Millions of human beings around the world are forcibly detained, their liberties removed by governmental authorities. Anyone who takes seriously the immediate potential for replacing capitalism with a world of real abundance and freedom knows already that the great majority of crimes are either crimes against property or involve the illegal trafficking of property — or are the likely direct result of living the restricted and stressful life of a wage- slave.
While there are those who justify the existence of laws on moral and ideological grounds, the defenders of the status quo must always argue their case referring to a swashbuckler’s haven of spurious doctrines, some of them philosophical (“free will”), theological (“good and evil”), psychological (“mental illness”) or political (“justice”). And yet the wasting away of countless millions of human lives remains a potent critique of a society of private property, as much as the maltreatment and exploitation of animals or children in our society. The sheer hypocrisy and failure of the law is inevitably the feature subject of this issue.
It is illegal to kill one’s fellows in a fit of rage but perfectly legal to kill fellow workers from other countries to satisfy the ruling class’s need to protect or assert its economic or political spheres of influence in another part of the world. One must not steal, say both the law and the Bible, and yet it is perfectly legal and morally acceptable to rob working people every day of the wealth they produce above their wages, distilling the high life for the greedy and lazy few out of the gradated deprivations visited on the majority, stymying people’s efforts to provide enough for themselves and their children. The subject of prisons goes to the very heart of our so-called civil society, putting to shame the naive suggestion that we live in a democratic society. The truth is that a society of privilege must be protected by the brute powers of the law. We are not allowed to enjoy more wealth than the crumbs we are permitted in our wages or welfare income, and anybody who attempts this in our society will be handcuffed and taken away.
Make no mistake about it, the lack of freedom inside the prison cells directly mirrors the lack of freedom for working people outside them. On the outside you will be forced to work, unless you want to live in a cardboard box and seek food in a garbage can; you will be forced to accept your wages or salary for the work you do, forced to accept the nature of the job, forced to spend vast hours of your life even outside work just preparing for it and getting to and from it. You will be forced to put up with the other side effects of capitalism — its pollution, its stress, its shoddy goods, its wars, and the fact that billions must starve to death, including tens of millions of children each year. Your “free” time itself will be carved up into the various consumer “entertainments” and “pleasures” available for the right price. What is truly yours in capitalism is debatable.
Your fate and that of the prisoners who languish behind bars every day are inseparably intertwined. Indeed, inside or outside prison, we will never be free until we establish a society in which humans come first and the production of wealth is oriented toward meeting our needs and those of our children — one in which we are no longer forced to work in order to be adequately fed, clothed and housed, and in which the economic priorities of the rich no longer send poor and uneducated youth to die abroad, or condemn the planet to a slow death by self-poisoning. When property is owned in common, we will find ways as a community to better meet our needs for wealth, creativity, decision-making, love, rest, productivity, and freedom.
We challenge the myth of the present era that some people are good and others evil, or that crime is an entirely moral issue. We maintain as scientific socialists that behavior must be understood in its social context: that of a society divided into two classes, one owning the vast proportion of wealth without working for it, and the other producing all the wealth while owning but a miniscule proportion of it.
Until the vast majority of us are liberated from the prison of being workers, we must denounce all the moralistic assumptions and shoddy social analyses of our public behaviors that lead so many of us to be locked away behind bars. We will on such a glorious day liberate our brothers and sisters in jail, and we urge them now to join us in the worldwide project of designing a system that promotes for real the enjoyment of the abundant wealth and freedom that are our birthright.
No comments:
Post a Comment