There is a sales manager gimmick, used to put salesmen in a correct mental attitude, that goes something like this: You say you have problems? Your wife is ill; your boy needs money for tuition; your car is ready for the graveyard; you’ve just gotten an increase in your rent? Actually, you only have one problem. Money! So why not get on the territory and make more money?
It might be argued that this is the scientific way of handling a number of problems. Find the common factor that generates them and correct it. In this case, however, the reasoning is not too sound because, at best, it would only work for a few. Money does not really have expansion qualities and the garnering of more by some can only mean the accumulation of less by others. And, yet, there is a lesson to be learned here.
In the world of our times there are all sorts of problems that seem to be shaking society to its roots. War, pollution. crime, uncontrolled population growth, cheating in the realm of merchandising, ghettoization, slum neighborhoods and the struggle for women’s and gay liberation. You name it. And each of these areas has its adherents and devotees: men. women and children willing to give of themselves to aid their cause, convinced that they are involved in the struggle for a better world.
Their dedication is, unfortunately, largely a wasted effort. There is a common factor in all of these problems that not only generates them, to begin with, but operates to prevent their elimination or even improvement. They are all spawned by the economics of the capitalist system and are symptoms of a world-wide system of class or state ownership of the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution.
The problem, in these times of potential abundance, begins with propaganda Not the propaganda of socialism but the propaganda of capitalism. Even before our children can walk and talk, their eyes and ears are bombarded with the capitalist way of life. Buying and selling, profit, wages and the struggle to stretch them from payday to payday are presented as a normal, unchangeable, natural law. Even the progressively oriented kiddles' books and TV shows are designed to educate them to cope with this way of life rather than to abolish it for something better. Yet, all around us, on the other hand, is evidence of the restraining and throttling of production. the potential abundance of all those things needed to make a good life, in order that a system based upon production for a market, for profit, might be maintained.
What is it that causes war, for example, in these times? The ever-expanding need for nations to find markets, sources of raw materials, and the military might to dominate other nations seeking the same things. And flowing from this base, this all-out emphasis on accumulation of capital which is integral to capitalism, those other problems that capture most imaginations arise. The fight against pollution and crime; the spread of slums and ghettos; the need for women's and gay liberation movements; the growth of consumer protection groups are necessary because of a system that places profits above all; vests ownership of the means of a livelihood In a minority while divesting most of us of almost all but our ability to work which we must sell in order to live and pits section against section on the age-old axiom of divide and rule.
Even the fear of uncontrolled population growth Is based upon the needs of capitalism's labor market rather than on humanitarianism. A sane system, based upon production for use would support a much greater population than exists now on earth.
Yes, there really is but one problem. It is world capitalism. Why not organize to abolish it?
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