{ "item_title" : "The Point Is", "item_author" : [" Michael Rice "], "item_description" : "It is commonplace on the left for us to say that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class. Social change cannot happen by accident. Our class cannot achieve power because someone else, or some other force, gives it to us for power cannot be given away, it has to be taken.It is also accepted that the working class has to be organised to take power. It follows that the working class has to be arranged in collectives. Organisations and collectives are interchangeable terms. The interesting thing is that the working class can only be organised in its entirety in two distinct places - at work or at home.Of course, other interest communities involve and recruit working-class people, but such groups, as worthy as they may be, will never provide the structures to secure and sustain class power. Class power has to be exercised through structures that encompass every worker. It is either representation from the workplace through workplace councils, or Soviets, as the Russians called them, or from neighbourhoods. Indeed, neighbourhoods are more inclusive as they also contain unemployed and retired workers.Already, history has provided examples of societies based upon both the workplace and the neighbourhood - the Soviet Union in its very early days and the Paris Commune. This book argues that the example of the Paris Commune has greater relevance to modern Western societies.I have structured this book into the following chapters: The Problem, Cooperative Movement, Union Label, Not Amazon, The Paris Commune, IT the struggle for control, Dollar Imperialism, Cooperative Monetary Unit, and finally the chapter entitled: How to Change the World for Good.My focus for this book is on neighbourhood organisation linked to ethical shopping and incorporating new software to make it happen. Then creating the political paradigm shift through using the shopping app to establish Community Collectives. It was all about neighbourhoods.However, in writing the book I realised that there is a need for a new international trading currency to replace the dollar - an international currency that promotes workers' rights. It suddenly dawned on me, when I was researching the history of the cooperative movement, that it could provide the bedrock for a new monetary unit. The Cooperative Monetary Unit (CMU) could become a latter-day sort of Keynesian Bancor. I really do think that my proposal is doable. But it needs champions advocating for it.Of course, proposing a new international currency also meant that I needed to give some details of the role of the dollar system in international affairs. As John Connally, the then Secretary of the Treasury, so aptly put it at a G10 meeting in November 1971: It is our currency, but it is your problem. This was just a few months after Nixon abolished the convertibility of dollar to gold.My chapter on Not Amazon gives details of my attempt to develop solidarity shopping. So far, I have singularly failed - but ideas can sometimes win through. Solidarity shopping and the development of neighbourhood community collectives do not of themselves constitute the revolution but they could become the training, the logistics the organisation for challenging existing state structures.It is also about building the here-and-now institutions that can, one day, become the arteries of a democratic workers' state. It is a plea to stop waiting for spontaneous uprisings and to start the disciplined, unglamorous, essential work of construction.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/03/699/993/1036999939_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "20.00", "online_price" : "20.00", "our_price" : "20.00", "club_price" : "20.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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