The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant machine to generate profit for corporations.
Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.
That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.
It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.
Crosspost from https://news.abolish.capital/post/56355
It’s how the economy worked in Australia before colonisation. It was explained to Me by an Elder from the central desert. Before colonisation, there was no word for work. There was a word for sweat. You put sweat into helping your community because you loved your community. Karl Marx explained it a little differently; he said: From each according to ability, to each according to need.
David Graeber wrote this book called Bullshit Jobs. A bullshit job is a job so pointless, even the person doing it believes it has no purpose. Some people with bullshit jobs don’t even have to do any work. They just sit in an office all day browsing Reddit and pretending to work. Graeber thought these people would be happiest, but they’re not. They’re depressed and unhappy. Turns out, humans have a psychological need to contribute valuable work to society. They need to help others.
A gift economy is the natural and proper state of humanity. Trading work for currency tokens is a dangerous aberration. Groups who live and work together don’t need to barter in order to cooperate. If you take people out of the capitalist mind prison, a gift economy is just what makes sense. We already have communism for children; we give them food, housing, clothes, and an education for free. But it takes a village to raise a child. So imagine if everyone in your community just helped each other the way we help kids. That’s communism.
I love it. Sign me up. I wanna go back.
I think we’re gonna have to have a revolution first. The capitalist state forces us to engage with the whole money system. We need to tear down the state.
Step 1 is to spread more knowledge of communism through your community. Step 2 is to use direct action and mutual aid to build a revolutionary group who see and practice the benefits. Step 3 is going to have to be a coup of the government by the people, where we smash apart the machinery of government.