How We're Put Together

Presented on the Old Mole Variety Hour , January 14, 2019 Once upon a time, when I was a boy in the 1950s and ‘60s, we all took it for granted that every part of the world was in some stage of an unstoppable world historical process called “progress,” or “modernization,” characterized by what we would now call “globalization.” Concretely this meant integration of the world economy under the “the free market”: free trade, open borders and international travel, faster and easier communication, constant technological innovation, equality (at least in theory), and cheaper and universally available consumer goods. It also meant cultural assimilation: that non-Western peoples and cultures would become “civilized”.   They would accept Western rationalism, and “primitive” practices and “superstitious” beliefs would gradually fade away. There were some obstacles such as communism, Beatniks and Hippies, unreasonable demands of labor, the Peace movement, and premature dema...

The guiding star of political action, from the Old Mole’s point of view, is the democratic control and ownership of the wealth and resources required to produce our lives – everything that falls under the heading of capital. Pretty much all of this capital is now, directly or indirectly, under the control of the wealthiest tenth of the top one percent of the population, or, in the US, about 320,000 people. It is their interests in maintaining and expanding their power that dictates what the rest of us have to do, how we have to work, in order to live. Genuinely radical political action always aims at chipping away at, and eventually abolishing, the power of the capitalist class and the basis of that power, the private ownership of capital. The goal is a world in which we all together decide how we shall live. This is what revolution is: fundamental change in the relations of property, and therefore of the conditions of labor. To appreciate what it takes to make ...