A call for a new way for self government in our communities and in our work places. An Economic Democracy!
The Need for Social Ownership
A studied reflection on what is at the core of the social turmoil we call poverty, crime, racism, the environmental question, and the vicious Congressional divisions in government, can be narrowed to one, and only one cause; the structure and use of our economy.
It should be clear to everyone by now that the present system has failed to to sustain a consistently prosperous, peaceful and harmonious society. In fact, the opposite is true.
Think about it. Many of us have been pauperized. We fight among ourselves and with other countries. We have little or no real decision-making role in a government which has become an open political battlefield for the economic system’s most powerful corporations and their chief beneficiaries to the exclusion of our everyday living needs.
Right now we are headed for a societal and global holocaust. As a people we have been led into wars abroad, and now the wars have been visited upon us by people most of us have never met, and have never personally harmed or injured in any way. To passively witness our own destruction , and to deny the real reasons why it is happening, is to condemn ourselves and future generations to a drab, worry-laden, welfare-ridden future of physical and mental impoverishment.
We can do something about it.
The Rationale for Social Ownership
To begin to call for the building of a sensible, new system in which we have real input and actual control of our lives, we start here thenecessary beginnings of a vital, broad-based national discussion for a reconstruction of our society on a sound, rational base starting at the ground floor of our economic organization.
A new social direction is needed to replace this present one which has been breaking down periodically and dramatically ever since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. We needgenuine democratic institutions which We, the People, the citizen majority, can democratically use to serve our societal and individual needs and wants. Social ownership of our needed industries and services is the most logical answer.
Our emphasis is on codifying genuine democratic principles into our existing socially necessary institutions. We are not talking about so-called “Communism,” or the popular understandings of “socialism.”
We are not advocating any form of STATE ownership of our national industrial assets in which the administration and operation of our work places is governed from the top down.
In the realm of ethical morality, social ownership of our industrial complex, social ownership is natural and just.
Social ownership is natural because We, the People, operate our socially-operated industrial tools, the foremost instruments we, as a cooperative society, now have for societal survival in the modern industrial world. By virtue of their critical need by the whole society, it becomes imperative that these are not misused for narrow, short term private gain by any minority, as is now the reality.
Social ownership is just because it is compatible with the fair, universally-accepted axiom: that is, the product belongs to those who make it. Since the majority of society’s citizenry is of our working class, and since it is our class which has created, and operates the industrial wheels of necessary social production to provide the goods and services required for us to function as we do, it becomes a simple matter of elementary justice that our industrial tools be owned, controlled, administered and democratically operated by those who work them.
While I definitely agree that the current society in the US (and those in all other parts of the world) is far from "a consistently prosperous, peaceful and harmonious" and that the citizens have "little or no real decision-making role" made by government, the "solution" provided in this article is not one at all.
I am going to be more detailed than the previous commenter.
"Social Ownership", socialism, has been demonstrated before in many places, including the US, and found to be terribly lacking. The more socialistic the society, the worse the outcome. The greater degree to which individuals owned their own property (including businesses) and made their own decisions, rather than done by some bureaucrat - the greater the individual liberty available - the better off that entire society. Simply look at the measures that were enacted in the US from the end of WWI by Wilson and greatly enlarged on by Roosevelt for examples of "socially planned"/government mandated economically related interactions. It was the approaching and then actual WWII that improved the economy in the US from what it was in the 1930s - if one is looking narrowly at only certain parameters to gauge improvement....
Even with the claim "We are not advocating any form of STATE ownership of our national industrial assets in which the administration and operation of our work places is governed from the top down.", massive State involvement is in essence what "social ownership" means of the type described. As an aside, I have serious doubts if the author ever had hir own business or was even closely associated with such ownership and successful operation. Even being part of a committee for an employer or some other organization would provide experience of the increased difficulty for efficacy with group decision-making; and the larger the group the worse the problem.
At the root of the problem of such a "solution" presented (again, since it is not new) is the idea that human beings are like ants or bees, living in animal societies for which the concept of individual does not exist, except for the Queen. All others are simply workers or soldiers there to attend to the Queen's needs for the furtherance of the colony and therefore the species. Use of the words "we", "us" and "our" - heavily used in this article - is greatly distorting to one's thinking, unless each individual included in that "we" has given permission for the writer/speaker to include hir. I do not include myself in the plural pronoun references of this article. So I say to the author, "Speak only for yourself and those who have given you specific permission." For more on the distorting effects on thinking by most uses of plural pronouns - "Collectivism in Language: Its Effects on Valid Reasoning"
The real solution for the mess of current society is not less individual liberty - new and more laws with a government actually part of business, even if supposedly only "socially necessary institutions". What exists now, and is promoted by some politicians for a greater amount, is fascism - the State is in a type partnership with nominally private businesses.
The real solution is a society that promotes a free market. There has never been a truly free market in the US or anywhere in the world. The suggestions in this artilce would not improve the lives of most living in the US, and they would bring into being a system of more government interference in the interactions of those who seek to trade to mutual benefit. A paradigm shift in thinking of the type described in "Social Meta-Needs: A New Basis for Optimal Human Interaction" must first occur in large numbers of people. This is not at all impossible, but that change must occur first or any more reasonable alterations (not those written of in this article) will simply degenerate into more of the same that exists now, or even worse.
**Kitty Antonik Wakfer
MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness, individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting
by
Kitty Antonik Wakfer (11 articles, 2 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 70 comments)
on Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 3:58:47 PM
