What Is To Be Done (Thwap Version)

 

What do we have to do?  Create a world that truly respects democracy and human rights and that respects the living planet that sustains us.  We have to create a civilization that truly allows everyone the right to rise to their fullest potential.  A world that recognizes the inherent right of all to equal enjoyment of their humanity regardless of sex, race or geography.  

Does this mean that everyone is entirely equal and that some all encompassing government will enforce conformity of behaviour and economic outcomes?  I don't think that's what we want.  As a rather eccentric individual I don't want my harmless idiosyncracies to cause me to be ostracized.  I do think that people with valuable skills will want some sort of reward for the investments that go into obtaining the training and education needed to develop those skills.  If the tasks they do require sustained efforts and are likewise valued by society, I believe that a just society would give them their due.

Something like that was embedded in my "Workers as Citizens" proposal. [Note: I thought there was a post more clearly focused than that one but I can't find it.]  I honestly believe that ordinary people will recognize if someone has an important job to do and the rare talents necessary to do that job, that they will vote to adequately compensate such a person.  But I believe that in a truly democratic society the end result will be a far cry from the unending history of gross inequality of human civilization up to now, from "god"- emperors holding the power of life and death over their subjects to today's financial oligarchs owning billions of dollars in financial assets including derivatives specualtion, manipulation of share prices, and the monopolization of goods and services.

In the immediate near-future we need to reverse global heating.  We need to rein-in economic inequality.  We need to eliminate war as factor in deciding disputes.  We need a powerful, radical, and effective peace movement.  We need to democratize the economy.  We need to democratize the media.  We need the radical transformation of our political economy.

But how do we do this?  I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about the barriers to these visions.  I don't want to spend most of my time in a critique of the system that is redundant due to the existence of vast libraries of comprehensive criticisms of the present political-economic order.  But I will have to mention these problems from time-to-time in order to address how to overcome them. 

So, what strengths do we have?  By "we" I mean, first of all, the like-minded readers of this blog; the people that I and my like-minded readers know in other capacities who share our values; those of our fellow citizens who share our values; and the people of the world who would be onside with a world of economic justice, the absence of imperialism, conformity with the limits of the ecosphere, sexual and racial equality, and peace.  By which I mean, therefore, a majority of the human race.

The first thing we have to do, as Canadians, is to get the majority of Canadians onside, organized and mobilized to realize the radical transformation of Canadian political-economy.  And to do THAT we need to have a positive vision of where we want to go and a coherent explanation for how we can get there.  Having a critique of the present system is fine.  It's necessary.  But it can't be the majority of our efforts.  Having some Utopian vision is nice.  But without an understandable plan to get there it is nothing more than "belling the cat."  (A lengthier, more articulate discussion of merely peformative protest to combat actually functioning oppression is this brilliant essay here.)

I propose (as I've long proposed) that DEMOCRACY should be the centerpiece of our project.  Democracy and human rights.  Human rights, because the while the main concern of European liberals in the 18th and 19th centuries was for the preservation of the property rights of the privileged few against the impoverished many, there is MORE than something to be said for the dangers of subjecting minorities (racial, ethnic, religious, whatever) to the demands of the majority.  That having been said, I do not think that respecting the rights of adult homosexuals to marry each other, or for racialized minorities to not be discriminated against when seeking jobs or housing, and such other things, is what is really standing in the way of a more genuinely democratic Canada.

And, as I've been saying for decades, it is the absence of democracy in the economy, specifically the workplace, that makes Canadian democracy a bourgeois economy.  A democracy that is mostly performance rather than real.  So, somewhat in the background there has to be an understanding that workplace democracy is a goal.  Also, instead of merely whining about oligarchic control of the media, we should do something about it.  And that means advocating a genuine political strategy for the democratization of existing mass-media.  (Which I'll get to later.)  A genuine political strategy for the democratization of social media.  (Which, obviously, includes removing it from oligarchic control and resisting asinine attempts to censor it at the merest whim.)  A genuine strategy to reach the people with old-fashioned, face-to-face, grassroots communication.  Which means going out and talking to regular people.  (All of which I hope to get to in subsequent posts.)

But in the meantime there are other contexts wherein the values of democracy can be achieved.  In the realm of formal politics we have representatives who we can ostensibly influence.  As politicians in a bourgeois democracy though, these people respond more to the wealthy and the powerful.  Because the wealthy and the powerful are small in number they are often united (relatively speaking) in what they want.  And they have surplus resources that they can use to reward compliant politicians.  And they have control over resources (generally speaking, the "Means of Production") that they can withhold to punish politicians who oppose them.

But we the people have power.  We have power in numbers and we have power in our collective wealth.  They need our votes to maintain their legitimacy in our system of pseudo-democracy.  And we can see the evidence of our wealth when the oligarchy is bailed-out when their speculations turn sour.  And our wealth is seen in the subsidies to the fossil fuels sector.  And our wealth can be seen in the profits of the monopolists in finance and telecommunications and other gouging sectors.  How are public bail-outs paid for?  With the subsequent wealth produced by us and taxed by the government and denied to established public sector programs and funneled to making payments on the debts created by the bail-outs.

We have power and wealth but we are divided.  And to an extent, elites create and sustain these divisions.  But it is an exaggeration to say that there would be no divisions if there were no elites.  The animosities between men and women; between competing religious delusions; between cultues; etc., would exist without oligarchs and this needs to be recognized.  Nonetheless, we can all agree on somethings.  In Canada, our national health insurance program is very popular.  Publicly subsidized, universal healthcare, managed by an accountable, not-for-profit public sector is widely cherished.  And it is under attack from troglodyte and scumbag politicians controlled by corporate predators.

I would propose that the first major campaign we should fight (while having an coherent ultimate goal hovering in the background) is to mobilize the Canadian people to defend AND EXPAND our public healthcare system.  To do this we need a coherent plan that organizes and mobilizes the Canadian citizenry.  One that focuses our collective wealth and power to such an extent that even the most dull-witted corporate lackey politician has to recognize it as a genuine competitor to the more familiar exercising of wealth and power by the oligarchy.

I might as well conclude this blog-post here and delineate the campaign I'm thinking about in my next post.  There's nothing like a cancer diagnosis to focus the mind.  We are, all of us, mortal.  In the long-run we're all dead.  Do we want to live lives of illusion?  Lives of subjugation?  Lives of moral hypocrisy and fear?  Lives of frustrated dreams?  Or do we honestly want to live fighting a victorious battle for the realization of our values and our dreams?  I'm going to try to only write about this positive vision.