Our production, per individual, is millions of millions of times higher than that of the paleolithic, neolithic, and still at least hundreds of thousands of times that of people after the agricultural revolution, and at least hundreds of times that of someone at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Yet, our masters and their apologists demand that the majority suffer so that they can have more.
Debating about the theoretical implications of some specific propagandized version of freedom on a slippery-slope argument is absurd.
The fact is that we are way more productive, have way more things, and way better organized than ever before and yet rich people are getting richer while most people are getting poorer and working harder. Sometimes that moves around a little but, but very slightly. The trend remains the same in well working capitalist societies. Sure, the places the capitalists went in and spent several generations raping all the women, torturing all the men, and stealing all of their resources are sometimes (though not always) doing better after the kick the capitalist leaders out. But generally, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Still.
You want to know what we will do to make things better?
Get rid of a system of material slavery where we have to judge ourselves based on how poorly our masters treat us. A company that creates something and makes the same amount of money as it did last year, in a capitalist system, is a failure. The profits must keep growing.
What is the profit? That's what the employer takes from the worker. The worker, by necessity in the system, works harder and makes more things than he is paid to do so that some profit is left over for the employer.
Great, so already we have a system where the employer must constrict everything around the worker as much as possible in order to get more year after year.
And it goes beyond this.
Specifically what do we want to do? We want to look at a given system, analyze it, and then come up with a solution that will give as much to as many as possible and ensure that we all live like the princes we deserve to live like. As noted, we are thousands upon thousands of times more productive than the cave man, but we have millions upon millions living in slums and garbage heaps in conditions far worse than any cave man.
That's all we ask for. A solution in part of India is going to look different than the collapse of the United States into a socialist nation. You look at what you have, and you make it better for everyone. This is the radical authoritarian menace that the capitalists want to stop.
For our masters and their hand-lickers, freedom is an abstract metric with which to measure the power of the most powerful to do what they want, which cannot be practically exercised by the poor.
Or, as Lenin said better:
Lenin wrote:But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.
...Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”--supposedly petty--details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,--we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.
So in conclusion, from each their ability, we all do something now to live—some kind of labor is something we do for ourselves anyway in our free time. From each according to his need: we have the resources, the progress, the ability to make sure everyone has what he or she needs.
How would it work specifically? Marxism is an analysis, we can predict some things that are likely to happen and adjust from there. It isn't fortune telling. But as an analysis, we have to look at the conditions of the revolution, the available resourced, etc, etc, etc. But
our demands, most moderate, are we only want the Earth.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!
- By KurtFF8
- By FiveofSwords
- By RealPolitic