More solidarity, less state!
Our society functions according to a capitalist system. This means that everything is geared towards maximizing profits, whether in housing, health, education and, of course, wage labour itself.
HEALTHSYSTEM
This means that care in the healthcare system is not geared towards people’s well-being. It is not about whether you are well cared for and healthy, but whether it is financially viable to provide you with a hospital bed, for example. The current hospital reform is making the situation even worse. More and more hospitals are being closed and centralized in cities. At the same time, there are fewer and fewer specialists. As a result, there is no longer any nationwide healthcare provision in Germany. In practical terms, for example, this applies to abortions, obstetrics and gynecological care. Very long distances often have to be covered.
There are current concepts for aligning healthcare with people’s needs. The Polyclinic Syndicate is an association of various initiatives that are committed to solidarity-based health centers. They not only point out that medical care itself is problematic, but also that it is closely linked to people’s social and economic situation. People who are poor are sick more often and live shorter lives. The initiatives are committed to the establishment and operation of solidarity-based health centers. In this way, they want to counteract health inequality and stand up and fight for a just society based on solidarity.
HOUSING
Another important area in our lives is housing. Most housing is owned by huge companies that make profits from the basic need to live. More and more people cannot afford to live, more and more people are being pushed out of city centers because rents are too expensive. More and more people are living on the outskirts of cities in unattractive neighborhoods, often in poor conditions.
The houses should belong to those who live in them! There are various approaches to this. The Mietshäusersyndikat or local cooperatives try to buy houses collectively through self-organization. This takes them off the market and they can no longer function as objects of speculation. People manage their homes and shared flats themselves and make decisions according to their needs.
The local referendum to expropriate Deutsche Wohnen was a huge campaign. This was an attempt in Berlin to convert privatized housing back into communal property and return it to the interests of the residents. Even if the implementation is currently being boycotted by politicians, it is a step in the right direction.
The action alliance ‘Stop rent madness!’ Dresden is a coalition of tenants and other housing and rent policy initiatives. They are fighting for a solidary, affordable city for all people who live in it.
EDUCATION
Our education system in schools and universities is also based on the system of capitalism. This has an impact in various directions. We learn for professions that make sense in this economic system in order to make a profit later. We learn to internalize hierarchies and to enforce and/or obey them. The fundamental function of education under capitalism is to produce the next generation of compliant workers. Instead of educating critically self-thinking individuals, a strong pressure to perform is exerted on children from an early age. And this education system itself is also unfair. Children from poorer families or with learning deficits for whatever reason often fall by the wayside. There are not enough resources to compensate for injustices and there is no will to do so. Instead, private schools and special grammar schools educate an often middle-class wise elite.
A good education should be accessible to all and should be geared to the needs of both the individual and society as a whole. School should not be a preparation for the capitalist market, but should enable free education against a background of social justice and the development of grassroots democratic social systems.
In Dresden, for example, pupils and trainees organise themselves in the Black Rose pupils’ union for better learning and training conditions.
WORK
Don’t hate Mondays, hate capitalism. Every Monday the working week begins again for most of the people. Wage labor in capitalism is not a fully fulfilling activity, rarely a meaningful task for the community, and if it is, the working conditions are bad. Workers sell their labor power to an employer for a certain period of time and receive wages in return. The wage is often not enough to cover all basic needs, the work is often hard, there are too few breaks and too much overtime. And although workers have been organizing themselves for over a hundred years and trade unions have achieved many achievements, labour disputes are criminalized today more than ever. Union busting – anti-union policies are practiced in many large corporations. This is an attempt to attack the status quo of collectivity, co-determination and protection under labour law, and to nip any efforts by employees to organize in the bud. There are endless examples: Gorillas, Amazon, Birkenstock, Legoland, UPS, Lidl, Aldi, etc.
We also don’t want girl bosses and more diversity in leading positions. We want to abolish state, capitalism and all involuntary categories.
One way to fight for better working conditions in a just world is to organise in a syndicate. The General Syndicate Dresden is a grassroots democratic and anti-capitalist trade union for all professions, federated in the Free Workers’ Union.
We need to organize work according to needs and not profits. In a future society, we should work as little as possible, produce only what we really need and perform the tasks that are necessary. People should not sit behind an assembly line for so long and break their bodies so that a company can make a profit. There are always attempts to organize work collectively and in solidarity, to appropriate the means of production and to work in a self-determined way. One example of this is the Viome cooperative in Greece. After the company wanted to close down, the workers occupied the factory and organised production as a collective.
Collectives are places where experience and skills are acquired and shared. These can help to develop and live a model of society that does without the capitalist principle of exploitation. The fundamental values in collectives can be summarised as follows: Benefit-orientation instead of profits, cooperation instead of competition, building solid relationships through trust, equal rights in decision-making, equal money for all, emancipatory development and joint assumption of responsibility. In Dresden, there are also some collectives (businesses) that are organised entirely without bosses, such as the zickzack Kollektiv (Kolle Mate), the bicycle courier ImNu or the Datenkollektiv. These companies are happy to share how it works to reorganise your own company! Here you can find a nationwide overview of existing collectives: https://kollektivliste.org
ENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND CLIMATE CHANGE
All these social aspects are linked to the issue of resources and how we use them.
No plastic straws, no fair trade and no organic certificates can save the climate and the environmental destruction that climate change is causing. People in the Global South are currently facing the consequences the most. Every year, millions of people flee their homes because of the climate, because of weather-related disasters such as floods and hurricanes, and there will be many more to come. Farmers in the Global North are also feeling the effects on their harvests due to droughts, floods, hail, sudden weather changes…
Capitalism, its huge corporations and their exploitation of natural resources and animals are the main culprits for climate change and environmental problems, and politicians are making laws that enable them to do so.
Another factor is the animal industry. This is unrivalled in the exploitation of human and non-human beings. It symbolises economic power and political influence, declares animals to be means of production and commodities and is largely responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Millions of people are already feeling the effects first-hand. Once again, the inhabitants of the countries of the global South, who contribute the least to global warming, are particularly affected.Meanwhile, the main producers of greenhouse gas emissions, the western industrialised nations, have the financial means to largely protect themselves from the consequences of the crisis and thus feel less of the consequences of their actions and consumption. We urgently need a transformation of our food system, an end to animal farming and a fair, plant-based, sustainable agriculture for all. This will not happen overnight, but there are a number of projects that are working on various concepts: https://faba-konzepte.de/ and https://transfarmation-deutschland.de/.
We should practice living a simpler life with as few resources as possible. But the responsibility for all these problems on this scale lies in the system we live in, and that has to change. We need a redistribution of wealth, community-oriented economic and resource policies, a sustainable environmental policy, the abolition of power politics and discrimination.
And we can start today!
All on a small scale and together on a large scale!