fatvegan

I just read this in Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky.

But of course, achieving real democracy will require that the whole system of corporate capitalism be completely dismantled - because it's radically anti-democratic. And that can't be done by a stroke of the pen, you know: you have to build up alternative popular institutions, which could allow control over society's investment decisions to be moved into the hands of working people and communities.

Which reminded me again why I love superannuation. And why I'm excited about where it might lead. It's basically undemocratic and big government-ish. We say to the working and middle class, that since they seem incapable of generating assets the state will do it for them. The great thing is, the people who are pushing this sort of safety net, are the same people who derive all their power from their exclusive control of the world's assets. As the trillions of dollars of superannuation investment starts to crowd out the investment of the powerful, their power will diminish. And the beautiful thing about it is that business will flourish because consumption has been converted by the government into investment. And not through the conventional means of ripping it off workers and handing it to capitalists, which economists have always said is the only way of getting enough investment into the system.

It gets better though. Because workers own the means of the production there's this wonderful cycle where wages become merely a way of distributing the workforce efficiently rather than a means of survival for the working class. It's so stable and elegant. Not to mention equitable and just and happy. And it reduces the return on assets the rich get because of the crowding out effect. I just love it.

The cool thing about Noam Chomsky's quote and superannuation is that we actually have achieved what he's saying with a stroke of the pen. It's not complete but I really believe that in a couple of decades the working class will wake up and realise that it has far more power than it has ever had before.