The Symptoms, The Disease, The Cure

The Symptoms:
Poverty
Climate Crisis
Resource Wars
Oppression of:
     Women
     Indigenous
     LGBTQ+
     People of Color
Persecution of Refugees
Hunger
Access to Clean Water
Unequal Distribution of Wealth and Resources
Unequal Distribution of Health Care
Unchecked Disease
Mass Shootings

The Disease:
Capitalism

The Cure:
Seizing the means of extraction, production and distribution; delivering these into the hands of the people.

This is a thing that can be done. It will be done; it is inevitable.

Here's a Sweet Little Ditty From Barking Red at the Fuck Capitalists Blog

https://fckcaps.blogspot.com/2019/06/open-borders.html

Open the borders!

Samir Amin, 1931-2018

“Increased awareness will not happen through successive adaptations to the requirements of capitalist accumulation, but through awareness of the necessity of breaking with those requirements.” —Samir Amin 

From "Dissent": Imagining A World With No Bullshit Jobs

More on useless work:

"According to Graeber, the same free-market policies that have made life and work more difficult for so many people over the past few decades have simultaneously produced more highly paid managers, telemarketers, insurance company bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists who do nothing useful all day."

Add salespeople and sales managers and you understand my life...

" Kim Moody argues that rising productivity and low pay has more to do with intensifying management techniques, like lean and just-in-time production and surveillance technology that polices workers, than it does with automation. If that is true, then it seems like we are stuck in a vicious loop of companies creating more bullshit jobs to manage and police workers..."
--
"This is what statistics actually show—productivity in industry skyrocketing, and with it, profits, but productivity in, say, health and education declining, therefore, prices going up, and profits being maintained largely by squeezing wages. Which in turn explains why you have teachers, nurses, even doctors and professors on strike in so many parts of the world."
--
"Brooks: Another of the arguments you make is that the structure of the modern corporation resembles feudalism more closely than the ideal of hypothetical market capitalism. What do you mean by that?

Graeber: When I was in college they taught me that capitalism means that there are capitalists, who own productive resources, like say factories, and they hire people to make stuff and then sell it. They can’t pay their workers so much that they don’t make a profit, but they have to pay them at least enough that they can afford to buy the stuff the factory produces. Feudalism, in contrast, is when you just take your profits directly, by charging rent, fees and dues, turning people in debt peons, or otherwise shaking them down.

Nowadays the vast majority of corporate profits don’t come from making or selling things but from “finance,” which is a euphemism for other peoples’ debts—charging rents and fees and interest and whatnot. It’s feudalism in the classic definition: “direct juro-political extraction” as they sometimes put it. This also means the role of government is very different: in classic capitalism it just protects your property and maybe polices the labor force so they don’t get too difficult, but in financial capitalism, you’re extracting your profits through the legal system, so the rules and regulations are absolutely crucial, you basically need the government to back you up as you shake people down for their debts."

We don't need to do so much of what we do. Capitalism has us all grasping at ghosts.

Jesus, Jewish Communist Hobo

Extranewsfeed, John Laurits, Jan 2018

The World Really Does Owe You A Living

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

-“The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30

"The problem with the kids today is that they think  the world owes  them a living!"

-Everybody's Grandpa everywhere

Your Gramps was wrong. The world does owe each and every one of us a living. For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that "the world" means all of the people on the planet. All of the people on the planet owe you a living, just as you owe all of those people.

We do not have to sell our labor to each other. We do not have to kill ourselves at occupations, simply because our less-technologically-advanced ancestors had to. We have reached a point in the development of our society and it's technological aptitude where there is no reason for all of us to occupy a 40-hour-per-week job. There just isn't that much that needs to be done. We create useless occupations to ensure that we cling to the old paradigm (ever have to deal with a commissioned salesperson?), just because that is the way it has always been done. We are seized with indignant rage when we see the unemployed. We call them lazy and useless. Sounds good to me.

And all of these useless jobs are designed specifically to serve a single purpose:to preserve the power of the powerful. In other words: keeping the wealth in the hands of the wealthy. Your job is not going to make you rich. It is going to keep you in your place. And the place of millions, even billions of us, all over the world, is to die in poverty.

We continue to murder the poor using labor largely because the tiny number of people who have the power to change this don't want it to change. They don't believe it is in their interest to do so. Poverty kills by making healthcare unaffordable, by mandating malnutrition, by enforcing ignorance. There are many excuses made for this, but they are all insufficient. The paradigm of labor is used as a weapon of social control by the oligarchs, providing just enough income to make the poor cling to their jobs, but not enough for them to break out of their situation.

There is a solution to all of this: The practice of selling labor needs to end. Production for profit needs to end. Manufactured scarcity needs to end. Put the means of extraction, production and distribution in the hands of all of us, in the form of collectives. Convert the basis of the world's economy from profit to need. Design and produce for need rather than wealth-creation and the need for useless labor goes away.

This creates a society where only a few are needed for work. So, the paradigm becomes part-time work, work-as-needed or work on a rotational basis. The vast majority of one's time becomes free to pursue whatever the heart desires, rather than doing what must be done simply to survive.

We have the means to do this, and each and every one of us owes it to all the others to make this happen. So, yes, the world does owe you a living. Demand it.

History

Economics and Political Theory can never be separated from History.

Who Are the Aliens?

Capitalism creates aliens. Any sufficiently wealthy person, whether owner of the means of production, the owner of property, or simply the parasitic inheritor, is an alien in the sense that they are removed from the common experience of the rest of society. The more isolated they become from the work of survival, the less like everyone else they are. That is to say, they lose (if they ever had it) the ability to empathize with their fellow humans, and believe that everything they have they deserve; everyone else simply isn't worthy of success due to their own character flaws.

This follow-on effect of capitalism is dangerous, not only because it reflects the unjustifiable hoarding of wealth on the part of a small number of people. But, also because those people, especially after a generation or two, begin to feel like they are different from the rest of the population, better and more deserving, not just because they work harder (which, of course, they don't) but, because they are somehow chosen by God. This is the basis of feudalism and monarchy.

If this seems far-fetched, all one has to do is to look around the US at this moment. People who think this way are already here.  The whiny, over-privileged little boy who currently occupies the Oval Office is a prime example. He feels like he deserves whatever he wants, simply because he is who he is. This intense, maniacal gluttony for acquisition is precisely what makes people like this alien.

The seed of alienation is inside all humans, however. Anyone who becomes wealthy, by whatever means, is at risk of this unfortunate fate. We know this, because these people are still just human, with the same biology and underlying psychology as the rest of us. They simply have been poisoned, and transformed into something less than human, something alien.

I say unfortunate because it is a condition that, no matter how wealthy they are, cannot last. Eventually, everyone dies, and they have spent their short lives bent on getting more and more, and it is never enough. They damage society by removing resources that would be better used in some other way than just sitting in their coffers. They poison those around them by infecting them with the same psychosis. They damage themselves because they are never happy.

Capitalism is an alien god, and it creates aliens in its own image. We can do better. We can purge the alien influence on our society and rule ourselves instead. We don't need them, they need us. 

America's Best, Sanest Economist - Richard Wolff

Let's let him speak for himself:

Richard Wolff 2016

Richard Wolff 2017 Kansas City

The Pink Tide

What's Going On In Ecuador