5 January, 2018
All I want for Christmas are the means of production. Seriously. I mean really seriously. Not as a catchy, clever slogan on the front of Oz’s sweater. Not as a utopian fantasy. Not as holy Marxist doctrine. No, I mean for real.
If ever there was something so plain to every sentient being older than age 11, requiring no degrees, theorizing or pontifical commentary by news media pundits, it is that the ownership of the means of production by a tiny wealthy global elite is the single biggest blasphemy to decent life for people on earth, and the single biggest threat to the survival of human civilization.
Do you know what makes my blood boil? It’s the claim you hear repeated whenever the economy comes up in the news, which is more or less all the time, that “business creates jobs.” It’s one of those lies George Orwell wrote about in 1984. You know, like “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.”
And what’s worse is what follows from it, that folks should be grateful that those hard-done-to employers, out of the goodness of their hearts, deign to offer us work. For example, “Top employers work hard to attract the best employees” (Record, November 25, 2017).
Doesn’t it make you want to scream? It’s not that their wealth is the product of our work (it is). It’s not that their “enterprise” destroys jobs (it does). No, it’s that we owe them gratitude for paying us minimum wage in part-time, no benefits, precarious employment.
Don’t you hate that word “employment”? It’s okay for tools, but for human beings? Since when is it right that human beings should be employed as means to other people’s ends?
That “bosses” should “employ” “workers” as “labour” to work for them but not for themselves? How degrading is that? When the first landless peasants were forced to find work in the factories of industrializing societies two centuries ago, they called it wage slavery.
They were right.
We don’t need “jobs”, the empty promise of every politician, from Trudeau to Trump. We don’t need “full employment”, the mantra of parliamentary labour parties like the NDP. We need an end to jobs and employment and their replacement by co-operative, equitable, worker-owned-and-managed enterprises run in collaboration with their local communities.
I’m deadly serious. The economic system the corporate rich have built to enrich themselves is killing us along with the planet. It’s got to go, both because it’s an assault on the dignity of every human being subjected to it and because, by disrupting the climate, it threatens the very survival of human civilization.
Peter Eglin
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