In our “A World to Win” series, Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance members have expressed their desires for a different future.
From universal basic income, green economies and reproductive rights, we have discussed demands that can change the trajectory of our current world towards somewhere greener, freer and more just.
In this final article of the series, Angus McAllen raises the demand of “Everything for Everyone”, an idea of a society without classes, inequality and poverty.
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We live in interesting times. The capitalist system has thrown up a series of crises, driven by a set of violent contradictions.
Across the globe, capitalist governments are desperately trying to organise themselves, seeking a way to restore high rates of capital accumulation and economic growth.
At the same time, the logic of growth is pushing up against ecological limits. The system, which demands infinite accumulation, infinite resources, infinite consumption, is driving us towards a point of crisis, which will make our world a far more dangerous place.
Around the world, capitalism, driven into crisis from its own contradictions, is producing ever more danger and antagonism. Imperial blowback and geopolitical manoeuvring has produced a world in which extreme violence and fascism can gestate, both in the destabilised regions of the global South and in the rich nations, which are increasingly ringed with barbed wire fences and counter-terror laws.
Capitalism in its globalised form, both the apex of its imperial ambition and at the tipping point of its decay, relies on never-ending global movement — of money, capital and commodities.
But there is also the global movement of people, of labour, looking for work across borders, regions and continents. In turn, capitalism produces many more global movements of people — these less welcome — who are fleeing the crises of empire abroad, looking for sanctuary in the imperial heartland.
Young people today feel immersed in these crises. Our daily lives are a microcosm of the systematic violence of the capitalist world system — writ small as unemployment, student debt, police violence and urban inequality.
In our poorly paid, non-unionised and casual jobs, we are tiny cogs in the same system that causes factory collapses in Bangladesh and migrants hiding in trucks trying to cross the border between the US and Mexico.
This crisis becomes even more shocking when you realise there is no technical or organisational reason for not sharing our resources in fairer ways, on the global level. Rather, it is systems of social relations that maintain scarcity, that maintain poverty amid wealth, just at the time when the solution to poverty is within our reach.
While the apologists for the system wail about “human nature” and “efficient distribution”, our response should be to cry, from the depths of our desperation: Everything for Everyone!
We have the capacity to give all human beings access to the necessities to live full and happy lives. Food, water, shelter, clothing, adequate medical care, universal education, participation in social life and access to cultural resources in order to expand our horizons — technology can give us all of this and more.
But the current system is not oriented towards this goal of achieving full human development.
Rather, capitalism is oriented towards turning profits, accumulating more and more money in a drive for infinite growth. While many have rightly criticised this drive for infinite growth as unsustainable even in the short term, capitalism is unable to change its direction. The forces that drove it to come into being are the same forces that continue to drive it into crisis.
Everything for everyone encapsulates an alternate view of how society could be organised. Instead of a system oriented towards profits, imagine a society where human need and human development come first. In such a society, everything needed to live fully-developed and free lives would be provided directly as part of the basic organisation of society.
In doing this, we seek to refute the lies and distortions of apologists for all forms of hierarchy and oppression. Poverty is not inevitable. Inequality is not natural. We do not need governments, rulers or bosses to structure our lives. Property does not guarantee freedom. We can have a society that is just, free and environmentally sustainable. Another world is possible.
When we accept that it is possible for us to provide good lives for ourselves, then the question of resource distribution becomes one of power, it becomes a problem of struggle. Ordinary people need to wrest our collective future away from the structures of power and profit that currently run our lives.
To wrest back control of our collective existence, we need to build new ways to organise ourselves for power.
In Venezuela, the revolutionary movement is rooted in the political experience of the communes — organs of participatory democracy that initiate and oversee local projects towards community development. The slogan “Commune or Nothing”, as expressed in the movement of the communards and their supporters, is a directive towards everything for everyone — through the commune, we can directly implement our dreams for our collective future.
The communes of Venezuela are just one example of a movement that emerged from a historical moment and wrested power into the hands of ordinary people. Under the social programs of the Bolivarian Revolution, a number of Bolivarian Missions focus on education, including Mission Robinson — primary education and literacy — Mission Ribas — secondary education — and Mission Sucre — higher education. They represent a model for people around the world who are struggling for change.
This struggle is a battle to disrupt and destabilise the way that capital tries to accumulate, to confront and defeat the machinations of the capitalist state in the workplace, the neighbourhood or in the university.
Through this, we can invent new ways to organise our societies. We can learn how to provide food, housing, education and healthcare for ourselves and how to retake and reinvent social space and social living for ourselves. In short, we learn how to build a better tomorrow by struggling against the present.
As young people, we are confronted with a historic crisis, but we also have a historic opportunity. We have a chance to demand a new society, a future worth living in. This world is not the best of all possible worlds — another world is possible. Let's fight for the future and demand everything for everyone!
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