Fellow Travellers Towards Socialism

 "From space I saw earth - indescribably beautiful - but with the scars of national borders gone." - Mohammad Faris, Astronaut

If we are to save ourselves and each other, we must get out of the twin clutches of both corporations and nation-states. Neither of them are at their core either person- or earth-centered. Instead we must desperately and thankfully reach across the illusory - paranoia fixed in place - borders of nations to find the greater, more fulfilling personhood of our common humanity and of the common interconnected life-purpose of all life on Earth. We must break the state and corporation-manufactured chains which keep us from our true freedom; we must no longer allow murder and ecocide to be perpetrated in our name for the false assurances of security without freedom; we can no longer countenance economic growth for the owners at the expense of both the planet and human communities.
What could be more apparent than that the leaders, government and industry both, bestriding the world and proclaiming themselves wise and knowing, are neither? The great world conflicts, when analyzed, decocted, and boiled down to their essential bones, amount to this: very young children arguing amongst themselves, each one saying, "Mine! Mine! Mine!" and none of them yet having learned the profound simplicity of sharing. We must be the mothers who take their deadly playthings away.

To the corporate leaders, we must say, "Enough is enough, you have too much already, now you must share." To our political leaders who are drunk on their self-importance, we must say, "When you grow up and begin to think about someone besides yourself and your little circle of false friends, you may again be given some small amount of responsibility." As is well understood now, these so-called leaders mostly have the personality characteristics of psychopaths and sociopaths; indeed, the higher they've risen, the more they earn, the more likely they are to be lacking in empathy.

So why then do we allow psychopaths to tell us what we must have in order to be happy? Why do we allow sociopaths to wave their flags and tell us who we are? Surely, if we are anything, we are wonderfully varied life-forms on a planet with many different forms of life, all intimately interrelated and all intricately depending on each other for their very existence. But we are now tearing this fabric of being in twain, turning a teaming miracle planet into a dead zone. Time is very short if we are to save what is left before it all unravels into drought-ridden chaos. Now is the time to escape from psychopathy and sociopathy, and hopefully, humanely, use every means of nonviolent resistance possible for the preservation, creation and sustenance of a community of life on a living earth. For this to be possible, beyond peaceful civic disobedience, we must also remove our funds and personal energies from the psychopathic and sociopathic systems that are destroying us and move them into alternate systems of energy, finance, food, governance and energy and water security. It is sanity, plain and simple.

These are the final paragraphs of an article by a former US Department of State foreign service officer which I have taken unashamedly from here.
Socialists also recognise the need to remove finance from the equation too, but apart from that - - -
- As Stan Parker frequently reminded us 'There are more of us than you think.'
JS