- People don’t like the system. As mentioned earlier, 95% of
Americans think corporations should lower their profits to
benefit their workers and the communities they do
business in, 70% think businesses have too much power
and more than 80% think that working people don’t have
enough say in what goes on, that the economic system is
inherently unfair, and that the government basically isn’t
functioning, because it’s working for the rich. - Corporations—the major power system in the West—are
chartered by states, and legal mechanisms exist to take
away their charters and place them under worker or
community control. That would require a democratically
organized public, and it hasn’t been done for a century. But
the rights of corporations were mostly given to them by
courts and lawyers, not by legislation, and that power
system could erode very quickly.
Of course, the system, once in place, cannot simply be
dismantled by legal tinkering. Alternatives have to be
constructed within the existing economy, and within the
minds of working people and communities. The questions
that arise go to the core of socioeconomic organization,
the nature of decision-making and control, and the
fundamentals of human rights. They are far from trivial. - Since government is to some extent under public control—
at least potentially—it can also be modified. - About two-thirds of all financial transactions in the globalized
economy take place in areas dominated by the US, Japan
and Germany. These are all areas where—in principle, at
least—mechanisms already exist that allow the public to
control what happens.
People need organizations and movements to gravitate to.
If people become aware of constructive alternatives, along with
even the beginnings of mechanisms to realize those alternatives,
positive change could have a lot of support. The current tendencies,
many of which are pretty harmful, don’t seem to be all that
substantial, and there’s nothing inevitable about them. That doesn’t
mean constructive change will happen, but the opportunity for it is
definitely there.