 19, 2016

All Is Wrong With The World But It Can Be Mended

The world may well be an anti-human, capitalist-tinted, ideologically-reinforced powerless one but it permits the active, disciplined use of democracy, by the immense majority to institute a revolutionary state of affairs. This use of presently flawed, representative 'bourgeois' democracy, by an immense majority of convinced socialist to, dissolve and end forever, 'government over them' and elect the people, to administer a delegatory democratic society of real social equals in relation to the social product, locally, regionally and globally, using re-callable delegates where necessary, is the 'Achilles heel' of capitalism. The workers are already running capitalism from top to bottom. They are more than capable and qualified to run the post-capitalist society. It is a change of ownership from the minority to everyone. The means and ends of this transformation must be in harmony. "The ends must determine the means" used to those ends.

The exercising of a democratic mandate, for the change of ownership, from private, corporate, state or other bloc elites, into common ownership 'is' a culmination of the revolution which will be already growing in the minds actions, and aspirations of the immense majority and reflected in the growing enfeeblement of capitalist representatives, dispensing fearful prophecies and reforms, to disabuse the majority before realising the game's up. It is unstoppable once the idea grows. It would be foolish indeed to resist. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

All previous true revolutions, as opposed to putsch's and civil wars, have been minority ones, using larger groups to help, (peasants ,workers) but discarding them afterwards when the prize was won, to install new elite classes and of course, they were bloody affairs. Those had damn all to do with human 'nature’, but socially conditioned human behaviour. Those arose out of the social conditions and class struggles of their time, but ends and the means coincided for their minority post-revolutionary justification, coercion preceding ideological, reinforcement,  eventually, as 'the only show in town'.

"The ends justify the means", is the anti-human doctrine of such minority revolutions. The beneficiaries, minority class rulers, in a parasitic economic relationship to the majority. Capitalism certainly 'sprang into the world oozing blood from every pore' and it certainly spawned a system where war, two world wars and the nuclear obliteration of a population of two cities are seen as normal legitimate concomitants of capitalism in, 'business by other means' mode, for access to raw materials, trade routes, markets and spheres of interests.

The greatest emergent quality within capitalism is, ironically, social production itself. All of the necessities of life are produced socially but acquired individually (by the capitalist). That the producers (the working class) perceive that their economic interests are not represented within the present political power structure reflects the similar relationship of the past between the bourgeoisie and the king. So, in this way, we see the seeds of our future (socialist revolution) in the economic relationships of the present. Human culture is a dynamic economic and political process that is always changing. Any attempt to analyse economics and politics without a realisation of this most important factor is like trying to get on board a speeding train while wearing a blindfold. The popularity of this ’blindfolded’ approach to the study of political economy is obviously in the interests of the status quo whose agency within industry and the centres of learning has encouraged superficial theories such as ‘neo liberalism’ etc.

In this way almost all contemporary economic and political theories have been merely attempts to rationalise the irrational realities of the market system, which is conceived of as eternal and essentially unchanging. The economic elements for making socialism a practical alternative have been in place for at least a century, but as is painfully obvious, the mass consciousness necessary for revolution, is almost entirely absent. Many aspects of the history of the last century can be postulated as reasons for this: the carnage of two world wars and the subsequent loss of confidence in human potential to make a better world (poignantly expressed in Adorno‘s phrase: ‘Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’) and the ubiquity of the distraction of consumerism together with the minority control and ownership of the mass media, being two of the most probable. None of these explanations, however, can disguise the cultural, political and moral bankruptcy of 21st century capitalism.


We socialists say that mass consciousness and self-determination is the only way to create socialism; history will decide if we are correct because, among other things, it can never betray you.

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