Throughout history the development of humanity’s tools beyond the subsistence stage has created the material basis for class exploitation. These class relations, exploiter to exploited, have been enforced by violence and war. People have dreamed of an end to the misery and slavery this has brought to the many, along with privilege for the few. Down the ages the oppressed have died fighting for this vision of a world free from scarcity, exploitation, class domination, and stupefying labor.
Now, labor-replacing technology in the form of computerized automation and robotics is eliminating wage-labor and destroying the capitalist system. The people must either organize to take power to control these vast productive forces in their own interest, meaning distribution of what is produced according to need, or we will perish.
This new means of productions is creating a new revolutionary class, one no longer tied to the capitalist system. In their demands for what they need, more and more they find themselves thrown against the naked power of the State, with its increasingly militarized police and its unjust laws.
The “law” of private property is what is standing in the way of our being able to create an economic system that conforms to the new conditions and for the common good. On this depends the very survival of humanity and the earth. Only with consciousness and a clear vision of the alternative will revolutionaries be able to fulfill their epochal task.
The few hold onto the means of production as private property, as a source of extreme obscene private wealth, while everyone else starves. If this continues they also will find themselves on a planet their profit-driven system has torn apart by wars of plunder and polluted beyond its ability to sustain life.
These means of production, in the hands of our class instead of in the hands of the billionaire class, could fulfill the age-old vision so many have dreamed of and died fighting for. These new means of production offer the potential to provide the people of the world all they need to live creative and fulfilling lives, materially, culturally, and spiritually.
The ruling capitalist class can do nothing about this contradiction. Their attempt to hold onto private property, as the material basis for capitalism crumbles and disappears, puts them on the defensive and out of step with reality. The material basis for their rule is being destroyed. The world they are trying to build is a fascist prison planet of earth-destroying wars and planetary plunder, controlled by the corporations and for the corporations. Their only weapons are violence, terror, confusion and the historically-evolved ones of race and other ideologies of division. They can no longer house, feed, clothe or educate the people. What propaganda will convince a person that their hungry child’s belly is full?
A cooperative society is the only solution compatible with the new technologies that are leaving capitalist relations in the dust. It is the ruling class and private property that stands in our way.
We are on the cusp of human history, with nowhere to go but forward, into a world of cooperation, peace, and unleashed creativity, in a world free of all forms of enslavement. That is, a world freed from the rule of private property. Today, scarcity is imposed by the ruling class. The new technology offers the potential abundance of everything we need not only to survive, but to thrive. Only with an understanding of what is possible, and how to achieve it together, can this practical vision become a reality. No longer can a small class of people be allowed to hold what we need and what technology produces as private property for their own gain.
The new technology gives us the ability to free ourselves from want, insecurity and exploitation. Now, humanity’s creative genius can be liberated to solve the problems created in past eras. We can come together to restore health and balance to the planet, raise the next generations of practical visionaries, explore the inner and outer cosmos, and create art in all its forms. We already have the means to freely share this vision. The new global forms of communication are being used to exchange revolutionary ideas, organize movements, and share ideas and strategies. People have at their fingertips the ability to spread this vision. There is no going back to the democracy of former times, but the dream of humanity for a truly democratic society is attainable only by going forward into a cooperative, communist society.
The American people, and humanity around the globe, are beginning to shake off the lies and are demanding political and economic justice. The vast movement for the right to the basics of life is in reality a movement for overturning the system of class exploitation forever, replacing it with one based on peace and cooperation.
Humanity can only move forward and fulfill the desire and vision of the ages. We are at an epochal crossroads. We will either organize to seize the power to bring this to reality, or perish.
This is the second of two Building Block articles on strategy, tactics, and vision. Building Block articles help explain a basic concept of the revolutionary process, challenging readers to explore its meaning for political work in today’s environment.
September/October Vol25.Ed5
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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