SusanRosenthal.com – Solidarity is the Best Medicine

by Susan Rosenthal

For the past two months, youngsters have been canvassing my neighborhood to raise money to help pay for their schools. Tonight is Halloween, and they will be at my door again, asking for donations for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. Children are encouraged to participate in these fund-raising activities to show concern for others. The message is: You can’t change the world but you can make a difference in someone’s life. I have three problems with this:

First: the work that we do every day should provide for human needs, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, treating the sick and raising living standards for everyone. Instead, the surplus produced by working people is confiscated by the bosses to fund their lavish lifestyles and to support a class system that creates hunger, homelessness and disease.

Second: the taxes that working people pay, the billions of dollars that flow from our pay-checks into government coffers, should be funding social services that promote health and well-being. Instead, this money is used to fund wars of acquisition that spread death, deprivation and disease.

Third: everywhere we go: at home; at work; in stores; and on the street; working people are expected to pay out-of-pocket to subsidize a capitalist system that won’t fully fund schools or hospitals, house the homeless and feed the hungry. And we do pay. Individuals contribute much more to charities than corporations. But it’s a never-ending cycle. The more we give to charity, the more corporations can keep for themselves.

The working-class majority pays three times: producing surplus that is taken by the capitalist class instead of being used to meet human needs; paying taxes that support the capitalist class instead of meeting human needs; and donating to charity, so the rich and powerful don’t have to pay for the misery they create.

We shouldn’t need charity in a world of abundance. If the global wealth produced in 2005 were divided by the world’s population, every person on the planet would have $9,212, or $36,848 for every family of four. There would be even more to share if everyone who wanted to work were employed. Furthermore, if people in poor nations had access to the same methods of production used in rich nations, world production would triple, providing everyone with a yearly minimum of $27,636, or every family of four with more than $110,554.

Mass deprivation persists for three reasons: the elite take the biggest and best for themselves; they tell us that there’s not enough to go around; and we believe them.

By standing together, we can claim the abundance that rightfully belongs to all. That’s the message our children need to learn, that we can change the world – through solidarity, not charity.

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