30 Jan 2024 7:20 am
(PART III of III)
(Recapping for continuity purposes.) Nonetheless, much of Cannonpointer's bullet points raise essential issues that must be addressed. For example, he wrote, "People won't be happy having only their needs met. They have wants in addition to needs." To be sure.
Under capitalism, not only is the majority of the wealth produced by workers appropriated by capitalists, but so is the worker's life activity controlled by others. Therefore, the lives of workers are reduced to that of animals, mainly working to satisfy the material desires of capitalists and producing under the compulsion to meet their immediate needs (e.g., food, clothing, and shelter). Marx referred to that and other aspects of alienation as being separated from one's "species being" or human identity. It's the derivation of, for example, "Happy Hour" - the need to forget the emptiness, boredom, and lack of freedom in one's work life and, by extension, one's personal life.
The salient thing about socialist society in this respect is that with the members of the capitalist assimilated into the ranks of the working class, the ability to be economically exploited and domineered by others is removed. Not only is the lion's share of worker-produced wealth no longer stolen via a system of bourgeois legality known as private profit, but so is the degrading "my way or the highway" treatment that fosters the need for "Happy Hour." With workers owning and administrating the needs of production through something like this http://www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart ,they'd be directly involved in decisions related to planning, production, reinvestment, and compensation. To those who will assert that workers are incapable of doing so, remember that we - the working class already run all industries; it's just that we don't own and administer them, and therein lies the problem. With nearly all capitalists being removed from their respective industries' productive processes, they do indeed embody the saying, "Without workers, capitalists are nothing. Without capitalists, workers will be everything."
Cannonpointerr: "I am not claiming that I have the answer to properly ordering the people's business. I suggest that neither do you." Yes, as I stated a few days ago, it would be an infringement of the basic concepts of dialectical materialism for me or any other Marxist to attempt to "properly order" a futuristic socialist commonwealth. Again, that will be up to those who forge such a society. Cannonpointer: "Indeed, you don't even HAVE a "people." If that means I'm not a racist, then yes, I don't have "a people." I'm an internationalist and, therefore, anything but a racist.
(END OF PART III)
Be well
Good day
"Harvey Mushman"