The Micro-summary 9 Dec revision – Politics is all messed up and people in a state about it, even in the wealthy west where things could really be right for everyone.

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The starting problem is that everyone thinks political parties and governments ‘run the country’. But they don’t. They don't run the economy, the relationships in business and work where we make our living. (And some get wealthy). They are left to run as free markets, mostly. And the whole point of free markets is that governments don’t control them. The most important free-market relationship is in the work process.

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What people say about politics is confused because it isn’t based on these core workings of society – ‘the system’. We need to make it so that it is.

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In free-markets, in the business system, in making goods and providing services, large-scale, mass production (industrialism) is more efficient. So it constantly drives out small-producers. So most production becomes done in a relatively few large operations. And this leads to a minority of people, business people, the business class, running most of the economy, not governments. Through organising as businesses, the business class get power over everyone else at work, and great wealth. In politics, they use that to promote politics that favours them, conservative politics.

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Their conservative parties say them having this power is fair, because everybody is free to trade as individuals and start and run a business. But with mass production, even with smaller businesses, business people take wealth from the system not as individuals but, with those large operations, with many staff, as companies, collectively. They get wealthy more from the work everyone else does for them than from what they themselves do.

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The false view that this is all about individual rights gives political cover to business freedoms that conceals how they actually work collectively.

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The key mechanism is that with large, industrialised operations they have large workforces. That means they can keep production going without any one particular worker. That means they can bargain harshly with workers one at a time and get wealthy from charging more for our work than they pay us.

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Again - they are a class, the business class - the clearest example of a class. Because they run most production, they are the economy. That means they have inherent political power even outside party politics. And then, on top of that, they – business people of all sizes of business -organise conservative parties and media. Through that they protect their power over everybody else in the work process by making business freedom in free markets the dominant political view, one that severely constrains progressive parties.

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So, contrary to how people talk, the political parties don’t simply 'run the country.’ the parties come from people in the system organising to protect their role and interests in it. And the majority don't get what they want from work or politics because the business class put more into that than most workers put into organising as workers at work, and into progressive politics.

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For a foundation for people getting what they need, we need a clear view of these basic political and trading relationships – the system. The works that make up 'Us, Politics, The System, Class' provide it. Then we need to put our relationships with the business class – at work, and in taxation and provision of public services – at the centre of political debate. Only then discuss the political parties and politicians.