What has socialism ever done for us?

Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization – Peter Kropotkin

Many, many years ago, before bog rolls, condoms and Pet Rocks were invented, people discovered a remarkable thing. They didn’t call it anything, or if they did, there is no record because records hadn’t been invented. In fact paper hadn’t been invented, but paper came about because of what they discovered.

People discovered that if they worked and cooperated together, they could gather in communities, farm. feed, house, make stuff and protect each other and do things for the common interest of all. People who now demand to know what socialism has ever done for them need a little lesson in history because if people had never learnt to cooperate for the common good, none of us would even be here.

Working together in communities, people discovered the value of excess labour, a few people farming the land produced far in excess of their own personal needs and therefore others could benefit from their labour whilst making other stuff, like tools and buildings, clothing, pots and utensils and all manner of things, which, with focused labour and energy, were in excess of each persons individual needs.

They learnt to barter with each other and later invented money as a means of exchange, which again required further sophisticated levels of cooperation not just between villages and communities but between nations.

Today, cooperation is so ubiquitous that we not only take it for granted and never even bother to mention it, but some unthinking fools actually think of themselves as self-made, which is funny because it is doubtful they could name a single person in the vast global army of those who produce every morsel of the food they eat and depend on for life.

Self made men, for it is usually they, are a special breed of the supremely selfish, taking for granted the uncountable millions who provide for their every need every moment of their disgustingly selfish lives. I wonder if their mothers ever wonder if they were worth giving up a tight pussy for?

No nurse or miner, street cleaner or factory worker, ever said, “I am self made…” It takes a very special ignorance and arrogance to claim that. Imagine working in a coal mine and telling your mates you’re a self made man. You’d never hear the end of it.

But here we are, a world so sophisticated, built stone by stone, silicone chip by silicone chip, wire by wire, that we no longer talk about the mind buggering cooperation it took to get us here and keeps us here. In fact, our labour is so despised, we’re lucky if we get a minimum wage paying us less than we need to live on, forcing us to live on top-ups from the state whilst the profits from our labour is stolen and buried in tax havens, because the rich do not want to contribute anything to the societies in which they live and which sustain them every second of their selfish lives.

They say it’s a dog eat dog world, survival of the fittest, to justify their extreme ignorance and greed, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Walk the streets and look around, everything about us is cooperative, mostly peaceable, getting along, doing what we do in cooperation with every stranger, lover, friend, employee, employer, even the toss pots.

You can see how it works if you keep just a few chickens. If they are all laying, you very quickly find that your consuming can’t keep up with their producing and you’ll either have to give the eggs away, sell them or throw them away when they go rotten. Why? because we live in a world of abundance. Without that abundance, there would be no life on Earth. If we lived in a world of scarcity, life itself would be scarce, a rare, but still wonderful, thing.

Human kind have become adept at creating even more abundance, often carelessly and inconsiderately. Capitalism is founded on abundance, on the principle of more and more, for continuous profit and it is greed that has brought our world into crisis, because we no longer know how to stop, battered, as we are, by constant adverts, feeding our insecurities and a hunger for things we do not need.

There is only one way out of the global crisis we are facing – cooperation.

We come full circle, it was cooperation that got us here, where greed is killing the planet and the importance of cooperation has been forgotten, and only a conscious return to cooperation will save us.

But this much is true, we are naturally cooperative, it’s innate. We are herd animals, social beings, cooperative beings. We can do it, but we must deconstruct the greed and hypocrisy that has come to dominate this amazing world we live in.

What has socialism ever done for us? Even in the midst of the most rabid capitalism, the greed, the wars over resources (where ordinary people fight the wars of the greedy), the mindless consumption, socialism (cooperation) has done everything.

Everything! From the shirts on our backs to landing on the moon. Every fucking thing! Including one of the worlds greatest ever socialist, cooperative, achievements – our NHS, publicly owned and funded and free at the point of use.

The fight is on and we must win and we will only win though cooperation, for the love of ourselves and our neighbours, for life.

Vote Labour if you value life!

Keith Ordinary Guy. 08 November 2019.