another political disappointment?
to be honest it doesn’t matter who the president is or what party is governing, the real power is where the money is
do you really want to spend the rest of your life watching the zuma’s and the trumps, the bernies or the corbyns, they play their parts well but are unable to ever change the economy away from capital accumulation and towards a needs-based distribution model, if you solve corruption you won’t solve hunger, if you solve hunger you won’t solve lack of shelter, if you solve that you wouldn’t have affordable healthcare, if you gave us that there would still be xenophobia, yes, congratulations to our heroes who won some of these victories but we aren’t able to solve them as fast as new ones emerge, it is an unwinnable battle, this is the reality you are too scared to think about, why are you so afraid of the possibility of an alternative system to capitalism?
if you are worried about a dictatorship or a repeat of the USSR or “total chaos”, or militant theocrats (including “christian” ones), then your concerns are valid, nobody wants to risk something so big and then it fails and you end up back where you started. but there’s more than just two options, and the options include models where you get to choose whatever job you want and only work 20 hours a week, and if you can’t work you still get the benefits, and then absolutely everything is free.
How does this work? if the people planting the crops are given seeds for free, and they give the yield of those crops to food processing factories for free which then give the packaged food to the supermarkets for free, who then give the packaged food to the customers for free then nobody is gaining anything yes, but nobody is losing anything either, and when you apply that same free supply chain model to every industry in the economy you end up creating a new economy which is still doing the same things it did before except this time everything they need they get for free and everything they produce they give away for free
an entire economy like that means everything you are personally need is free, and so you don’t need a salary in order to get your food / rent / etc. so if you don’t need a salary anymore you can do your job for free, meaning everything you previously made money off of is now free for the people who used to pay you for it, see how it has a knock on effect. this is what socialism is actually meant to be, not nationalized industry and central planning, not with “progressive” politicians who are going to “clean up the corruption” and “be on our side” by enacting social welfare, that’s not socialism it’s an attempt to mimic it while keeping money around. a shortcut that fails every time in my opinion.
the question then becomes well if i didn’t have to do my job in order to have a salary so that i can meet my needs, if my needs would be met for free why would i keep doing my job? but if you’re thinking that then doesn’t this say to you that you aren’t doing the things that are important to you? (if you do like your job then that’s a cool privilege to have but not the experience of most people).
but what about the dirty jobs? how do we get people to do them without money? first of all, doesn’t money seem like a loaded gun, where it can literally get people to do something you would never ever want to do, no, when there’s no money there’s no loaded gun and so it is possible that nobody would do those things, but surely we can solve this problem without threat? if we want sewage cleaned up as a society then let us figure out a way to get it cleaned up without people needing to do it, and until we have that new technology implemented we are all going to have to chip in and do a bit of work in order to have the kind of society we want, but that is the beauty of it, we all work together to make sure things are the way we want them, but we are deciding for ourselves what that is, if we don’t want to use fossil fuel we can transition away from it completely within 5 years, so why don’t we? it’s the money.
no, if we agree to share the burden we also get to decide what burdens we take on and which we don’t, when nobody shows up to work at the oil fields but instead start working on photovoltaic (the enviromentall friendly kind: Organic/polymer solar cells) it will happen, and no zumas or guptas will be able to stop us and we wont need a bernie or a corbyn or a maimane (if that’s your thing), to save us. is it as easier said than done? absolutely. it’s not going to be easy, but when is the right time to start? in 2024 when the ANC finally loses an election (just an example) but the new party fails to deliver on our hopes, or should we wait for the new hero after them who will also fail us? how many more times do you want to be disappointed that greed keeps winning. you need to cut the problem off at its root: money.
and so this isn’t going to happen tomorrow, not in a month, a year, maybe not even 10 years, but if we start working towards it today we can get there, 10 years of actively organizing and planning so that when we get rid of money everyone knows what their jobs will be, those who don’t want to participate in working can go and find their own places to live, but the average worker in society will want this to work because they would have spent 10 years planning for it, they will be invested, and we would succeed because no more energy and resources will be spent entertaining the whims of the rich and capitalists, no more stock markets, no more exchange rate, no more inflation, everything will be simplified to what do we need to do and how do we get that done.
but you don’t need me to tell you how to do this, you figure it out with the people in your lives, we have the internet now, things can go viral, we can have online polls, we can share solutions and ideas, teach each other, and develop the skills needed to live in a society without money, there has been almost 200 years worth of problem solving going on in this area, i was shocked to find out about it because it seems like the kind of thing we should already be talking about, be taught in school, but it’s strange how the things that rich people would rather you not know end up a scarce commodity when your society is based on money.
if you are interested look up pyotr kropotkin, murray bookchin or even go to this wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-communism, like i don’t normally write long ass political posts like this but if you are feeling like we are powerless and hopeless i’m here to tell you we can take back the power and there is hope, hope that we all as a society can stop being pulled one direction and then another by world politics or sport or celebrities or entertainment and look directly at the root of all the evils around us, money, and solve that problem, then you can go back to your entertainment (political or otherwise).
There will be a lot of problem solving to do as eliminating money finally allows us to start addressing the needs around us — in fact one of the ways that we get rid of money is to help those who are the least among us to be put first, we end poverty and suffering and then we go back to our whims. but think of how much richer we will be as a society, culturally, even in our own personal lives having finally achieved world peace, how much better will our entertainment be then (NO ADS), how much less environmental destruction and climate change. i am laboring this point but the root is money. and it’s scary to admit that because there are people who go to jail for suggesting it, but how many more people have to die, while we wait for our political heroes to save us when they need funds to run their campaigns and so how can they keep their own job if they through shade on their donors
it boils down to this, we are in a state of inertia, we are heading one way and it is to hell, like honestly, when climate change wipes out entire regions and makes growing food really hard we will look back at now as being the good old days, and then it will be too late to try and change the rudder. we were sold the myth that this capitalism ship was unsinkable but there’s an ice berg of climate change ahead and the captain and crew have secured life boats for themselves only this time. now is the time to start having discussions about other systems, before things get that bad, while we still have the time to save this planet, to save the people who are dying every day because of hunger. the amount of money that the rich own could pay for everyone on earth to be fed, yet they’re not paying, and yet we still want them to rule over us, they are kings, wicked wicked kings who hold the power to save those in their kingdom from suffering but care not to, if you perpetuate loyalty to capitalism and money you’re a loyal servant to their interests.
*mic drop*
if you want to chat about this stuff you can find me on facebook in this group.
and if you want to read something else i wrote, how this one on the definitions of capitalism and socialism?
