Why socialism?

If you're at all in touch with reality and not in a self-sustaining delusion, you've noticed that the price of gas, food, and other goods have increased dramatically while the global economic system is undergoing a severe crisis. This, on top of declining wages, vanishing benefits, worsening working conditions, and a credit shortage, has resulted in a desperate global populace. For instance this past June closer to home, 3,000 people lined up outside Milwaukee's main welfare office when rumor spread that emergency food vouchers would be distributed to those in need when the center opened its doors on Monday morning. Monday morning came and went and these folks still are still in need of material assistance.

Since I'm on the topic of lines, just last week, hundreds of people stood in line outside of their local branch of Pasadena-based IndyMac Bancorp. to withdraw what they could of their savings, retirement or otherwise. What alarms me most is that bank runs have not been seen since the Great Depression! And more alarming may be the reports coming from the FDIC indicating that these runs are bound to increase as 90 others are on their list of "problem" banks.

So in the wealthiest nation on the planet, more and more people are going to bed hungry and malnourished, and across the globe, hundreds of millions of people are barely struggling to survive. And it comes down to the fact that working people can't afford to feed themselves nor their families. So after we begin to sift through the rhetoric coming from world leaders or cable television pundits or economists from elite universities, we should ask ourselves this question: what is really preventing us from feeding ourselves?

Some would say, there are just too many damn people on this planet. However this Hobbesian argument does not hold since "according to the FAO [United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization], with record grain harvests in 2007, there is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone--at least 1.5 times current demand. In fact, over the last 20 years, food production has risen steadily at over 2.0 percent a year, while the rate of population growth has dropped to 1.14 percent a year. Population is not outstripping food supply." Since it is the case that our present society has the technological capabilities to feed everyone one and a half times over, why does the dominant economic system deny the world's people the wealth of foodstuffs it creates?

In short, it is because capitalism fails to prioritize human need. Since food, as well as other goods, are treated as commodities bought and sold on a market, people who most need it can't afford it. And by capitalism I mean an economic system where firms are driven to increase profitability as they compete with each other for market share.

This post will be one of many that will hopefully win you to the argument that while capitalism has produced incredible wealth and prosperity for the few, it has also produced poverty, destitution, and misery for the many. So why socialism? Because the only way to rid the world of war, poverty, racism, sexism, and every other form of oppression and the only way to begin to seriously address the environmental meltdown taking place, workers much organize themselves to win political power to fundamentally change the economic basis of our society. This change does not come by electing new leaders, but by raising everyone up to become leaders and organizers. The society these worker/organizers will create thrives on rationally planning the economy where workers not only foster sustainable economic relationships but also ecological ones. To do so takes a long term class struggle, a democratic, concerted effort to take over workplaces and communities and attempt to solve the problems we face as workers (and the political and economic elites have utterly failed to address). Because as workers united, we cannot be defeated.


Here are some links to the occurrences I've mentioned above...

http://socialistworker.org/2008/06/26/desperate-in-milwaukee
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080718.RKOZA18/TPStory/Business
http://socialistworker.org/2008/05/23/can-whole-world-be-fed