The money trick..continued from previous page 13

 Banks, financial services, insurance offices, advertising agents, solicitors, brokers, security staff, estate agents; check the functions of the masses of offices on the main arteries of any town or city and you will find the overwhelming majority of them pursue functions directly or indirectly
concerned with trade or commerce or with other activities peculiar to a buying-and selling economy. Indeed in many places today the number of workers 'servicing' capital and capitalism exceeds the numbers engaged in the actual production of goods and services.

 Even the poverty that capitalism creates as a result of inadequate incomes,
unemployment, sickness and infirmity has to be policed and serviced by vast numbers of people checking, spying, filing, form filling and forced to make brutal and dehumanising decisions. Not only are these multifarious functions wasteful and without a useful end product for those spending their lives performing them, but they in turn have to be transported, housed and
provisioned by legions of other workers.

 Then there is the crime business which apart from judges, lawyers and
criminals engages tens of thousands of police personnel as well as prison staff.
Crime in capitalist society is a vast business and like the rest of the enterprises created by capitalism has, in turn, to be provisioned by further extensive ancillary services.

The 'defence' industry

 The so-called defence industry and its mammoth support services employs most of the world's scientists. These are usually highly specialised people employed in the business of devising ever more sophisticated means of slaughtering human
beings or frustrating the work of other scientists rivalling their work for other
governments. Worldwide, military establishments employ millions of men and
women as armed forces as well as vast numbers of civilian employees while
millions more are engaged in producing armaments and other needs of the killing
industry. Additionally, of course, the activities of these military establishments
foster imitative resistance, or terrorist movements which governments respond to with a financial priority beyond that of the social needs of their citizens.

 The legend is that this vast vortex of destructive wealth exists for the defence of the citizen but the average citizen of one country does not threaten the average citizen of another country, The 'average citizen' of most of the developed world is a member of the working class who does not possess anything that might encourage aggressive tendencies by those of similar
status in another area of the world.

 The truth is that armaments, armed forces, diplomacy and all the other things
associated with war have nothing whatsoever to do with the working class
and the problems of that class - other than the fact that it is workers who will do the fighting and the killing. Otherwise, the ordinary citizen is not consulted when alleged democratic governments decide to engage in armed conflict. Wars and the incredible destruction of human life and property are about the wealth of the capitalist class; in fact it is the predatory conflicts of the marketplace spilling over on to the battlefield.

 An obscene aspect of the system of social organisation we are told represents
the pinnacle of capitalist civilisation is the actual distribution of wealth globally and nationally. A United Nations report featured in the Guardian (6 December) reveals the depravity of the system by telling us that:
"The first ever study of global household assets shows that half of the
world's adults own just 1% of the world's wealth while the world's richest 1% own 40% of all wealth. "

 This is why we have world hunger; why we have poverty and insecurity; why
we have terrorism, wars, appalling social problems like alienation and crime and this is the justification for the frightening threat to the our environment. This truly bears testimony to the utter absurdity of capitalism and the mode of life it imposes on society.

Socialism

 The irony of capitalism is that it is maintained and sustained on the credulity
and ignorance of its victims, the working class. Not only does the working class
produce capitalism's vast wealth but it is conditioned by the existing educational
processes, by the media and by politicians to believe that there is no rational
alternative to the system of capitalism.

 This does not mean that the workers are contented and docile or that they
approve of the way capitalism functions. On the contrary, dissatisfaction and
alienation are rampant. Resistance to wars and cynical, reckless market globalisation has become a universal protest against aspects of world capitalism and everywhere the value systems that maintained a quiescent working class are breaking down.

 In the UK, for example, crime figures soar, more than 80,000 people are in prisons in Britain and new prisons are urgently required. A large section of the population are on anti-depressants and, if the media tell it right, the use of hallucinatory drugs has reached epidemic levels. Vandalism and anti-social behaviour especially among the young evidence a marked degree of
alienation and the escalation of the suicide rate, again especially among the young, demonstrates the lack of social cohesion within our rat-race society

 Continually, the capitalist controlled media tells us that there is no poverty now
and it is true that an explosion in productive capacity wrought by new technologies has banished much of the old hard-core destitution that was prevalent in the first decades of the last century. But poverty is a relative condition not a comparative one; it is an inevitable aspect of social inequality
and has to be measured against prevailing conditions and relatively speaking poverty is still rampant even in the most highly developed nations of world capitalism.

 And whereas in the past the dispossessed could see hope in the massed
political formations of Labour and Social Democratic parties and many were imbued with the belief that the Bolsheviks were building a future of hope, today those illusions have been banished by time and the realities of the system. The dream of applying rational solutions to the anarchy of capitalism and its wages and money system has been shattered.

 Whether these illusions were part of a necessary process of social education is
open to doubt but at least now we know from our experience that neither political parties nor armed insurrectionists can create a truly social democratic society while leaving the structures of capitalism like its money trick and its wages servitude intact. Today we have to face the fact that we live with capitalism and its appalling problems or move forward to its logical alternative:Socialism.

 Socialism will be a system of social organisation that, by its nature, can only be
brought about by overwhelming democratic consensus. It will involve the political disestablishment of the concept of ownership in society's means of life - the land and the instruments for producing and distributing all the things human beings need as the material basis of a full and happy life.

 Essentially, socialism will be a voluntary association of free people cooperating in creating at regional and global levels the goods and services they need
and availing of those goods and services as required.

 Even such a brief statement clarifies the fact that all the wasteful functions we
have referred to and which are essential within a market economy will disappear, freeing hundreds of millions of human beings from the demeaning servitude of functions associated only with the machinery used by our
masters for our exploitation.

RICHARD MONTAGUE