Proposals for antiproductivist and Participatory socialism.

AuthorBurke, R.

The capitalist world system is facing its final crisis. In its attempt to contain labor costs in the developed world, capitalism has globalized production to less developed countries, hoping to take advantage of cheap, easily exploitable labor. In the process it is increasingly de-ruralizing the world; most of the human race now lives in cities, creating a global proletariat, and shrinking the sources of that same cheap labor which it has sought to tap. This global workforce will put an increasing upward pressure on labor costs.

In the developed world the advancement of automated production insures that socially necessary work is done with progressively less labor. Well-paid industrial jobs disappear to be replaced with badly paid service work, undermining the social contract of the post World War II era. Despite the assaults of neoliberalism, demands for health, education and guarantees of income continue unabated. Millions starve each year while the food that can feed them, produced in abundance, rots due to the unprofitability of feeding the "wretched of the earth."

The environmental crisis of global warming threatens to wreck civilization, the direct result of 200 years of economic activities driven by the quest for profit and the productivist imperative of limitless growth, not to mention the possibility of nuclear war in the wake of environmental meltdown. The handwriting is on the wall. By the middle of this century we will have a new world system, and we are faced with the choice of one which maintains the hierarchies and inequalities of capitalism in a new form, or one that is more democratic and egalitarian. For those of us who choose the later option the time has come to consider what the shape of this new world system will look like. The following measures will prove necessary in the decades to come.

Reduction of labor time

As advances in technology assure that socially necessary production will require less and less labor, it becomes imperative to spread the savings in labor time among workers, so that everyone can work, but work less. This is also necessary to break the hegemony of productivist mindset in which one serves an ever expanding production. Time is freed from being in service to endless productive growth and made available to autonomous activities rather than serving the megamachine. The progressive reduction of labor time must be put at the disposal of free individuals for their free development.

Guaranteed income

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