We wake up every day to go to work, taking orders from a manager. We sit at work counting down the minutes until we go home, counting down the days until the weekend, counting down the weeks until our next holiday, wishing our lives away. Or worse, we can’t find a job, so we have to scrape by on Centrelink. We worry about paying the bills and making rent and we always seem to have the same bank balance at the end of every month. We get frustrated about the latest war the government’s decided to start, and they’re ignoring us again. We watch the latest news on environmental disaster and wonder if our planet has a future.
The problem is that every day we recreate a world that wasn’t built to serve our needs and is not under any meaningful level of popular control. Society does not reflect our human needs. To those above us, we are resources, with our needs subsumed to the market and its endless need for growth and profit. The endless pursuit of profit keeps us stuck in boring jobs, or looking for them when we’re out of work. It keeps us worrying about the rent or mortgage payments every month when our homes were long since built and paid for. It keeps the planet on course for an environmental disaster as climate change accelerates and world leaders flounder.
The problem with the market is not that prices are too high or supply too short. The problem is not too much regulation or too little. The problem is that everything has a price. In the world of the market human needs only feature if those humans happen to be rich enough to satisfy them. The world’s governments all work to uphold this order, sometimes with the carrots of democracy and welfare, sometimes with the sticks of dictatorship and warfare. This is not our world.