“Now tell me how changing the world to make it more to your liking will solve the problem of human greed.” – Brackers
It won’t and it can’t solve the problem of human greed, just as social policy of any type cannot solve the problem of murder altogether. However, the attribute in itself and the trouble it causes can be minimised.
Here are a couple of ideas that aren’t necessarily original, but might help to reduce human greed and its effects:
1) Sharing out power more equally. You might think you live in a democracy, but you don’t (wherever in the West you live). Democracy implies public participation, public decision making and where there are votes, votes along fair lines. At the moment we have most media owned by rich people by definition, and representing more or less the opinions of rich people. In Britain, at least, all of the political parties would be inviable without the support of large corporations’ donations – so they get a large slice of the power over our elected representatives.
In many Third World countries, the IMF or World Bank has power over the elected government and can effectively make them strip the assets of a country and sell them to the rich world at knockdown prices. This is enough to destroy even the successful businesses of the poor world: and the reason is greed and power inequality between the rich and poor worlds. Military dictatorships are yet another example: the more polarised the power, the more room for greed.
Democracy can be extended until it becomes the way in which local communities agree upon the distribution, production roles, ethics and responsibilities that they have. Democratic dialogue by democratically chosen representatives of each locality to each region, from each region to each state and from each state to an international assembly can allow for the advances in each place to be repeatable elsewhere, for common goals to be achieved – say for example the worldwide abolition of slavery – and environmentally appropriate production to be planned.
2) “Property is theft” – by making everything public property and replacing the concept of “ownership” with that of “community”, you can also reduce human greed. The money system encourages black markets and mob violence to thrive by effectively paying for it. Disconnecting the consumer and producer relationship by two separate systems: a “consumer” system of credits which are only for completed products from community-run distribution centres and a “producer” system based upon a computer link-up of production and consumption figures all over the world to produce the economist’s Holy Grail, a “perfect market”.
Property being abolished, images, information and inventions would now be able to be distributed freely. Artists of all types could still live solely upon their craft if they could sufficiently convince any community of the advantages of subsidising them. The complete musical, artistic and literary catalogue would be freed for anyone to enjoy or learn from on the internet. Patents would be the owned by the human race, and all drugs would be generic – the subsidies to those on the research and development side of medicine would come from the international assembly.
No one need starve because someone else “needs” a Rolls Royce to show off. By providing initially for everyone’s needs but still allowing a credit system to function – subject to a possible penalty as one’s marginal value nears zero (for example, a man working a 23-hour day might not produce much more than another man working an 8-hour day, and certainly wouldn’t produce nearly 3 times as much) – people can if they want work more or less for more or less material “wealth”, but within reasonable limits, for the sake of both their community and the environment, which takes a hit every time someone within capitalism designs a new way to exploit it.
3) The treadmill of capital leads people to rank themselves by income and conspicuous expenditure. There are many better ways for people to discover their true worth, and these must be catered for within each community. Sporting events, intellectual events, exhibitions of creativity, efforts on behalf of the community and efforts to look after one’s own family: every way of advancing the individual, the community or the human race would be portrayed as valuable, instead of the present concept of the self-seeking man, valuable because of his misuse of power. Community news media will be returned to the community. National and international news media will be selected by the editors of each community news outlet, collected by anybody and collated through the means of the internet.
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Just a few ideas I’m throwing out for comments and meaningful criticism. All of you who call yourselves socialists but who reject the travesties we have seen in Burma, North Korea, Stalin’s Soviet Union etc., please write an article on your own blogs with a few more suggestions, and comment here so that I can link them all together.
(X-posted from http://jangliss.livejournal.com)
Just a note – Carnival of Socialism 5 is out now: check http://carnivalofsocialism.blogspot.com for more details)
