I have previously posted on what a re-imagined society would look like. I wish to add to my earlier conception the following suggestions, after many suggested that I enter the polluted processes of ‘representative democracy’. Comrades you wish me to go and warm the benches of the house of neo-liberal corruption called the parliament, to participate in wasteful pomp and ceremony, worse of all to wear a suit and tie?
People we do not need messiahs, or heroes, we only need ourselves and to refuse to participate in the system which will make it ungovernable and cause it to collapse. The technology exists for us to create an alternative space, a new imagined cooperative and collaborative reality:
1) If every ordinary working South African marches of to the banks tomorrow and withdraw all their money and put it in cooperative community banks, the empire of banksters will collapse.
2) If every community mobilizes to provide their own services and stops paying the neo liberal government for its appalling services and redirect the funds to cooperative community service delivery the service delivery crisis will end.
3) If we all unite and agree on one day to take over our workplaces and put them under collective cooperative worker control, the unemployment crisis will immediately end, as we divide work-time equally among all citizens. If we take work out from private business control and make work the collective cooperative part of social productive relations that it is, we will once more regain our human dignity and control over our own lives. No longer will anyone have to stand and beg on street corners.
4) Oil and coal are in the way out, and we will run out of most of the essential resources to run the current system globally by 2050. We have the communication technology to allow most office workers to work from home. This will massively reduce oil consumption for transport and electricity consumption (coal) as we will no longer need to operate the energy wasteful skyscrapers in our cities.
5) We can resolve the land question by promoting urban farming and breaking the separation of rural and urban by promoting small scale, cooperative and collective agriculture by giving the landless access to land on condition that it is used scientifically, cooperatively and collectively.
6) We can end the housing crisis, by ending the speculation in property and shutting down the property realtors and estate agents, and collectivizing the housing stock. Anyone owning more than one house will have to avail additional houses for collective and cooperative use so as to overcome homelessness.
7) We should place all universities under parent/student/academic and worker committees, and kick out the labor brokers, sub-contractors, and beneficiaries of outsourcing. All mines should be placed under worker and community control and management, and our country be reparations for minerals plundered by global capital, including compensation for the environmental damage done by mining.
8) We should end the tender system and do all infrastructure development and maintenance through brigades of youth and unemployed.
9) We should introduce education with production as the basis for education so that we overcome the breach between had and brain that allows for capitalist managerial-ism to prevent worker empowerment. All theoretical education should be accompanied with practical education, so that we are all able to be productive cooperative citizens.
10) Fossil fuel energy should be scaled down and replaced with appropriate energy with minimal environmental impact. Those working in the fossil fuel industries should be deployed and re-skilled to work in appropriate energy occupations.
11) Our most valuable resource as a society and as a collective is our human resource. Every unemployed person is a water of this resource. There is enough work for everyone in this society, what prevents people from doing meaningful work is the capitalist system of exploitation and its wasteful relations of production. everyone can work, there is plenty of work that needs to be done, and if everyone works, it means that everyone will have more free time for self-development intellectually (education), physically (sport), lovingly (recreation) etc.
12) There should be no price on human rights such as food, education, health, housing and it should be the responsibility of all of us to look after every one of us, and the responsibility of every one of us to look after all of us.
13) We should break down all the walls and fences that separate us, be they physical, cultural, real or imagined. We are one race, the human race.
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