The Need to Change

In his documentary ‘The Super-Rich and Us’, Jacques Peretti catalogued how the rich and privileged live in a world of fantasy – of symbols, just as religious fanatics do. They amass money pointlessly, far more than they can ever spend. They store it among the bricks and mortar of empty houses in London, in tax havens, in gold and jewels. What is the point of all this money? How many expensive meals can they eat, how many luxury cars can they drive, how many of their homes can they live in? Just like “holy scriptures,” yachts and private islands are purely totemic. They represent a belief system and an identity. That identity reassures the wealthy that they are virtuous. If it were not so (they tell themselves) they would not be so successful. It also gives them a reason to get up in the morning – to make more money. They don't care about whether people are suffering. They have power and privilege and they don't care about anything else except to simply increase their wealth. If the price of the burden of “solving “ the economic crisis is placed on working class people, on the poor, on the elderly, on the young, it is a price they are happy to pay. What really is the difference between the Left and the Right anymore in modern politics? Both bow down before the market, and loyally serve their corporate masters – the only difference being a matter of degree. If politicians and governments don’t really have your best interests at heart we can’t really expect the ultra-rich to care that much. After all, it is their interests that are being served. It's about money. It's about power. The rich share an allegiance to promoting wealth upward. They share an allegiance to reproducing their own ideology. They share an allegiance to greed. They share an allegiance to a culture of cruelty and deprivation. They don't care about people. Young people are only a long term investment but too many in the system just believe in short-term returns. Any sort of exhortation or pleading with the elected representatives of capitalism to be “nicer” and more “benevolent” to us is going to fail. It can never happen.

The political and economical system is completely dysfunctional and broken. The future demands a new political consciousness. We can't just wait for capitalism to tear apart society and then build from scratch again, for with the fast approaching climate change crisis, there won’t be a world for us to rebuild. Resistance is impossible without education that will provide a radical democracy that is truly participatory and will give power to all people so that they can shape their lives. The Left argument that once contradictions become bad enough, people will act accordingly is nonsense. Unless these contradictions are understood, analyzed, thoughtfully probed, until people have a sense of what those contradictions mean—there's just as much of a chance that they'll move into embracing fascism as there is that they'll move into a more radical conception of democracy itself. Some people will attempt to find solutions in ways that intensify the very conditions that made them disposable and suppress the revolutionary imagination.

Inequality is still getting worse. It used to be 85 people’s wealth equal 3.5 billion, this year it is now only 80 people equal 3.5 billion peoples wealth. Global wealth is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a small wealthy elite. While one billion people still live on less than $1.25 a day, the wealth of the richest 80 has doubled since 2009 and now equals almost $2 trillion. That’s correct, 80 people now have a collective wealth of almost $2 trillion, including such household business names as Bill Gates at $80.6 billion, Warren Buffet at $72.7 billion, Christy Walton and family at $41.6, and the Koch brothers at $41 billion each. The issue is not about introducing wealth taxes. The issue is, how do we allocate the wealth that we have? People want and need services. They want roads, they want healthcare. We possess all the resources to furnish them. The question we should be posing is not what level we're going to tax the rich to give you the goods and services you want but about using our natural resources and the creativity of labor to satisfy human needs. That's a very different argument.  The proper perspective is socialism It means re-organizing society to function for the benefit of most of the population, rather than organizing society for the profits of a few.

 If the system is entirely broken how and what are we going to replace it with? This is where the socialist movement must admit it has failed. Unless we create a culture and a consciousness capable of changing the way people think about the common sense assumptions that drive their lives, then they will see no alternative. They will continue to perceive the status quo as the only possible reality. Socialism will remain a wishful fancy for the far-off future. The socialist movement must provide a glimmer of hope for what a democratic socialist society might look like. We must recapture the imagination and the inspiration of the socialist message. We have to dispel ignorance about what socialism is and offer confidence in the means of how we can reach it. Some believe the Occupy movement was a failure because it never gave a list of demands, and it refused to have a hierarchical leadership but that was its strength, not its weakness. It helped create a new language and a new way of understanding exactly how politics leaves people out. What it didn't do put enough emphasis was in building long-term structured organization, a political party, a socialist party. You can't fight power and capture the state machine simply with decentralized informal organization and they don’t need to be top-down leader-led type of parties. It doesn't mean they need to be authoritarian but what they are required to do is exercise authority by being responsible to the majority will.

The Socialist Party is all about producing a realistic and achievable utopia. Informing people about the world's problems opens up the possibility to address them and change them. We have to be critical to be meaningful, to make politics transformative.

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