Free downloads of key out-takes and the full work are below this Micro-summary –

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The Micro-summary – Politics is all messed up and people in a state about it: Even in the west, where things could easily be right for everyone.

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What people say about politics is confused because they don’t base it on how society works – ‘the system’. We need to get them to.

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People think political parties and governments ‘run the country’. But they don't run the super-important business and work relationships where we make our living, and some get wealthy - the economy. They are mostly left to run as free markets. And the whole point of free markets is that governments don’t control them.

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The most important free-market, the one in the work process, is ignored.

 

Conservative parties say free markets mean everyone is free to trade as an individual, and to run a business, and so the extreme differences in power and wealth we have is fair.

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But that’s not how it works. In free-markets, in making goods and providing services, mass, high-volume production (industrialism) is more efficient than small. So high-volume producers constantly drive out small ones and most production comes to be done not with everybody operating as small traders but in large, collective work operations.

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They are owned and run by a minority, business people - the business class.

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So, with mass production, even at the small-business end, business people are not making wealth as individuals but, with large operations, as companies. With many staff, they get wealthy more from the collective work everyone else does for them than from what they themselves do.

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But the claim that this is all about individual rights - a ludicrous claim - gives extremely important legitimacy to business people’s freedoms. It enables conservatives to present it as liberty.

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The key mechanism is the collective work process. With the large workforces of high-volume, industrialised operations, business owners can keep production going without any one particular worker. So they can bargain harshly over pay and conditions with workers one at a time. And can charge more for their work than they pay them. And that’s where their wealth comes from. Even though they might be enterprising and able and deserve more than the rest, that’s actually how they get so wealthy.

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It all means the minority business class run most of the economy, not governments. Their activity is the economy. That in itself gives them inherent political power that drastically limits what progressive governments can do.

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And they use the wealth they take from the economy to actively promote politics that favours them. Business people of all sizes, down to the smallest, organise and support conservative parties and media or influence progressive parties. They protect their power over everyone else in the work process by making business freedom in free markets the dominant political view.

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Business people are the prime example of class – the business class.

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So the political parties are not rival teams from an elite of non-partisan managers just claiming to be the ones who can most competently 'run the country’ or ‘the system’ for everyone’s benefit. They come from the system, from people in it organising to protect their role and interests in it.

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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 politics, 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.

 

If you read anything below, read 'The Essential Us, Politics, The System, Class'.

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