I believe that individuals and institutions should be guided by the core principle of cooperation. People from across the political spectrum would all probably agree that by nature human beings are fairly logical beings. Thus since cooperation among beings and the sharing of our human capital and natural resources would improve the quality of life of the vast majority of humanity, it is not naïve to say that if presented with a choice between cooperation and sharing or endless competition and strife, the greater mass of humanity would choose the former.
The very minimum goal of this cooperation should be the meeting of human needs. To survive the human body requires; clean air, adequate shelter, fresh drinking water, and adequate nourishment. To thrive the human soul requires an environment where the mind can be educated enough to develop greater consciousness and be free to create, express, love, and generally enjoy the miracle of existence.
In order to sustain life it is clear that we need to preserve our environment. If we keep assaulting the commons for short-term profits it will not be possible in the long-run for human life to continue at all. Nature is a resource that we must manage and exploit carefully. Whether you believe in a supreme being or not, it is imperative that all men acknowledge that we are the masters of our own Earth. More so than natural selection, today human behavior directly dictates the faith of the biosphere, we are the lords and stewards of our environment and under our stewardship we must battle to maintain the sustainability of life.
In order to feed and house humanity it will take new institutions to better harness portions of the world’s resources to promote development, environmental self-sustainability, and food security for the world’s masses. Scientific research maintains that the Earth holds the resources to meet the global needs of humanity. Today we produce enough food to provide every human with almost 3,000 calories per day, if used to its maximum capacity it has been estimated that we have enough arable land to sustain a, population of almost forty billion souls. Thus it is clear that all that is needed is strong, decisive, and calculated action to confront our current inability to provide for billions of human beings.
Non-material development of people is also vital. Education and the nourishment of the mind and soul is imperative to this creative flowering. Social rights, like marriage equality and women’s liberation, and democracy, in the workplace and through representative bodies are also imperative to achieving human liberation.
No one is claiming that building new institutions will be a process without failures or a process that will not require a degree of material sacrifice from those currently benefiting from the existing order of things. Nations with a proportionately large share of the world’s resources have a proportionately large responsibility to lead this charge, responsibilities that thus far many of these nations have been neglecting. Yet the problem is not the citizens of these industrial nations, but rather their elected representatives and the entrenched special interests many of them represent. The vast majority of the world and indeed, this country, would probably agree that human energy and natural riches would be better spent meeting human needs and creating a renewable, sustainable environment, and allowing every person to develop to his or hers maximum potential than on developing nuclear weapons and space-based defenses against these same wicked creations.
Some may argue that free-market expansion will indeed help develop many of the countries of the South, and if that development is conducted in a manner that is both respectful of the environment and human rights it will not be shunned. Even Karl Marx argued that a more equatable and just world would be only be attained in countries where capitalism was already well-developed. If there is an environment bereft of adequate resources, competition and class-strife would ultimately develop once again. But let us look at the plight of the masses in the world’s richest and most advanced capitalist nation, the United States of America. In the United States, thirty-eight million people go hungry on a daily basis, skipping meals in a land of morbid obesity and corpulence. In the United States, millions of homosexuals are deprived of their right to freely enter stable relationships with the people they love and are committed to. In the United States, almost fifty million people are uninsured and millions of disadvantaged children go years without even the most basic dental care. In this environment of inequality, pain and anguish, many turn to drugs, entertainment escapism, sexual deviancy, and tens of thousands are desolate enough to commit suicide every year.
This is a world many good people regret bringing children into. This is a world that many good people become corrupted in, this is a world with too many problems and too few politicians offering competent solutions. This is a world of too little substantive debate, but too much ideological dispute. Instead of debating the unanswerable we need to find common ground. Whether we believe in God, abortion, or evolution, we should find accord, acknowledging the problems that face our planet. These problems are universal, they effect every nation on Earth, every class of man and every race. Once we accept that we indeed have a problem. Once we accept that a world where six million children die of malnutrition and starvation annually while the world overproduces food; every man, woman, and child of decent moral character should have a moral crisis. They should question their role on this planet, their responsibility for this plight, and question what exactly their elected policy makers are doing to confront this problem.
And next, they must not fret or despair. They must not call these global ills “natural”, they must not dehumanize the very human faces behind every one of these billions of people suffering under the status-quo, they must act! There is nothing in our D.N.A. or in the gases of our atmosphere or in the infinite particles that compose the universe that prevents us from progressing towards a world guided and governed by cooperation and sharing. There is nothing in our society which is immutable!
Key to this development of consciousness and the desire for something better is a global acceptance of the concept of materialism versus that of idealism. I use the classical interpretation of these terms and not the modern popular usage of them. Using the popular definition of materialism and idealism, those committed to human progression would be labeled as the “idealist” and those exploiting the planet and their fellow humans for profit shamelessly would be called the “materialist”. However under the classic interpretation, the one Marx was using when he developed the theory of dialectical materialism, the idealist would be someone who argued that it is merely the force of ideas and thought that change society and progressed history. Poverty under this theory could be combated if insolent poor people were motivated enough to use their free-will to excel beyond their condition and become prosperous. Conversely, the materialist would argue that it would take structural change and the erection of new institutions to rid the world of poverty. Poverty itself not the product of personal failure, poverty is the product of a faulty societal structure. We must recognize that poverty is not a natural human failing, but rather a failing of our social and economic systems.
Once this philosophy gains acceptance people will realize the need to take action and not just muse about transforming society. This of course will seem like a fool’s errand, but throughout history “impossible” dreams have had a knack of coming true time and time again. Just decades ago the dream of a South Africa free of apartheid seemed far-fetched, the dream of racial integration in America seemed unattainable, the dream of workers freely organize and unionize seemed quixotic. Just look at the social progress we have made across the world since then. If in 1870 England, a poor factory worker, working sixteen hour days, six days a week, for virtual slave wages, told his factory owner that his grandson would receive under a National Health Service the same high quality of care as the capitalist overlord’s grandson, he be ridiculed as a fanciful dreamer? The utopia of the present after all can be transformed into the reality of the future, it just takes mass action and determination.
The natural progression of humanity is towards becoming more humane to one another. This cause is becoming even more a reality in this new Information Age. The world is indeed becoming smaller and now more than ever it is the time for global outreach, not introversion and isolation. Workers in America who have seen millions of their jobs outsourced overseas should not blame their Chinese or Indonesian brothers! Instead they should recognize that they have a vested interest in the condition of labor worldwide. The working class can avoid a race to the bottom by insuring that global human, labor, civil, and environmental rights and regulations are upheld. Similarly people across the world can reach out in solidarity with one another, bridging gender and ethnic gaps to fight for a common good and a world where meeting of human need comes before profit.
In summation;
Once we acknowledge that we must create a world that can;
1)Meet human needs, preserve the environment and foster human creative
2)That this goal is a real possibility
We should dedicate ourselves to a human-wide consciousness and solidarity to address our problems and usher humanity into a golden age of shared prosperity, peace, and stability.
This is the calling of our generation and generations to come.
In solidarity and looking forward to the future,
Tags: democratic socialism, human development, marxism, poverty, progressive movements, socialism
