A call for a NEW way for self government in our communities and in our work places....An Economic Democracy!

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New Society... USA

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.

The Legal Question

Our Constitution, the law of our land, makes it possible to reconstruct our social institutions. Article V, the Amendment Clause, enables us to change the system through legislation, the legal and peaceful ballot way. The legal and moral basis for using a new system, for a fundamental change, is found in our early American traditions.

Thomas Jefferson, author of our Declaration of Independence, told us that his writings were for the people of that time, and that conditions would change as to the ways future generations would order and govern themselves. He declared that WE mustn’t look upon what his generation did as being written in stone, never to be changed, which is why the Amendment Clause, Article V, was included in the Constitution.

On the folly of keeping the Constitution exactly as was originally written, Jefferson wrote:

“We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their …ancestors.”

George Washington added:

The basis of our political system is the right of the people to alter the constitutions of government.”

Abraham Lincoln concurred:

Any people living anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most sacred right -- a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.”

Lincoln went a step further:

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their CONSTITUTIONAL right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

Perhaps James Madison, The Father of the Constitution, came closest to understanding how our present form of government, as well as the economy, established over 200 years ago, would not be desirable for future generations when he declared that the time would come when:

"Wealth will be concentrated in the hands of the few,” and that it would be necessary to “…readjust the laws of the nation to changed conditions.”

That time we believe is now. We need new laws… to democratize our necessary social institutions.., government and the economy. .We propose a social and economic democracy.

The general format of such an innovative concept can be further studied at :

http://www.hwforums.com/2201/size="2">

Authors Bio:
Ret.Teacher