Millions of people losing their jobs, millions of lives devastated. People losing everything, and ending up homeless. As someone put it, it’s a shock knowing that your talents and skills are dispensable. We don’t truly realize how much work gives meaning to our lives in this kind of society until we don’t have it.
The situation makes clear that we absolutely can, and must, have a society where we don’t have to worry about selling ourselves in the labor market every day in order to eat. That new society is possible right now. We have the technology to produce everything we need. But private property is standing in the way.
Today, a relative few of us work for the government or for non-profit groups, but most of us work for private employers. We have to sell our labor power – our ability to work – to these employers, these private owners of productive property.
If employing you doesn’t make a profit for someone, you get laid off. Today, given that robots and computers are replacing work permanently, there are not going to be jobs – in the old sense.
But this technological revolution in the economy also makes possible – and not just possible, but necessary – a revolution in how our society is organized.
We, the people, could own society’s productive property ourselves. Technology would no longer be a threat to our ability to make a living; it would be a tool to give us more leisure time, more time to spend with our kids, more time to devote to taking care of each other and to doing the things that really personally satisfy us. The only thing in our way is a ridiculous system where our society’s productive property is in private hands. It may seem like a big job to change that, but history has shown that a system that can’t meet the basic needs of the people can and will be changed. Together we can do it.
Bob Lee is the editor of the People’s Tribune.
