Americans (and the vast majority of the world's population) are on a treadmill of defeat. That's why things are getting worse, not better. Working class and "middle class" Baby Boomer parents know that things are getting worse. They know that that life is a lot harder today for their children than it was for themselves back when they were young adults looking for their first real job. Good-paying jobs are more scarce. Expectations in life are lower. Student college debts are now so oppressive that they render new college graduates virtual debt slaves forced to work a job they don't like just to pay back the debt.
We need to jump off the treadmill of defeat. Let's start Thinking about Revolution. (pdf)
Regardless of the political party in office, trillions of dollars get taken from uses that would make life better for regular people and placed instead in the pockets of the owners of a military industrial complex that needs, and when necessary creates, a bogeyman enemy to justify itself. Many Americans lack adequate health insurance, are unemployed or are homeless because the plutocracy that controls the United States wants the American working class to feel so insecure and desperate that it will be grateful for low-paying jobs with lousy benefits. And virtually all our politicians pretend we have a government of, by and for the people and tell us that if we just vote the right way things will get better.
The treadmill of defeat operates by persuading us to accept, as a permanent fact of life, that our society must remain one in which money is power and most people don't have any, in which making a profit for an employer is the highest priority in life, before which all other considerations must bow. Being on the treadmill of defeat means having no vision of a better society. It means limiting one's aspirations to whatever crumb a politician or employer may throw us, feeling grateful for it because a crumb is better than no crumb, and then seeing even the crumb get taken back before too long, as Social Security is now being cut back, and savage budget-cutting is taking back social services we once took for granted.
Jumping off the treadmill of defeat means building a revolutionary movement--revolutionary in the sense that it has the revolutionary goal of creating a much better kind of society, one in which there are no rich and no poor because everybody who works according to ability (and those not expected to work because of age or disability) shares equally, according to need, in the fruits of the economy; and in which social order on a national or even global scale is achieved by voluntary federation of autonomous local communities where all the people who support equality and mutual aid are welcome to participate as equals in writing the laws of their local community, and there is no central government of a few hundred individuals in a faraway capital writing laws and ordering everybody to obey them. This is the goal of democratic revolution.
Jumping off the treadmill of defeat means using every opportunity to challenge what IS with a revolutionary vision of what COULD BE. Here are just a few examples:
- IS: Many people who are able and willing to work cannot find a job and thus suffer great economic hardship, simply because no employer finds it profitable to hire them. People unable to work (because of their age or a disability) must live in poverty on "welfare."
- COULD BE: To get a job requires nothing more than a) pitching in wherever people are doing work or b) learning a skill so as to be able to pitch in later, because the economy is not a capitalist economy based on profit, but a sharing economy in which all who pitch in reasonably according to ability (and all who are unable to work) share in the fruits of the economy with equal status according to need--no rich and no poor.
- IS: College costs a fortune so only the wealthy or those willing to take on a huge debt can get a higher education.
- COULD BE: College is free; the cost is borne by society because society benefits from having people well educated.
- IS: 30 million Americans will have no health care insurance under Obamacare.
- COULD BE: All people who contribute reasonably to society have an equal right to the health care they need for free.
- IS: Big Pharma, to make its Big Profits, needs sick people to buy (via steep health insurance premiums) its drugs; if an inexpensive cure or treatment for a disease (such as eating a certain diet or being treated with a common inexpensive substance) is discovered, it would threaten Big Pharma's profits, thus causing the entire health care industry to be biased against such cures or treatments.
- COULD BE: The economy is not based on profit and everybody benefits if a cure or treatment for a disease is discovered.
- IS: Public K-12 schools are controlled by and run for the benefit of the richest and most powerful Americans for the purpose of making working class children blame themselves for failing standardized tests (which are a form of child abuse designed to fail a set percentage of children no matter how well students learn the material). In this way schools are used by the very rich to make working class children accept their place at the bottom of an increasingly unequal society and feel unworthy of having a good paying job or even a job at all because they are not "smart enough" or didn't work "hard enough" to score higher on the standardized test.
- COULD BE: Teachers and parents, who want to instil in all our children the confidence, skills and joy of learning that can enable them as adults to take charge of society and make it more equal and democratic and caring for all, run the schools in a genuine democracy.
We need to jump off the treadmill of defeat. Let's start Thinking about Revolution. (pdf)
from here
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