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Rant: Sense, cents and sensibility

27 Aug

It makes no sense we blow billions buying bombs or bailing out banks, but can’t afford to end world hunger. It makes no sense we pay to see a movie and then are forced to sit through commercials before it starts.

“It makes no sense.” I’m using these words more and more often.

The tyranny of idiot capitalism has become so ridiculous that it must be a sign the system is in crisis. The outrageous lies and distortions told to defend it have got to mean capitalism is finally obfuscating on thin ice.

At a minimum, please tell me other people have noticed the same absurdities that make me feel like smacking every sycophantic shill for the ruling class across the side of the head and screaming: “You’ve got to be kidding me! This is the best system possible? This is the height of human achievement? What do you take us for? Utterly brainwashed fools?” (And then I think it takes one to know one.)

Capitalism means freedom. Really? For the ever-greater proportion of people working in precarious part-time jobs paying peanuts? For the 70-year olds behind counters selling Big Macs or greeting Wal-Mart shoppers? For the tens of millions who have had their pensions chopped? For the garment workers toiling in life-threatening conditions in Bangladesh or Haiti or Honduras to earn $5 per day? For the millions of suburbanites who spend a quarter of their income and their waking hours on and in the vehicle that takes them to their shitty job? For the tens of thousands who have been recently bombed into “our way of life” by the greatest or one of the lesser capitalist powers? For the generations to come who will face climate change caused by profits earned spewing ever more carbon into the atmosphere?

Don’t interfere with the free market. You mean the same “free” market that has destroyed millions of good working class (what the scared-of-the-socialist-bogeyman Americans call “middle class”) jobs in order to enable a few dozen multi-millionaires to become billionaires? The market that had to be saved by bailouts to the very companies that caused its crisis, but which can’t afford good free public education for all? The market that gives us ever more processed food made from genetically modified plants fed to animals that graze in slashed-and-burned rainforests then shipped ten thousand miles but can’t provide nutritious meals of locally grown real food for every child on the planet? The market that is so efficient it requires hundred of billions of dollars to be spent on advertising to convince us to buy its products? The market that gives us plenty of $80,000 cars and $10,000 watches but can’t give billions proper sewage and water systems? The market that enforces patents owned by huge corporations, instead of the right for all to access affordable life-saving medicines? A market free from government controls, which when you really think about it means a market whose rules are made by and for the rich instead of through democratic decision-making?

Yes, we live in an absurd world. A world all about making cents, not sense.

The apostles of greed claim competition and choice are the only rights worth fighting for, as if we are all only consumers. But the vast majority of us are workers too. What about our rights at work? They are ignored, trampled upon and denied because that is what the “free” market requires.

Yes, we live in an absurd world but it can’t possibly get any worse. Can it?

It will, if we don’t fight back.

It can and it will get worse unless millions of people join together behind a common vision of an alternative to this system of one dollar, one vote called capitalism.

Once upon a time we did have a vision of an alternative economic and social system. Once upon a time a movement of hundreds of millions of ordinary people with that vision was created to build a better world and it was successful in many places, winning the universal franchise, public education, the 8-hour day, pensions, health and safety legislation, public health programs, daycare, laws against discrimination and more. Pretty much every reform that was listed in the Communist Manifesto 165 years ago.

But the unions and political parties that came out of that movement never won the most important thing: equality of power, the right of everyone to participate in running both our economic and political system. It never fought for and won something best described as economic democracy.
It left power in the hands of tiny minorities who ultimately run the world in their self-interest. And now these self-serving minorities are rolling back the reforms our mothers and fathers struggled so long and hard to win.

Yes we live in an absurd world. And it will get worse unless we come together to change it. It’s time we showed some collective sensibility.

 Ernie Peshkov-Chow

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The power to build economic democracy

19 Aug

It makes perfect sense that capitalists would promote the idea that workers are not capable of running the world. For the same reason capitalists and their supporters claim a few rich people “own” the collective means of production: These are ways to justify minority rule. In effect, the one per cent minority is telling the 99% majority: “Our money gives us the power to run the world and you’re too stupid to do anything about it.”

Bullshit of course, but there’s a question to answer before rebutting these two piles of propaganda poop: Why would workers want to run the world?

And this is not just some rhetorical question. It is a summing up of dozens of questions and statements that I hear everyday from people around me, all workers who should know better. Here are a few:

“Let the managers manage — it’s their right.”

“The world is so messed up, it’s too late to do anything about it, anyway.”

“We’d fuck it up.”

“There’s no collective solution, the best we can do is look after ourselves.”

“My friends and family, that’s all I care about.”

“I’m not here for a long time, just a good time.”

“Go back to the land.”

“I can barely look after myself, let alone run the world.”

“It sounds good, but it will turn out bad. It always does.”

In other words, why even consider the project of the vast majority of people, who are workers, getting together and trying to make a better world?

The easiest answer is: We’re screwed if we don’t. The one percent who currently rules the world is doing what small ruling classes have done throughout history — run the economic and political system in their self-interest. If they get rich from war, there will be war. If they get to choose between health care for all or more profits for themselves, they’ll choose profit. If lots of money is to be made by pouring ever more carbon into the atmosphere, global warming will get worse and worse.

Workers must take power away from the greedy one percent and run the world in the interests of all because if we don’t things will keep getting worse.

And workers, organized together, are the only people with the potential power to create a democratic economy. If we don’t do it no one will, because only workers have the possibility of taking over the factories, offices, warehouses, railways, ships, stores and other places of work that make up our economy. Only workers acting together can create an economic democracy.

“Is that the best you can come up, a negative reason?” some might ask.

But in fact there’s lot of positive reasons. I can think of a few right off the top of my head:

Changing the world to make it a better place will be fun. All those who participate will have the time of their lives.

Your grandchildren and their grandchildren will love you for doing it.

It is the right thing to do.

Imagine a world where everyone was actually given an opportunity to develop all their potential and be the best person they could be. Trying to achieve a world like that is a very good thing.

I’m sure others can come up with a lot more positive reasons why workers should want to change the world.

Think of these reasons as the tools we need to build the foundation of a movement.

You’ve got to start someplace. A trip to a new world begins with a single step.

Ernie Peshkov-Chow 

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Why would workers want to change the world?

9 Aug

It makes perfect sense that capitalists would push the idea that workers are not capable of running the world. For the same reason capitalists and their supporters claim a few rich people “own” the collective means of production: These are ways to justify minority rule. In effect, the one per cent minority is telling the 99% majority: “Our money gives us the power to run the world and you’re too stupid to do anything about it.”

Bullshit of course, but there’s a question to answer before rebutting these two piles of propaganda poop: Why would workers want to run the world?

And this is not just some rhetorical question. It is a summing up of dozens of questions and statements that I hear everyday from people around me, all workers who should know better. Here are a few:

“Let the managers manage — it’s too much of a headache.”

“The world is so messed up, it’s too late to do anything about it, anyway.”

“We’d fuck it up.”

“There’s no collective solution, the best we can do is look after ourselves.”

“My friends and family, that’s all I care about.”

“I’m not here for a long time, just a good time.”

“Go back to the land.”

“I can barely look after myself, let alone run the world.”

“It sounds good, but it will turn out bad. It always does.”

In other words, why even consider the project of the vast majority of people, who are workers, getting together and trying to make a better world?

The easiest answer is: We’re screwed if we don’t. The one percent that currently rules the world is doing what small ruling classes have done throughout history — run their world in their self-interest. If they get rich from war, there will be war. If they get to choose between health care for all or more profits for themselves, they’ll choose profit. If lots of money is to be made by pouring ever more carbon into the atmosphere and capitalists are running the world, global warming will get worse and worse.

Workers must take power away from the greedy one percent and run the world in the interests of all because if we don’t things will keep getting worse.

And workers, organized together, are the only people with the potential power to create a democratic economy, which is the only way of taking power away from the ruling minority. If we don’t do it no one will.

“Is that the best you can come up, a negative reason?” some might ask.

But in fact there’s lot of positive reasons. I can think of a few right off the top of my head:

Changing the world to make it a better place will be fun. All those who participate will have the time of their lives.

Your grandchildren and their grandchildren will love you for doing it.

It is the right thing to do.

Imagine a world where everyone was actually given an opportunity to develop all their potential and be the best person they could be. That would be good, wouldn’t it? Trying to achieve a world like that is a very good thing.

I’m sure others can come up with a lot more positive reasons why workers should want to change the world.

Think of these reasons as the tools we need to build a movement.

You’ve got to start someplace.

Ernie Peshkov-Chow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rant: Idiot capitalism

8 Aug

You know one of the things I hate most about capitalism? How it turns people into idiots.

You want proof? Advertising.

What’s the fundamental underlying principle of advertising? That people are idiots.

Drink lots of beer and you’ll get the girl. What do people watching learn from this? That young men are idiots.

You need to zoom zoom around in a fast car that costs the average yearly wage to buy and third of your monthly income to maintain to really enjoy the good life. Men of all ages are idiots.

You’ll never get the guy unless you buy that perfume and this skin cream…  Women are idiots.

But advertising is just the tip of the idiot iceberg sticking out of the capitalist ocean.

Cut taxes on the rich, slash social services and we’ll all be better off. Who’d buy that nonsense? Rich people and idiots.

Let’s go to war against those bad guys. And these bad guys too who just happen to have a lot of oil. And those very bad guys who also just happen to have a lot of oil. And these very, very, very bad guys who are mean to women. They don’t have any oil. Oh, but they do have a lot of other resources and just happen to control the route where we want to build our oil pipeline. Who’d buy this transparent bullshit? People who profit from war and idiots.

Be proud you live in a democracy. Except at work, where you must accept the dictatorship of the boss, or in the economy where capitalists run the show. And don’t complain that money buys the few elections we do have. Who’d accept this state of affairs? Capitalists, their sycophants, and idiots.

I know what you’re thinking. Capitalism treats most people like idiots because it works. That’s what most people are.

Not you or me of course, but most people. Right? That’s what you believe: Most people are idiots.

The truth is capitalism requires us to think that way. A system in which less than one percent of the population makes all the important economic and political decision functions best when most people think most people are idiots. If the 90 per cent of us who do all the work actually believed we were smart and capable of running the world ourselves, it would not be good news for the ruling class. We might take over and say: Hey capitalists, it was swell, but we don’t need you anymore. Or, at the very least, a lot of us might ask why, instead of how high, when the boss tells us to jump.

Throughout history ruling classes have justified their rule by claiming superiority over the rest of us. Five hundred years ago they were mostly concerned with convincing each other this was true. They didn’t care what the peasants thought. Sure, they had the church to keep us in our place, but mostly they relied on military might. Now, with the limited democracy we have won, it’s become more complicated.

The best situation for capitalists today is when workers are smart enough to do all the work, but stupid enough to think other workers are idiots.

This explains the right wing attacks on public education, the mindless trash on TV and all the other brainwashing, which the system calls popular culture.

You know what I hate even worse than capitalism trying to turn us into idiots?

That we let them.

Ernie Peshkov-Chow

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