Property, race, electronics, laborless production – and revolution. Everything is related, everything is connected. It is a complex, difficult path we tread, yet how we understand the world and what we do determines the outcome. “Causality and Human Will” illuminates for us that while the tangled web of cause and effect sets the parameters of human history, it is the human mind and will that resolves the riddle and guides us to a confident future.
The future we envision is “A World Beyond Private Property”. Human history since the overthrow of primitive communism has been shaped by one form or another of private property. All wealth, all property has been created by the exploitation of human labor — from slave to serf to wage-slave — and appropriated as the private property of the ruling class. Private property lords it over the very slave who created it. All of the inequalities that human beings have known and continue to suffer today are rooted in this fundamental relation between the owning class and the exploited class. Now, even as the introduction of electronic, laborless production destroys the very basis of capitalist private property, the concurrent leap in productive forces makes possible a future of such abundance that private property and its inequalities may be swept aside forever.
“A Future Without Jobs: What is the Solution?” explores the intellectual ferment that is percolating throughout society on an increasing level as more and more are becoming aware of and are attempting to come to grips with the impact of the revolutionary new technology. How can a technology that can create such abundance apparently be the primal cause of the current economic crisis? Joblessness, poverty, debt, alongside great wealth — is this simply another version of the cyclical crisis of capitalism? Or are we witnessing the destruction of capitalist commodity production as we know it? Is the system broken, or can it be fixed, repaired, adjusted? Many commentators seek to preserve the system of private property despite the realities of the new technology. We offer a different view: the new technology makes possible, and necessary, a society in which all share in and contribute to the fruits of that society.
Race and racism are deeply imbedded in American history and are integrally connected to the development of the economy. Race is still with us, yet the concept of race and how it is employed must change with every change in the economy. The revolution in the economy brought on by the introduction of electronics gives rise to the vast social revolution we are now experiencing, and racism in America accompanies that process every step of the way. “A New Form of Racism Emerging” shows that a new form of racism is shifting the attack to economic status. Regardless of color, it is this new class that are viewed as a threat to the very fabric of American society. Yet as the foundation of color-racism is being undermined, the common economic situation for this new class provides the basis for a unity across color lines.
Today we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the L.A. uprising: “The Day that Makes Twenty Years.” The revolution is already underway, and the L.A. uprising marked the opening round of a social revolution by the new class created by robotics. It launched the first wave of social response that has given rise to the growing waves of social response that we are experiencing today. Something new happened in L.A. twenty years ago, and something new is happening today. We are on the cusp of human beings taking charge of our own history, and creating a world that eliminates forever private property, racism and all forms of human exploitation and inequality.
March/April 2012. Vol22.Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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