After capitalism, what?
Dare to imagine future society
By Deirdre
Griswold
Many years ago, this newspaper ran a memorable article
called "The Trillion-Dollar Rat-hole." In it WW founding
editor Vince Copeland showed how a trillion dollars had gone
down the rat-hole of military spending during the period of
the Vietnam War. It was all part of U.S. imperialism's
offensive against the socialist countries and the liberation
movements after World War II.
Copeland showed with facts and figures that this money had
been stolen from workers' labor to finance the military
expansionist agenda of the boss class.
A trillion dollars is such an enormous sum--and it
represented even more in those days--that its magnitude is
hard to grasp.
We all have a pretty clear idea of what a hundred dollars
is. A hundred-dollar bill in your wallet makes you feel
pretty good. If you started laying hundred-dollar bills end
to end, you could fit about $1-million worth into a mile. So
you could get rid of a million dollars between your home and
the nearest supermarket, say.
You'd have to drop those bills from New York to
Minneapolis--about 1,000 miles--to create a trail worth $1
billion.
But to get up to $1 TRILLION with your money trail, you'd
have to circle the entire globe at its widest circumference,
the Equator, 40 TIMES, dropping a $100 bill every six
inches.
Copeland broke down a trillion dollars into something a
little more practical: how many millions of low-cost homes,
how many schools, hospitals, parks, libraries and so on could
have been built with this money.
Trillions upon trillions
During the Reagan-Bush years of 1981 to 1993, another $4
trillion was delivered to the Pentagon. And even though a
"peace dividend" was promised weary taxpayers after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. military budgets have
continued to range above $300 billion a year. It takes a
whole lot of money to try to rule the world.
Close to another $3 trillion went down the rat-hole of
Pentagon spending during the Clinton years.
Now add to all this lost human labor a new figure: $1.5
trillion.
That's what analysts say has been lost on U.S. stock
markets over the last year.
Some would say that this value never really existed. That
it was fictitious, based on false hopes of investors that
drove stocks far above realistic levels. But that argument
only sounds reasonable after stock prices have taken a dive.
If they continue to rise, as they did for a decade, then the
value of stocks seems very real indeed. It permits the owners
of those shares to buy all sorts of real things--houses,
boats, jewelry. People with pension funds in the stock market
may use them for more mundane purchases. But whatever it's
spent on, the value is very real--until a bear market.
The prices of individual stocks go up and down all the
time based on a wide variety of factors. But a trend across
the market that lasts over a period of several years must be
based on developments in the economy itself. Are more goods
and services being produced? If so, then this expanding
economy will drive up the market. Is production falling? Then
stocks fall, too. For, in the long run, the income produced
by stocks is nothing but a share of the surplus value to be
produced by workers.
Usually the movement of stock prices begins before other
symptoms of economic growth or decline are obvious to
everyone. In other words, the movement of stocks usually
anticipates what the economy will do.
When the value of stocks declines in one year by $1.5
trillion, it is a rough indication that the value of
commodities produced by working people is going to decline by
a similarly large amount. Will this decline be an absolute
figure? Not necessarily. The total goods and services may
continue to increase, but by less than had been anticipated.
Either way, values that the market had counted on earlier do
not materialize.
If you strip away the market and its movements and just
look at human economic activity, you can see in all this the
same kind of monumental wastefulness that Copeland described
in his article about military spending.
Layoffs compound the waste
Just as spending billions on nuclear weapons or aircraft
carriers robs society of the labor and materials needed to
build useful products that improve the lives of the people,
so is human potential wasted when companies shut down or lay
off workers. All over the world, including in this country,
millions are idled when they can't find gainful
employment.
Yet this is still a country where most people are working
terribly hard--too hard for their health and well being.
Sleep deprivation has emerged as a huge problem for workers
over the last decade. So has the state of mind of children.
"Latchkey" kids feel neglected and depressed because the
adults in their lives haven't got the hours or energy to
spend quality time with them.
With all this furious activity, those working are no
better off than before. In fact, real wages, which dropped in
the seventies and eighties, are still near the level of the
mid-1960s, having moved up just slightly in the last couple
of years. Items like rent, transportation, health care and
education have grown much more expensive. This has been
offset only partially by the low cost of many imported
items--reflecting the super-exploitation of labor abroad.
Nor has all this work--much of it in a high-stress
environment, where companies stay open at all hours and make
sure every minute of a worker's time is occupied--created a
society of abundance. Is there an abundance of affordable
housing? Is there an abundance of libraries or recreation
centers or parks? Can people with substance abuse problems
get counseling and treatment? Don't many of the mentally ill
wind up homeless or in jail?
And this is what U.S. capitalist society is like at the
end of the longest boom in history. When the current downturn
takes full effect, the pain until now felt most acutely in
communities of color will become unbearable across the
working class.
We are moving into an era of greater class struggle.
Intense need for the most simple, basic things, like food and
shelter, will drive the movement.
But a movement cannot be sustained simply by pain. It has
to have a goal, a vision. Young people especially want to
know how society can be changed, how we can build a future
without the oppression, war, exploitation, bigotry and
violence to humanity and nature that characterize capitalism
today.
If we struggle, where can it get us? Can we plug the
rat-hole and begin directing talent and energy into
rebuilding the cities, cleaning up the environment, finding
sustainable ways to power our technology, investing in human
development of all kinds?
Or will poverty and scarcity drag us down, as it has
revolutionary efforts elsewhere?
It's all possible
The answer lies in fully comprehending how amazingly
productive human beings have become. The capitalist system
conceals our enormous fruitfulness. It shows us poverty where
there could be plenty. It shows us ignorance and disease
where there could be enlightenment and robust health. It
draws the bleakest picture of the future--as reflected in all
the popular sci-fi visions of inter-stellar mayhem in the
25th century.
So let's look at what these trillions, which are merely a
monetary expression of the value created by human labor,
could be spent on.
To start, how about erecting $100,000-dollar homes and
apartments for people who now have no or substandard housing?
Ten million such units could provide new housing for about 40
million people. At a cost of $100 billion--or one tenth of a
trillion--the housing crisis could be solved.
It makes no sense to isolate housing from transportation,
shopping, recreation and work. A development plan that takes
all this into consideration would save people endless hours
of travel time and reduce the need for wasteful private
transportation.
New housing would help reduce energy use, as would money
spent on parks and other recreation near home. Adding trees
and wading pools cuts the need for air conditioning. Let's
take another tenth of a trillion to build pocket-size parks
in every urban neighborhood across the country, so no one has
to travel more than a couple of blocks to find cool, green
space and recreation facilities.
We'll need more skills so people in every community can
help plan and build these new facilities. And we'll need
artistic talent of all kinds to populate them with singers,
musicians and other performing artists, as well as sports and
fitness instructors. Chalk up another $100 billion for
schools. If half that went into salaries, you could employ
1.25 million teachers at $40,000 each.
So that brings us to less than one year's Pentagon
budget.
Lots more to do
Of course, there are other pressing needs--cleaning up the
environment, providing day care, making medical care free and
available to all. But we still have $700 billion left. Once
the people have their own mass organizations, where they can
listen to everyone's concerns, they can draw up plans to
tackle the most pressing needs first through a truly
democratic process. With so much wealth, the competition for
funds should be very manageable. They've been able to do it
in socialist Cuba, producing a world-class health system, for
example, with a minuscule budget. Why not in the United
States?
Just imagine liberating a trillion dollars worth of labor
every year for a decade--through a combination of cutting
spending on the military and police plus creating jobs for
everyone who wants one. Within 10 years this country could be
thoroughly transformed.
Sound like pie in the sky? Pie in the sky is a physical
impossibility (a pie in the face doesn't count). But there is
nothing in nature to prevent this scenario from being carried
out. The problem is the entrenched resistance of the
privileged classes.
There can be no effective planning when real estate
company A owns the whole block, bank B dictates how the money
can be spent, and auto company C bribes the legislators to
strangle mass transit. Private ownership, which started just
a few thousand years ago on a small scale but now
concentrates most of this planet's wealth in the hands of a
small group of billionaires, has put human progress in a
hammerlock.
In order to liberate labor so we can work at doing what
really needs to be done--just the way people cooperate
together during a flood, say--we have to liberate the
products of past labor. The accumulated wealth, the capital
monopolized by a few, must become the property of all.
That's what socialism is all about. It's about the working
class expropriating the expropriators--those who become
richer each day because they control the means of production.
And it's about coordinated and centralized planning so this
wealth can be used to satisfy human need in all its
complexity.
The working class movement around the world has a rich
history of revolutionary experience. Anyone interested in
defeating capitalism can learn a great deal by studying the
classics of scientific socialism, beginning with Marx, Engels
and Lenin. There are also many questions still to be resolved
about the course the revolution will take in North
America.
But the first question all militants must ask themselves
is: What are we fighting for? Just a few reforms that can be
taken away as long as capitalist rule exists? Or the
revolutionary reconstitution of society by the one class, the
workers, that has the power to take over the means of
production and run them for the good of all?
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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