Towards A Better World

The capitalist system is behind all the ills that burden humanity today. Poverty, deprivation, discrimination, inequality, political repression, ignorance, bigotry, unemployment, homelessness, insecurity and crime are all inevitable products of this system. For sure those problems that ails society were not invented by capitalism and existed before capitalism but importantly they have found a new meaning in this society and found a new lease of life, corresponding to the needs of capitalism. The draw their rationale from the needs of the system that rules the world today and serve specific interests in this world. The capitalist system itself has continually and relentlessly resists people's effort to eradicate and overcome these ills. Whenever people rose to take charge of their lives, the first barrier they face was the capitalist who stand in the way a society worthy of human beings and thwart efforts to change the system. Present society is based on the exploitation of direct producers — the appropriation of a part of the product of their labour by the ruling classes. Exploitation in capitalist society takes place without yokes upon the shoulders and shackles around the ankles of the producers. It is through the medium of the market and free and exchange of commodities, the fundamental features of capitalism.  The surplus value obtained from the exploitation of the working class is divided out among the various sections of the capitalist class essentially through the market mechanism and also through state fiscal and monetary policies. Profit, interest and rent are the major forms in which the different capitals share in the fruits of this class exploitation. The competition of capitals in the market determines the share of each capitalist branch, unit and enterprise. Violence and coercion have driven the expansion of capitalism from its start, and continue to be an indispensable glue holding together what has become a world economic system. Yet no level of brutality can itself keep a system, or any ruling structure, in place for a long period of time, much less for centuries, unless there is some level of cooperation.

That cooperation must rest, at least partially, on belief. Why did so many people in the past believe that God picked one dynastic family to rule in perpetuity? What peasants believed helped keep monarchs on thrones. Today, with education so much more available, such a belief would be laughed at. Ideology accordingly must be much more sophisticated. We must distinguish between governing and ruling. Presidents and prime ministers may govern for set periods of time, giving way to new officials, but these men and women do only that: govern. They manage the government on behalf of the dominant social forces within their borders, and those dominant social forces are in turn, depending where on the international capitalist pecking order the governed space lies, connected to and/or subordinate to more powerful social forces based elsewhere. It is capitalists — industrialists and financiers — who actually rule. The more power capitalists can command, the more effectively they can bend government policy and legislation to their preferred outcomes. More aspects of human life are steadily put at the mercy of “market forces.” Those are not neutral, disinterested mechanisms sitting loftily above the clouds, as the corporate media incessantly promotes. Rather, market forces are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the most powerful industrialists and financiers. Thus capitalist fundamentalism is telling us that a handful of exceedingly powerful industrialists and financiers should decide social and economic matters; that wealth automatically confers on them the right to dominate society. Not so different from feudal beliefs in monarchs. Without people believing that the rule of capitalists is a natural law, capitalism would not endure. When people ceased to believe in monarchs, that system of rule crumbled. With capitalism it is no different. “Socialism,” is no longer a bogey word. But capitalism is as strong as ever today, the mantra “There Is No Alternative” still prevails in the popular psyche.

Capitalism is what people know and believe in  and until that belief is broken through persuasion and people are compelled to confront the cause of their deteriorating living conditions capitalism will be nearly impossible to dislodge. Even allowing for the rise of the Internet, and the better ability for dissenting news and viewpoints to be circulated it is indisputable the corporate media remains dominant and allows only a narrow range of perspectives to be given a hearing. So many different media outlets report the same news item in a nearly identical way, that “spin” can easily gain wide acceptance as truth. The same dominant set of presumptions underlie them, those dominant presumptions, products of ideologies widely propagated by elite institutions, serve as ideological reinforcement. Public opinion is shaped by repetition, and not repetition in a handful of obviously biased publications or networks, but rather repetition of viewpoints, reporting angles and underlying themes and assumptions, across the entire corporate media. This propaganda does not fall out of the sky; its seeming pervasiveness flows from the ability of capitalists to disseminate their viewpoints through a variety of institutions, those they directly set up and control. Something as fundamental as who generates the wealth of society, and how wealth is generated, is obscured as part of this process of opinion formation. It can’t be otherwise, for this is the building block on which capitalist ideology rests. Incessant spin claims that profit is the result of the acumen of the capitalist and the capitalist’s magical ability to create profit out of thin air, when in actuality corporate profit comes from the difference between what an employee produces and what the employee is paid. Many people must be poor for one person to be rich, because the private profit of a few is taken from the underpayment of work to the many.

Can “socialism” be part of the mainstream political vocabulary? Can it displace the “There Is No Alternative? Is it a term we can fight for. The only way we can be true to our principles is if we are willing to fight for them. If our goal is to change the world then we work to create a new one. It comes down to a choice:

1) Work to change the personnel of the oligarchy

2) Work to create a new structure that represents people/planet over profit

It is time to stop tinkering around with a deeply broken system and time to now pursue radical transformation. Many more eyes will need to be opened, with a concomitant willingness to struggle and organize, if a better world is to be created. A better world is not only possible but can be created once a sufficient portion of society comes to believe in ourselves and that cooperation rather than dog-eat-dog competition is the route to a sustainable economy with enough for all.