Nature is good. Capitalism is not.

by Richard Mellor

added note: 10.30 pm
I forgot to add when I posted these comments that if there is a reader who can explain the chemical, botanical or biological or whatever process is actually taking place with this tree, and by that I mean the general processes for the layperson, I'd put the piece on the blog with a link back to this video. You can send it to we_know_whats_up.yahoo.com  Science is good.

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I was walking the trail this morning and as anyone that walks the trails it is not only a physical but a mental pleasure.  I find the Redwoods to be a very special environment although all nature is mystical.

I often just think about things as I walk and I almost walked by this tree. It had fallen across a narrow trail with half of it falling down a fairly steep ravine to the little creek below. I always imagine these creeks, what they must have looked like 200 years ago before the damming of the major rivers and urbanization.  I believe there is a movement to un-dam some of these rivers and that would be good, maybe we'll get the Salmon back.

What caught my eye was the chemical process taking place where the park workers had cut the tree in order to keep the trail open. As you can see in the video it was dripping and it was like flesh rotting and falling to the ground and as I say in the video, people who study these things can describe this process in detail as opposed to saying that the tree is just rotting like me.

We could all learn these things but not under a capitalist system. How we produce the necessities of life under this capitalist system is extremely destructive. Capitalism is a social system that produces not for social need, not for immediate consumption, not for a use value, but for a sale, for the market and today that means a global market. It is the process of the production of commodities for sale in this market that creates wealth.  But that wealth cannot be realized until the commodity that contains it is sold.

In yesterday's raider game a player got injured. The game was held up and the commentator said. "lets take a break".  Well, what he meant was lets sell some commodities so capital accumulation can take place.  He probably never thought of it that way; he probably thinks it's as normal as breathing but that's the real purpose of the football game being on TV. or the game as it is played existing at all. If you wonder why they spend so much time selling us things including spending trillions of dollars convincing us that we need them, it's to release the wealth contained in the object their selling us. It's wealth created by workers for which they received no compensation.

So as I walk along I think of these things and as I looked at this fallen tree and its new contribution to nature in death, I thought about how the wealth we create could actually be used in a socialist society.  Understanding the scientific process, the biology or botany or whatever it should be called, going on here, is something we can all be taught to understand.

The working class creates wealth through our collective labor power. But this wealth is not collectively owned not collectively allocated to society as a whole. We do not even decide how that wealth (above our own wages) is spent.  If we did, the millions of poor would eat. The millions of uneducated would become knowledgeable about our world and our place history, the history of those whose labor enriches all except those whose labor it is.

Capitalism doesn't free humanity. It enslaves us. We don't even own the product of our own labor power. Those who don't work own our labor time and what we produce during it.

That I can walk in such beautiful surroundings at all is not due to the market but in spite of it. The resources of humanity, including human beings are used to benefit the the ruling class who are a small minority of the population that maintain their rule through coercion and violence. Imagine the thousands upon thousands or scientists and engineers employed in the war machine industry, in the making of one F22.

We can feed, educate and house everyone; the resources are there, the ability to feed everyone is there, the ability to house everyone and make it possible for millions to become experts in fields that can advance humanity and allow us to become truly free human beings is there.

The class that governs society is a parasitic class. It cannot advance humanity only destroy it. Imagine the money spent on wars. We do not have a defense budget, we have an offense budget. Trump is considering Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp. for the Secretary of State job.  We will now have climate deniers,  bankers from the same firm of bloodsuckers that paid Hillary Clinton hundreds of thousands of dollars for a chat, running society. We will have people making decisions that affect our lives and that will hand billions of dollars to various other capitalist governments based on texts written thousands of years ago.

Trump's son in law and advisor apparently, Jared Kushner, is an Orthodox Jew from a wealthy family. He is a Zionist and has donated lots of money to the Zionist regime to fund religious schools and also to fund the settlements, areas that have been ethnically cleansed of Palestinians so that right wing religious fanatics can live there as god said it was their land.; he is funded a European colonial settler state.  The 1% have no morals at all do they. They are all hypocrites no matter what religious organization they lay claim to. Kushner never condemned Trumps racism, his disgusting comments about women and treatment of them and he has no problem funding ethnic cleansing. He'd better watch out though. Trump whipped up the Nazis and other white supremacist groups and they won't forget who Kushner is.

We now have a president endorsed by the Nazi's and the KKK.

For socialist like myself, it is not utopian to imagine that millions of people, young people, can become botanists or mathematicians or have a deeper understanding of any subject as we also participate in the labor aspect of making society function. We can all learn languages. New technology reduces the need for labor power and would increase leisure time or time during which we can participate in the organization of work and structure of our communities. But that's only if we own it. As long as this product of collective human labor power, mental and physical, is owned by a small select group of people for their personal gain, then technology increases our misery it does not set us free.

We can't make this system fair. We have to get rid of it before it destroys us all.