After All

Driving to work I heard on the radio that Ford's United Auto Workers union have reached an agreement under which "...the workers will allow Ford to make part of its contribution into a retiree health-care trust with stock".  This, according to the radio commentator, may eventually mean that the Ford workers' union will eventually own the company. To me this was a cause of celebration because the energy of the private management will now be harnessed to commonweal instead to non-sustainable greed.

Are we living in strange times? or the devolution of capitalism has brought us to a point where we can rebuild the market economy into a creative and constructive capitalism. The collapse of banking institutions in the United States taking along with it the global economy into depression, is a good reason to pause and re-think our future beyond the dogma.

The socialist state degenerated into the dictatorship of the few over many which was one of the reasons of its collapse. The dream of an utopian society remained a dream and many dreamers ended up in the Gulag or sufficiently disillusioned  to accept the ill conceived ideas of market economy without rethinking the new society. The discrepancy between belief and action further causing a fissure which will eventually suck in whatever good that can come out of embracing market economy.

The need of the hour is for pragmatic social engineering not dogmatic pursuit of political ideas which are often irrelevant and conceived for different times. The world needs to rethink the future of humanity and with hope for a better future searching for ways and means peace and prosperity could prevail. Is this the urging of a man in the last lap of his life? It is more likely the quixotic pursuit in the belief that human beings are at a crossroads where they can build a new society because over the last millennium they have put together tools and technologies which makes it possible to construct an age of peace and prosperity. That is the knowledge society, the very opposite of the Ninteen Eighty-Four nightmare that George Orwell wrote about in 1949. They are equally capable of destroying the civilization—not so much as making the human race extinct by nuclear holocast—through conflict, brutalization, intolerance and fundamentalism.

Jodi Tor Dak Shune Na Ashe (If they answer not to thy call) wrote the poet Rabindranath Tagore, exhorting the listener to continue his or her journey. It became one of the favorite songs of Gandhi. This is the clarion call of today for those who, like Obama, believe in change, hope and the ability of a society to recreate itself.