I wrote the following comment in "democratic underground" a few days ago in response to a post full of existential despair about the horrors of capitalism. Rather than remaining in the paralysis of despair, I think we need to focus on the steps we can take now, in our local communities, to counter the horrible effects of our current capitalist reality.
(For a superb history of how the Basque people, starting with a small group of people in a very small town in northern Spain, and working against the constraints of Franco's Fascism, created the most successful worker's cooperative in the world, see TPau's great diary:
Link to the Story of the Mondragon Cooperative)
We can create a new economic system which will abolish the mad drive for profits that drives corporations to strive for constantly increasing profits to justify their CEO's obscene multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses at the expense of the workers who produce the goods we all need to survive.We need to be producing goods for their use value -- because people want and need them -- not for the profits they will generate for the corporate CEO's.
The workers who produce the goods and the consumers who need them must, together, make the decisions about what is produced and how it is produced, not a minuscule number of wealthy "managers" at the top.
The managers/CEO's current wealth comes from the decades of hard labor they stole from their workers and the excessive profits stolen from the consuming public. If we take those unearned profits back and put them to social uses we could feed, house, clothe and provide health care to all our citize
Sounds like a big job, I know, but it can be done if we join together in neighborhood and work place groups to decide how we want our society to function and then taking what at first might appear to be small steps to regain control of our economy and our lives.
