Winners and losers
By Peter Boyle
According to the Daily Telegraph, media mogul Kerry Packer won $7.5 million dollars in 20 hands of baccarat in a Las Vegas casino recently.
While Packer plays with millions, every year 17 million people die from curable diseases like diarrhoea, malaria and tuberculosis. There's only one word to describe this: obscene.
What's the source of the tremendous wealth of people like Packer? Hard work? Their amazing skill at some socially useful task? No, the source of their wealth is the hard work and skill of the many people who work for the huge business empires these billionaires control.
Wealth on this scale is possible only because of socialised production. Almost nothing of significant value is the work of a single individual, or even a small group. Large numbers of people cooperate to produce nearly everything we consume. Even the "isolated" individual who works a farm or explores the bush for minerals uses tools whose production may have required cooperation spread over several continents.
Capitalist ideologists often argue that collectivism — cooperation — doesn't work, but it is a fact that capitalist corporations could not exist without collectivised work. They don't object to people working together, as long as it is for their profit.
The central contradiction in the capitalist system is between socialised production and the ever narrowing ownership of the factories, machinery, natural resources and land. The capitalists' ownership of these means of production forces most of us to work for them.
The result is the greatest disparity in wealth in history. According to the 1996 United Nations Human Development Report, the net worth of the world's 358 richest people is equal to the combined income of the poorest 45% of the world's population — 2.3 billion people.
The capitalists make a buck from almost every aspect of our lives. Recently the Clinton administration legislated to make it easier for US state governments to privatise their welfare systems. One of the corporations that will profit from this is the arms manufacturer, Lockheed. Lockheed's fastest growing subsidiary is its "human services division" — which nicely complements its core business, human destruction.
As they grow more powerful, these corporations are demanding more "rights". They already have the right to make most of the major decisions effecting our lives. They can send thousands into permanent unemployment, destroy precious ecosystems and condemn entire nations to misery.
They buy governments through political donations (bribery) and control the mass media. And they constantly issue policy directions from their faceless front, usually reverently referred to as "the markets" in their press.
They now claim — in the name of "free trade" — the right to invalidate even the limited regulations to protect health and safety standards, working conditions and the environment.
Working people, the great majority, could run production democratically for the first time ever. We already do all the work. Collectively, we have all the technical knowledge it takes, and we know how to work together. If we used all this — not just to make a bigger profit for our bosses, as we do now — but to work for our common interests, then we'd be building a very different future.
There's a name for this eminently practical project: socialism.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the National Executive of the Democratic Socialist Party.]