I wrote the following comment in "democratic underground" a few days ago in response to a post full of existential despair about the horrors of capitalism. Rather than remaining in the paralysis of despair, I think we need to focus on the steps we can take now, in our local communities, to counter the horrible effects of our current capitalist reality.
(For a superb history of how the Basque people, starting with a small group of people in a very small town in northern Spain, and working against the constraints of Franco's Fascism, created the most successful worker's cooperative in the world, see TPau's great diary:
Link to the Story of the Mondragon Cooperative)
We can create a new economic system which will abolish the mad drive for profits that drives corporations to strive for constantly increasing profits to justify their CEO's obscene multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses at the expense of the workers who produce the goods we all need to survive.
We need to be producing goods for their use value -- because people want and need them -- not for the profits they will generate for the corporate CEO's.
The workers who produce the goods and the consumers who need them must, together, make the decisions about what is produced and how it is produced, not a minuscule number of wealthy "managers" at the top.
The managers/CEO's current wealth comes from the decades of hard labor they stole from their workers and the excessive profits stolen from the consuming public. If we take those unearned profits back and put them to social uses we could feed, house, clothe and provide health care to all our citize
Sounds like a big job, I know, but it can be done if we join together in neighborhood and work place groups to decide how we want our society to function and then taking what at first might appear to be small steps to regain control of our economy and our lives.
Small groups can network and form small cooperatives with other small groups in their neighborhoods and towns to plan ideas and actions and, where warranted, take them jointly together. This might be as simple as starting sharing networks for internet Wifi and mutual technical assistance as we all need to share information to make good decisions.
Once a communications network is established, we can form food cooperatives, neighborhood garden cooperatives, credit union cooperatives, and even joint solar power and medical services cooperatives to hire local doctors and dentists to provide services at reasonable cost to all our neighborhoods. The possibilities are limited only by the limits of all our imaginations and energy to work to create them.
Many people -- with a variety of great skills -- are unemployed right now feeling personally worthless even though it is not their fault. It's the fault of the inhuman economic system which now owns our politicians as well as all our production and distribution systems. Their ownership is based on past thefts. Time to re-establish the values and priorities of our local communities by changing the rules of the economic game so we all can live with human dignity, not just the less than .001% of our population that, now, effectively owns us all. The skills of the unemployed, if shared with their communities, could put our whole society back to work -- for human beings, not obscene profits.
If those who are now out of work knock on the doors of their neighbors, find out what their needs are and what their skills are, we could begin to trade and share our skills and enrich our communities.
Capitalist economics has forced the whole world to live on its terms -- the drive for profit controls them. They now own most of our elected officials and write the legislation and rules to increase their own profits.
It is a global phenomenon. (Look at Rupert Murdoch's strangle-hold on British politics. He has done the same in the U.S. and Australia. He and his family own and control hundreds and hundreds of media companies throughout the world. His companies control the information we receive, and so we are bombarded by propaganda telling us how great capitalism is. It has been great for him, not the majority of us. And he is not the only CEO who has done the same. But there are probably less than 1000 such capitalists controlling our world. Together we are millions. (Forty million of us in the U.S. need food stamps when there is plenty of resources for all -- if we work together. We can take it back -- if we work together, locally and globally to create a decent society for all.
We can create a decent society which puts human needs and development as our priority, unleashes enormous creativity, and restores human values, if we work together. Start locally, talk to your neighbors and work mates now!
(I don't care what this new economic system we can create will be called; it will find its proper name as long as it gives us all back control over our jobs, neighborhoods, environments and human lives.)