A New Beginning?

What’s important to understand is what works on the ground is community; what works on the ground is cooperation. Strange as it seems but socialists have never took a more hopeful view of the future than now.

The lords of capital, by the very nature of the economic system, will fight to the last person on the planet for the last pound on planet. There can be no end to war, exploitation and disease as long as capitalism continues to enslave the mass of humanity and place private profit above all else. In fact, capitalism is holding back the progress of humanity and it is a real and deadly serious threat of worldwide annihilation.

Those of us who create, invent, explore, study, mine  farm, build, construct, teach, cook and clean, who do all the work, we’ve designed and manufactured robots that can do much of the work for us, quicker and more efficiently. We’ve made instant communication across the globe an everyday reality. We can exchange any information available with our fingertips on a key-board in a matter of seconds.

Just imagine if we used all this knowledge and technology   to satisfy everyone wants and wishes without waste of either resources or labour or polluting the environment. And then distributed them free to whoever wanted them according to a democratically conceived, worldwide plan?

We have the machinery and materials and human ingenuity to do all these things. Only capitalism stops us. Private property and capitalist control over the means of production and the accumulation of massive amounts of private wealth stands in our way. The fulfilment of people’s needs could be accomplished. The material conditions necessary to do so are available. It just can’t happen under capitalism. But the capitalist profit motive because it must come before human needs won’t permit it. The tragedy is that  competition for profit trumps people’s welfare security and safety. 

Today it is clearer than ever that the curing a disease is a for-profit business (and certainly the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most lucrative of them all), the quest for more profits will aggravate the disease and the human suffering. The need is to put profits above all other considerations. The irrationality of the capitalist mode of production for private profit comes first, and humanity’s progress is sidelined.Governments in the epoch of austerity have been the dismantling of existing public health institutions and the downsizing of hospitals and frontline medical resources.

We, the people, hold the power to put in place a socialist system of production for human need and want instead of for private profit. We have all the resources, technology and know-how to democratically redesign the whole economic system to provide for all human needs and wants without wars, oppression or environmental destruction. A society that if it cannot avoid the rise of new viruses, it can contain and limit its spread. It’s simply a matter of understanding that the planet belongs to everyone and each one of us has something to contribute toward the welfare of all. And that each of us can share equally in its fruits. Democratically planned socialism is the only rational approach to ensuring a bright future for all.

THE PROFIT SYSTEM                      OR  SOCIALISM