Thoughts on the future
Humans are both magnificent creators and problem-solvers as well, obviously, as beings capable of incredible stupidity and ignorance and, to quote the title of a New Order album, of power, corruption and lies. We cry at the folly of the human race, which has achieved so much in technological and scientific achievement, as it has in the arts, and yet which still continues to treat humans and the natural world as so much gunpowder to shoot out of the cannon of profit or power.
It is difficult to understand why humans put up with the resulting stress, the inefficiencies, the deprivations, the downright failures. It is as though most people view themselves as passive agents who can, at most, protest the system’s injustices in the hope that the powerful will respond, vote for what they believe to be the best alternative or at least the less offensive, and trust that the leaders and experts know what they are doing and will ensure their welfare. However, reality does not seem to conform to such expectations when it comes to protesting, voting and trusting. Instead, the system seems an inherently unstable structure, with its economic booms and depressions, its constant eruption of wars somewhere around the world, its inability to care about or effect sufficient environmental restoration, and the constant explosions of pseudoscience and misinformation that accompany cultural movements and fads, which are like commodities in the realm of ideas.
We are clearly not going to have the better world that the scientific and democratic revolutions promised us. This is because the voices of those who rightly insisted upon our release from the rule of aristocrats and the church ignorantly associated the rise of capitalist production with liberty. There is very little in capitalism to support that contention, even though those democratic revolutions released commodity production from the clutches of feudal privilege. Peasants were also released from the landlords of the ancient regime, and then fell into the equally ruthless hands of the bourgeoisie.
Change of masters
In this new world based on factory production, only the masters changed. The new ones introduced a form of ‘freedom’ without the prior obligations of the landlord. Living in slums, dressing in rags, suffering fatal industrial accidents, and being paid the least that the capitalists could get away with became the new normal, just as being owned by a master or living off one’s master’s land were the previous normal. Much of the world still resembles this embryo of a society based on greed and exploitation. Unionisation, technological advances and a degree of trickle-down economics improved the material lot of a greater percent of workers than our ancestors experienced in prior centuries, but the values that govern our system have not changed. We remain, most of us, essentially slaves to a system prioritised not to meeting the needs of the community but to making a profit.
It is amazing that the human spirit persists through this horror show that we live in. Doctors and nurses do incredible work to help the ill by putting the person first and the cost second, but health outcomes remain predicted by poverty and stress. I offer emotional support to local nursing home residents for a half a day per week, and their greatest complaint is not their medical conditions or loss of their home, although these are traumatic and depressing, but just the fact of residing somewhere that is understaffed. In such a nursing home, the residents wait long periods of time to be changed when they soil their bed. They wait hours for someone to notice they have turned on the light outside their room indicating a request for help. The food is almost inedible, after a life of homemade meals. The few activities offered hardly fill an expanse of time with nothing to do except watch TV. Muscles weaken and stiffen, and bodies waste away because physical therapy is too infrequent to make a difference.
That example is symptomatic of our entire economic system. While yes, bridges and buildings are somehow maintained, and supermarkets for most of us in the western world are stocked plentifully; the entire economic system of capitalism seems to hop along on one leg into an insecure, unstable future because one cannot predict the economy, the availability of jobs, the unemployment ahead, whether the mortgage will be paid without fail over a thirty year period, whether war will strike us, whether our planet will worsen, and how much social services will or won’t be financed based on the ideology of the constantly changing governments.
Meanwhile, our system is like a bus being driven by a thousand drivers each tugging in different directions. Because in capitalism all goods and services are commodities, thousands of companies use up human and natural resources with no intelligent oversight and with no regard for the living planet that is our home. Even the governing bodies that do exist to monitor and make recommendations about health, the environment, poverty, literacy, or other human needs, can only advocate, can only raise so much money, and must always fight cost-cutting priorities, varying ideologies, and think tanks that promote business interests by fighting activism with pseudoscience and misinformation. The needs of business and the needs of the community and of all living beings are almost always antagonistic.
A world without commodities
The one change that could definitively solve many of these intractable capitalist problems is the end of commodity production. The commodity is a feature of all shades of capitalism: moderate welfare state capitalism, state capitalism governed by autocratic left-wing or right-wing parties, or dictatorships run by charismatic narcissists, generals and religious extremists. Every government, whatever its political flavour, revolves around capitalism’s defining entity, the commodity. That institution allows the propertyless to survive only by selling their commodified skills. It allows economic production to be defined by the selling of goods and services. It limits access to society’s benefits based on priorities such as price, cost, profit and loss. It encourages thousands of companies to strip the planet like so many piranhas in the quest for profits. And its products are not produced primarily with quality, durability, or even need in mind, but mass-produced for cheapness and marketed through advertising to maximise persuasion and create false needs and wants, with oftentimes ill effects on human health, emotional wellbeing, financial security, the living planet, and other ‘externalities’ that profit cares nothing about.
A world without commodities would be one in which the priority of production would be the meeting of human needs. This would likely incentivise humans to work, to do their best, to maximise their knowledge, education, and skills, and to reduce the endless negative repercussions of the acquisitive nature of capitalism, which often brings out the worst in people. The liberty that capitalism claims to offer, which is really the liberty of capitalists to produce with minimal legal or political restrictions, comes hand-in-hand with all those externalities which erode human liberty: crime; violent gang or cartel shootings; corruption at all levels of the society; the drug trade; wars, unpleasant workplaces and work itself; rampant pseudoscience and misinformation; a worship of individualism that breeds narcissism; the widespread destruction of our oceans, lakes, rivers, forests, air, soil quality, species, and weather; the huge waste in human energy and resources that goes into managing commodities (banks, advertisers, traders, investors, insurers, ticket inspectors, sellers, buyers, exchangers, the machinery of war, and much more). All these side effects mean that capitalism erodes human liberty more than it promotes it, even in those countries fortunate enough to have some degree of freedom of speech and movement.
A world without commodities will require production under different rules. Production in the modern world merges many sciences, and so the research, planning, and execution of how best to meet human needs is essentially a scientific project. Money too often distorts this. Money is not real, but an entirely cultural and psychological phenomenon that evolved with power and property. Money does not belong in science, in the same way that political ideologies in university settings should not distort the practice and results of science. Our own world community should make use of productive machinery to meet our material needs, allowing us the freedom and liberty to live our own lives as we choose and according to our own values and interests. ‘Freedom’ will no longer be just an ideological soundbite used to con voters, but a reality, for the first time in human history.
The desire to build a world without commodities goes with the desire to live sustainably, both individually and as a culture. Capitalism, and its repressive antecedents (feudalism and slavery), distorted our concept of nature, essentially objectifying it. The rise in environmentalism represents a fairly recent development in our understanding of nature, even though it often fails to identify the economic culprit behind the objectification of living beings, namely commodity production. Socialists strive for the abolition of commodities, including the wages system, which reduces people to machines who sell their abilities to employers. Technical social questions will then be rid of financial considerations, which are not part of nature, or of our nature.
Such questions could be: Where do I want to live? What kinds of work would I find satisfying? What are the most pressing local needs that I wish to help meet? What can I do to help beautify my city? Are there realms of knowledge that I wish to contribute to? These, and many more personal questions, may finally be answered by self-knowledge, adventure, imagination, and a profound sense of serving other humans that religions can only fantasise about. A society in which our needs are in harmony with the needs of society as a whole. A society in which the purpose of production and of administration is the meeting of needs, in which we no longer fear poverty, starvation, war, or oppressive state ideologies and their henchmen. These are permanent and durable solutions to the problems that we face today, that may yield a sense of comfort and belonging that we are entitled to as humans who show our giving side each day when serving employers, families, and neighbourhoods.
We should feel that our world is ours. We are for the most part good, though imperfect, beings, who deserve a world in which our built-in, vulnerable fears of being emotionally damaged and eradicated by death should be matched by a sense that our community exists as much for us as we do for it. The eradication of the commodity, and its replacement by goods and services produced for free with the aim of meeting our needs, will bring out the best in the human animal, intellectually, emotionally, socially, and in terms of physical and emotional health.
There is no need for a world that encourages violence, competitiveness, ideological rivalry, ruthlessness and greed. Because we are imperfect beings with the potential for both good and evil, it behoves us to establish a social system that will be more likely to bring out the good than the bad. We owe that to ourselves, so that we can continue to evolve emotionally and psychologically, having finally conquered the most basic material needs of existence.
Once we have met those basic needs without unnecessary complication, stress and waste, we may continue to evolve more important qualities that today’s social system frustrates or prevents, and which our children deserve to be raised by: generosity, kindness, aesthetics, reason, gratitude, wisdom and, as beings on possibly the only planet that sustains any degree of complex life, awe at life itself, from the quantum level to the breathtakingly huge and beautiful universe, that the consciousness inside our humbly small heads allows us to marvel at.
DR WHO