I came across this excellent piece of Leon Mattis , dated October 27:
What is at stake are not just pensions.
What is at stake is what everybody understands: that we are in a world where you have to work harder and longer, exchange and simply live with what we get. And what we get, and how we are given, also determines how we are supposed to live.
We work and in return we receive a share of common wealth in the form of wages and income, and also, in recent decades, as social welfare, educational, health and retirement benefits.
Social spending, whether for education, health, pensions or down all together, and that means that globally we are worth less. And if we are worth less, because in the capitalist system the value of our work depends neither the quality nor the usefulness of it, but only on its ability to create new value.
When creating this value moves massively to emerging markets, our work is worth less, and our life is cheaper too.
But this is not true for everyone. Those who, owning or managing the capital have access to products they continue to receive the major share of the wealth created precisely because the investment in countries where labor is cheaper is to maintain capitalist profits. Contrary to what one would have us believe, there is nothing obligatory that the things are going well. It must happen to live, we are told. Yes, but is it really necessary to submit to live like this?
Because what we produce by working, this is not just wealth. What we produce by working, it is above all the conditions of our own domination. Whether to produce and accumulate ever, because this benefits some complex machine. The rich are not only richer, they are also more powerful than others. Like the lords of yore, today's capitalists have on society their collective power. The privileges of birth, a substituted another, more mathematical: the privilege of the bank account.
The strength of this system is to suggest that this dominance is not one, it is a necessary form of all social organization, no being today's human can not live otherwise.
The weakness of this system is that it relies on production and expenditure growing extent of this new value which turns capital. But trees do not grow to the sky, says the proverb scholar, and always comes a time when it is missing something. So is the crisis. So you have to remove people what we gave them, make them work more, pay less, all so that those who rule to continue to dominate.
To stop this domination, it is not of reform we need, nor the withdrawal of a reform. Regardless of wealth redistribution, because the problem is not that in capitalism the wealth once generated are distributed unequally, but what they can not be produced otherwise than unequal. What we need is for strikes and blockades continue, for it is in the movement of protest that the criticism of all that exists can be transformed into a proposal for the existence of something another.
must block the capitalist production and sharing what is already occurring, then share how we can continue to live this share.
the same day, but in another genre, the Imaginary Party has delivered its opinion on the current festivities :
To complete our understanding of the world, will subscribe to Article XI, which the paper comes out on newsstands November 13.
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