Get your own Free Home Page If a person can find an employment with corporations, state or other such frightful entities, then he/she is deemed to be doing useful social labour. This useful social labour might be making light pistols or bullet proof jackets; atom bombs or nuclear shelters; fertilisers or junk food; garments or movies; books or television sets ... [this is hardly a definitive list, please feel free to add your own list of useful social labour]. Labour, in our times, becomes useful and social only when it, or its product, can be sold - whether to the state, to corporations, to the academia, production houses or publishing groups, hospitals or schools, ancillary production units or large happy families. If one has qualities and desires to do things for self or others but is unwilling to sell that ability to do labour, then that person forfeits his/her rights even for survival. And is deemed to have become unemployable : i.e. useless. He/she becomes an embodiment of useless social labour, fit to be humiliated, abused but, also, feared.
What is termed as useful social labour is basically the system's demand on labour to perpetuate the rule of surplus produce extractors and their hierarchical social structures.
Capitalism is also a social system and so it must fulfil certain human needs. Our scrutiny and investigation of the balance-sheet of the total produce of humanity has produced some startling findings and obvious inferences. Findings :
1. Ninety-four percent of total produce of humanity is used for the maintenance and perpetuation of hierarchies.
2. More importantly, six percent of the global produce presently suffices for the nourishment and sustenance of the whole of humanity. Inferences :
1. If we are able to remove hierarchies, we just won't need ninety-four percent of the produce that takes place today. Consider anything anywhere from medicine to steel, paper to police- stations, elections to olympics, and erase what is required for the maintenance and perpetuation of hierarchies - we will be left with six percent.
2. With the erasure of hierarchies our work-load will be reduced to one-sixteenth of the present load. This by itself will enormously enrich human life and open up diverse arenas of creativity and freedom. Festivals with month-long festivities will resurrect.
3. With ninety-four percent of the production done away with, environmental degradation will dramatically diminish and give humanity a long enough breathing space to re-think, re-cast and re-create its production processes to sustain a harmonious human-nature relationship.
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