Confronting Injustice

Anyone with the slightest concern for women’s rights should be alert to the fact that the global trade in garments has its basis in the poorly paid labor of women from across the Third World. Over the past several decades, firms have relocated garment manufacturing to poor countries in order to benefit from lower wages and lax safety, environmental, and worker protection standards.

The American media, King related, “will praise you when you say, ‘Be non-violent toward [segregationists] Bull Connor and Jim Clark in Alabama,’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’”

Real progress was much more likely to be forthcoming if the various connecting pieces were collected together and their common roots were laid bare. This is why, along with struggling for racial equality, King was an opponent of the Vietnam War as well as a staunch advocate for the rights of workers and the destitute. He took a stand against, as he referred to them, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

Socialism is a much abused word in our day. It can stand for quite a few different things in the minds of people, but rarely does it stand for what is actually meant by the word. Upon being brought up in polite company, it commonly evokes refutation through reflexive reference to totalitarianism and the Soviet Union. Interestingly enough, whenever it is associated with totalitarianism, mention of “Big Brother” and “Newspeak” have an easy time finding themselves in the mix of charges laid against socialism.
The use of George Orwell’s work to refute socialism is rather ironic because Orwell was an out-an-out socialist. He relates the following in his essay “Why I Write”: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

Whatever the particular process employed, the basic principle guiding democracy is the idea that those who will be affected by a decision have an equal right to participate in crafting it.

Socialism means, to begin with, democratic management of workplaces and the wider economy. It entails the creation of, as Michael Lebowitz calls it, a “solidarian society.” Lebowitz explains that economic activity within capitalism is carried out by separating human beings from other human beings. When the economy functions on the basis of individual self-interest we do not relate to each other as members of the human family but as “separate property owners.”28 In such a setting if an individual produces a good that someone else needs she does so not for the other person but for herself. She knows that her own needs will only be met if she exchanges what she can produce for what others produce. But since self-interest is what motivates us, the exchange process is rife with deception and distrust – we each try to get the best out of the deal for ourselves.

Lebowitz stresses that the way in which a society organizes its economic activity determines not only how material goods will be produced and distributed but also, because our activity makes us who we are, what kind of human beings will be produced.

Regarding each other as separate property owners means that if I have a need that someone else can fulfill that person has power over me. Similarly, if others have needs that I can fulfill this gives me power over them. In such a setting, where needs are seen as a mark of weakness, it becomes an embarrassment for us to point out the fact that we have needs. We are thus forced to rely on the process of market exchange, and the values that it induces in us, to hold on to dignity.

Building a solidarian society based on social ownership and democratic management of production and distribution will mean the achievement of “the real purpose of socialism,” as Albert Einstein saw it: “to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.”

Gandhi, it should be clear, held “Western democracy” to be a farce. “True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center,” he wrote, “It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.”