And don't think that I am advocating more government spending. All of your talking points about the inefficiency and wastefulness of government have nothing to do with what I advocate.
You love it when liberal callers to your show object to something that capitalists do and propose fettering capitalism, because then you can make all of your polished arguments about how fettering capitalism only makes things worse. But I'm not talking about fettering capitalism; I'm for abolishing it.
Now don't get all excited thinking that you can clobber me with your old and reliable anti-Communist arguments. I am not a Communist, not even a Marxist; I don't believe in a centrally planned economy or even a central government, never mind a Communist Party dictatorship.
I'm afraid that if you're going to try to refute my point of view you're going to have to do some original thinking, because the script you guys use, the one that works so well against liberals and Marxists, will be like water off a duck's back if you try to use it against me.
So, What Do I Believe?
I think society should be based on a genuine application of the Golden Rule principle. Do you disagree with that? This means shaping society on the basis of equality and mutual aid and democracy. If you disagree with this, then be my guest and reveal to the world that you are an anti-social nut. I think the economy should be a "sharing economy" based on the following principles: 1) People, up until some reasonable age of retirement, ought to contribute to the economy a reasonable amount, given their ability. 2) Among these people economic products and services should be freely shared (not bought and sold) according to need when sufficiently plentiful, and otherwise rationed in an equitable manner taking into account need. Everybody should have the same status economically: nobody is rich and nobody is poor. The decisions required to do this (i.e. deciding what is a reasonable contribution to the economy, a reasonable retirement age, etc.) should be made democratically, as discussed below.
We should make social decisions about the economy and other things democratically. This does NOT mean having a central government that makes laws everybody must follow. (You and the Marxists can join together to argue the need for a central government that we all must obey, if you wish.) It means having social order be based on voluntary federation. "Voluntary" is one of your favorite words. You always praise capitalism because it is based on workers voluntarily agreeing to work for a boss, right? So you should be right on board with basing all of society on voluntary agreements, no?
Specifically this means that laws are made only by local community and workplace assemblies that every adult who supports equality and mutual aid can attend and have an equal say at. No "higher" authority can tell these local assemblies what they must do. People are free. You're not against freedom, are you?
Of course if people in some local assembly or assemblies decide to do something that is so wrong that others think it must be stopped (like enslaving people or institutionalizing child abuse) then people in other regions have every right to stop it, violently if necesssary. You never seemed to have a problem with sending U.S. troops into other nations to stop Communists from enslaving people, so I assume you have no objection to this principle, right?
Whatever a local workplace assembly needs in the way of resources (raw materials, machinery, land, as well as the economic needs of the workers) is made freely (no buying and selling, remember?) available to them if the local community assembly agrees. An entrepreneur with an idea about how to build a better mouse trap, or a more exciting video game, only needs to persuade his or her fellow citizens to let him produce it, and he's off and running. No federal red tape, no onerous taxes. You don't object to entrepreneurship do you?
Everything that requires coordination by many local assemblies is handled this way. Local assemblies send delegates to "higher level" assemblies representing assemblies from a larger region than one locality. And these assemblies in turn send delegates to yet higher level assemblies representing an even larger region. Higher level assemblies do not make laws; they craft proposals that the local assemblies carry out or not as they see fit. Negotiations take place to develop proposals that are agreed upon by a sufficient number of assemblies to carry out the proposal. Different kinds of higher level assemblies can be created for different kinds of purposes, ranging from organizing a sports event to a complex economic enterprise or university system.
Local assemblies, by this system of voluntary federation, can adopt proposals encompassing millions or even billions of people. They can, for example, agree to enter into a single "sharing economy" based on the principles described above, producing for each other and sharing among each other without buying and selling and without some people being rich and others poor. Each local assembly decides questions such as what is a reasonable retirement age or a reasonable contribution to the economy given all relevant circumstances. If a local assembly's decisions seem reasonable to the other assemblies then all of the people in that assembly will be accepted into the large sharing economy.
For people to be in this sharing economy they must contribute to it reasonably. Anybody willing to do so will be able to. They only have to go to a workplace and say, "Can I help?" They will either be told yes, or directed to get some prior required training or education, which will also count as making a reasonable contribution. If a lot of people are looking for a place to work, then the number of hours of work considered reasonable can be reduced so as to get the desired amount of work done with less work required per worker. This is easy when production is for use rather than for profit. This way there is no involuntary unemployment, unlike in the capitalist sytem you love so much. You always say that everybody who can work should work. Well this is how to make it so. Do you have a problem with that?
Before you shout, "This will never work!" I should tell you that it already has worked. In fact it worked very well. Indeed when it was implemented, economic production actually increased compared to the former capitalist system. I'm referring to Spain, in the provinces where a social revolution involving more than three million people along just these lines took place from 1937 to 1939. It ended, not because it didn't work, but because the fascist General Franco, with lots of help from the Communist Joeseph Stalin and the pro-capitalist Franklin D. Roosevelt, violently attacked and eventually defeated this revolution.
What Would You Do Without Liberals to Make You Look Smart?
So, Mr. or Ms. right wing radio talk show host, what are you going to do without liberals to make you look smart? Are you going to let callers with my revolutionary view speak their mind on your show? I dare you.
I bet you'll limit your critical callers to liberals who say things like, "Outsourcing jobs is bad and should be made illegal"? You love those kinds of callers, don't you? You can then give them the standard argument that outsourcing jobs is actually a good thing because it is the way that products are made most efficiently, which is good for everybody. As my local talk show host put it, "being against outsourcing is like being against progress, like being against railroads because they "put people out of work" compared to having people haul freight on their backs.
Your arguments always assume--without ever allowing this assumption, itself, to be questioned--that the only way people can be economically efficiently productive is if they work in a capitalist society, based on greed instead of mutual aid, based on buying and selling instead of sharing, based on inequality with some people rich and others poor instead of based on equality. Your whole right wing shtick is simply to argue that if our society is going to be a capitalist one, then the conservative way to do it is better than the liberal way. But who cares? The problem with our world today is capitalism. In order to maintain the inequality it is based on, the rulers of a capitalist society have to do terrible things to make people controllable, because most people want a more equal and democratic world.
Capitalist rulers subject children in public schools to high stakes standardized testing that is designed to make working class children feel undeserving of a decent job. They foment Orwellian wars based on lies. They pit people against each other by causing one group to appear nasty or fearful to others. So they use racial discrimination to make blacks look like criminals. They give economic, military and diplomatic support to Israel to enable it to ethnically cleanse non-Jews from their homeland of Palestine. They do this in order to make Americans fear Muslims and Arabs. The U.S. mass media accomplish this by never explaining the real reasons for Muslim and Arab anger, and telling Americans it's because they are anti-semitic terrorists who "hate our freedom."
The liberals are "useful idiots" employed by the rulers of our capitalist society to make it easy for you right wing talk radio hosts to come off appearing like you, with your pro-capitalist mantra, represent the average Joe who has decent values and common sense. Liberals enact Affirmative Action and tell whites, "We're sorry we couldn't give you the job (or school admission); we had to give it to a less qualified minority," in order to make whites resentful of blacks. And they tell blacks that the reason whites don't like Affirmative Action's government-approved racial discrimination is--get this!---because whites who aren't liberals are "racists."
What would you do without these liberals? The liberals not only preach that your white working class followers are racists for being against racial discrimination. They also lie about and insult your followers who oppose same-sex marriage because of their perfectly reasonable concerns for the children produced by such marriages with third party sperm or egg donation. The liberals say people who oppose same-sex marriage shouldn't really be allowed to have a say in society because their opinion on this question proves they are ignorant bigots who believe everything in the Bible no matter what, and who hate gays.
And the list goes on. Sure, you can make mince meat of the liberals. As long as the only criticism of your pro-capitalist ideology comes from liberals, you'll win a big following. That's precisely why the Big Money people promote liberalism; it's why they fund liberal magazines (such as The Nation) and liberal organizations such as the Democratic Party.
Listen, right wing radio talk show host! The days are numbered when the only critics you have to deal with are liberals, whose views might as well have been designed to make it easy for you to ridicule them. Your job as a cheerleader for capitalism won't be quite so easy when revolutionaries dial in.
Mr. or Ms. right wing radio talk show host, I'll do you a little favor. I'll show you where you can read what a revolutionary thinks, in more detail than I've spelled out here, so you can bone up on this view and prepare your rebuttal. The thirty page version is Thinking about Revolution.
www.NewDemocracyWorld.org
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