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How will we transform the global economy and change in the 21st century? Will new technologies generate new jobs & new industries? Will whole new patterns of work & lifestyle emerge? Will we enter an era of well being & prosperity? Do we only need to be open to change and smart enough to work with it? Only if we, the global workforce, use this period of change to consciously restructure our work & time to empower our lives will we create a ‘new age’ economy to serve people & achieve sustainability. In capitalist society humanity constantly releases new potentials – but for a very restricted end – to profit those for whom the rest must work to live. It creates a global economy - but one where the richest 225 people on the planet earn as much as the poorest three billion! In its world over-work, slavery and oppression dwell side by side with unemployment and exclusion; people are brutalized & nature is degraded. Only we, the world’s workers, acting in our enlightened collective interest, have the power to manage and control the planet’s social production in a way that is rational, humane and mindful of nature: to enhance our productive powers while equitably sharing work, time & resources. Only then can technical advance and economic globalisation become a civilizing influence, rather than part of a trend to barbarism as we enter a new millennium. Only through labour’s emancipation is there a path-way to a sustainable global socio-economy, and the key to this is labour organizing globally to combat capital’s hegemony. A shorter hours campaign, in turn, is a core strategy because it unites employed & unemploy -ed workers and workers internationally. · It equalizes access to work & starves the exploi- -ting class of the surplus it must extract to exist. It opens up the prospect of freedom – so humanity, as a free association of producers, interacting most rationally with nature, work through a cooperative world economy - see state & city dissolve! This is SWWAC’s message. We encourage labour & community activists to relate their actions to this task in the course of their own struggles against industrial and social hegemony. We can open up new possibilities organizing round ‘work-time-life’.
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