Build a World to Change Our Lives

Nothing is guaranteed in this life, except change.  Our history shows society constantly transforming. We are told that there are “not enough” resources and that in order to ration scarce resources we need a system that efficiently allocates scarcity. The truth is most goods are in fact abundant. We have created the capability to provide for all, and it takes fewer and fewer man-hours each year to do it.  We  need to end commodity-based production and exchange. We need to create a world in which social needs form the basis of production and distribution. No one will need to, nor be able to, sell their labour power. This is the minimum criterion for a socialist society.  People will nonetheless work, not out of a need to get pay in order to live, but as part of their expected duty to others and, hopefully to an increasing extent, because we are able to re-design work so we will enjoy much of it.  A non-market socialist world  needs to be promoted urgently because present society has laid the basis for our extinction using capitalist practices and thinking.  At the heart of the capitalist system is the practice and concept of money as a measure, even a god. The structure and relations of capital are impossible without the practice and concept of money as a general all-purpose means of exchange and unit of account. Capital is money that begets more money.  Thus monetary values come to dominate social and environmental values. We see non-market socialism as the only way to address the combined crises we face, which are results of a capitalist system based in production for trade, relying on monetary accounting and exchange. This system contorts and confuses the values, relationships and structures that ideally exist between people and between people and nature. Capitalists are defined by money, their power is monetary power, their logic is a market-based logic. Socialism must mean sharing the power to decide what is produced, how it is produced and for whom. Socialism must be state-free and class-free because states and classes represent exclusive power. To institute socialism we only need to understand the potential, limitations and needs of a natural and built world held in common along with the basic needs of humans — and share decision-making based on a discourse of use values and distinct measures appropriate to differing use values. There is no need for a universal unit of account or means of exchange.

Imagine the entire world focusing our efforts on education, building renewable energy, growing healthier food, and improving our medical, housing, and transportation infrastructure.  Is that not what life's all about? Imagine, having the right to develop our human capacities more fully; the free time to become more active Citizens; to finally use our free time for something other than escape.

Deep inside, we know life can be much more than we experience and with less fear.  The working-class has little or no choice but to submit to our ritualistic commodification. We allow capitalists, landlords, corporations, and their politicians to dehumanise us as their tools. We are forced into the labour market, for example. Although business worldwide are using technological advances in robotics to replace humans labour power and thus lessen their dependence on the working class, there is still a heavy reliance on people. Under capitalism, the ruling hierarchy relies on the state to control and establishing cultural hegemony. Millions of impoverished people who can barely afford basic necessities to survive, spend much of their time admiring wealthy celebrities. This intense consumption process has exposed the working class to informal channels of indoctrination,  through advertising and marketing, popular media entertainment such as television shows, movies, and video games, and the worship of the cult of personality and fame (and, thus, wealth).  In fulfilling this role, workers become consumers in the market for both necessary and conspicuous consumption while showing up every few years to vote for politicians that do not represent them. Members of the working class receives its values through many different channels, formal and informal. Part of this is accomplished through formal education, where traditional intellectuals become more specialised, and where the process of learning and thinking is replaced by indoctrination. A prime example of this indoctrination can be seen in the field of economics, where students seem unable to apply their thought beyond the narrow confines of capitalism. All exhibit an unwillingness or inability to see the most obvious of contradictions within their theory. Public education is not concerned with the students’ ability to comprehend or critically think, but rather with turning them into docile and passive tools of production and the the creation of obedient workers who are minimally competent to fulfil their exploitative labour role. Through this manufactured acquiescence the working-class literally buy into, become vested in, and thus serve and protect, the capitalist system. In a class-based society, fear becomes an effective tool in shaping ideas and pushing through ruling-class agendas with widespread working-class approval. Today, corporate news stations that are concerned only with ratings (thus, profit) choose sensationalist narratives that strike fear in the viewer. In the media industry of profit-based ‘news’, there is no need for overt government propaganda because corporate ‘news’ outlets willingly fill this role through sensationalism.

Under capitalism, the working-class finds itself in a paradoxical state. Our entire lives are dominated by activities that directly benefit those who own and control the production of the commodities we buy and the businesses we work for. Our participation in these activities both strengthens those owners while also further alienating us from what would otherwise be productive and creative lives. Our activities increase the owning class social and political capital while at the same time separating us from our own families and communities. This existence takes on a more severe form when we are called upon to fight and die in wars that, only benefit the property owning elite. We are conditioned to follow the status quo, despite its propensity to steer us into authoritarian avenues.

 Socialism is a market-free, money-free, class-free and state-free society, want-free, sustainable and just world-system. We stand for a global society in which production is for need and not profit (and is therefore sustainable), where the state, national frontiers and money have disappeared.