Capitalism's reach stretches into the bedroom . Pornography is a multibillion-dollar industry; pornographic images and videos are widely accessible via the Internet. Millions of men and some women are purchasing solitary experiences even in sex, which is supposed to be about reciprocal connection; they are sitting alone with manufactured images that often contain degrading, racist, sexist, or violent messages about gender relationships and sexual intimacy.Imagine a sexual life where people prefer the experience of intimate connection with an equal human being over profit-driven, degrading pornographic images. Imagine teaching children that sex is a mutually pleasurable connection . Here we might learn from social-democratic Sweden, which begins sex education in the first grade. It starts by teaching about how the flowers need to be pollinated to grow, continues through learning the intricate workings of the human body, and culminates in high school with talking about respect and caring for each other as well as any future children. Imagine the celebration of all kinds of mutual loving connections: gay, straight, and transgender.
No less an authority than Frances Fox Piven sees "Welfare in a New Society as An End to Intentional Impoverishment and Degradation":
If we want to strive for better policies in a transformed society, at least three principles must be observed. First, we should try to provide at least a subsistence-level income for everyone. Obviously, this would hugely benefit the poor , as many impoverished people are not helped at all by current assistance programs, and the ones who do get aid receive such meager benefits that they remain desperately poor. For example, the maximum benefit for a family of three lucky enough to receive Temporary Assistance to Needy Families in New York City is now $ 577 a month, far below the cost of renting even a squalid and tiny apartment, with nothing left over for other expenses. It would not only be the very poor who would benefit from an income guarantee. The old English principle of "less eligibility" was based on the understanding that relief benefits set a kind of floor below which wages could not fall, for the simple reason that many people might then forsake work for relief. The implications of this logic are clear. A guaranteed income not conditioned on work would strengthen the market power of low-wage workers. It would have a liberating effect on many other workers as well.
And a dead serious Michael Moore quotes Marx:
Labor cannot emancipate itself in white skin where it is branded in black skin. The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
Moore also tells us that:
John Brown expressed socialist sentiments before his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. "All captured or confiscated property and all property the product of the labor of those belonging to this organization and of their families, shall be held as the property of the whole, equally, without distinction, and may be used for the common benefit," he wrote. He imagined a United States where all "shall be held as under obligation to labor in some way for the general good.
Other contributors include Ajamu Baraka, Juan Gonzalez, Arun Gupta, William Ayers, Michael Ratner and Paul Le Blanc, who envisions "The Third American Revolution: How Socialism Can Come to the United States."
All those who care about the present and the future should rush to read and implement this book's ideas - instead of continuing to analyze the endless ways in which a situation that dishonors us all persists.
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