What Society Is All About
We must face the fact that class oppression is not a side effect of this society; the whole purpose of this society is economic exploitation of the majority for the benefit of a small minority. This is not a little foible that creeps into this society that we can correct or liberalize or put a band-aid on. It’s what the society is all about.
People had to be deeply embedded in patterns to think this system was to their advantage, and the rest of the people had to be convinced that the organization that flowed from an oppressive society would be advantageous in order to buy into it. . . . The rationalization was that the organization accompanying a class society allowed many more children to grow into adulthood. The human population was able to grow beyond scattered bands only with the organization, and the organization was identified with the oppression.
I’ve said before that if someone in a flying saucer had visited us at that point and said, “Wait, you don’t need the oppression in order to have the organization!“ we could have skipped a terrible systematic accumulation of patterns over the last eight or nine thousand years.
Reprinted from page 93 of “Resigning from the Owning Class,” in An Unbounded Future
(Present Time 211, April 2023)