By Bob Lee

Like everyone else, I’ve been reading the headlines the past few years about wave after wave of layoffs. Millions of people losing their jobs, millions of lives devastated. People taking years to find new jobs, and going back to work for a lot less money, if they found jobs at all. People losing everything, and ending up homeless.

Then, last January, I got laid off from a place where I had worked for 16 years as a writer and editor. It was an old story — two companies merged and people got let go after the merger, 10 percent of the staff in this case. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t really, and it was a shock. The day they let us all go I went around saying goodbye to co-workers. We didn’t know what to say to each other. Those who didn’t get pink slips wondered if they were next. The management gave us boxes to put our personal stuff in as we cleaned out our offices. All my things fit in two boxes. I was surprised at that; you would think that after 16 years in a place you’d have more personal junk piled up, but there I was, outside the door on the street with all my stuff in two medium-sized boxes. I was dazed.

Now, it’s nearly eight months later and I’m still among the more than 924,000 people who have been laid off since January in what some economists are calling a “booming economy.” Now I know what it means to be one of the people behind the statistics. Now I’ve experienced first-hand what I had been reading and hearing about — the self-doubt, the anger, the stress, the anxiety and the depression that comes from desperately wanting and needing a job and not being able to get one. As someone put it, it’s a shock knowing that your talents and skills are dispensable. We don’t truly realize how much work gives meaning to our lives in this kind of society until we don’t have it.

My experience has made it all the more clear to me that we absolutely can, and must, have a society where we don’t have to worry about selling ourselves in the labor market every day in order to eat. That new society is possible right now. We have the technology to produce everything we need. But private property is standing in the way.

Think about the kind of society we have now. A relative few of us work for the government or for non-profit groups, but most of us who need to work have to work for private employers, meaning for the handful of wealthy people who own the factories, the mines, the mills and the offices where things are produced. We have to sell our labor power — our ability to work – to these employers, these private owners of productive property. If they don’t want to buy it, for whatever reason, we don’t work, and if we don’t work we don’t eat. The owners of productive property only employ us when it’s profitable for them to do so. If a computer or robot can do the job, we get replaced. If the market for whatever a factory is making dries up, the factory shuts down. Under this system, employment is for someone’s private profit; we don’t put people to work just to satisfy our collective needs. If employing you doesn’t make a profit for someone, you get laid off.

I’m not really complaining about my situation. (At least not yet.) There are millions of people much worse off than me. But part of the point here is that over the past 20 years the waves of layoffs have spread from the ranks of the blue-collar workers into the realm of the white-collar workers where I’ve been laboring. The US is now seeing its second “jobless recovery” from a recession, and it looks like the economy is headed back into another recession. No one’s job is safe, no matter how skilled, educated or experienced they are, and no matter what industry they work in, because technology is replacing labor.

But this technological revolution in the economy also makes possible — and not just possible, but necessary — a revolution in how our society is organized. We, the people, could own society’s productive property ourselves. We could produce whatever we needed, whenever we needed it. We could guarantee that everyone in our society had everything they needed to have a full, cultured life – food, clothing, housing, education, health care. Technology would no longer be a threat to our ability to make a living; it would be a tool to give us more leisure time, more time to spend with our kids, more time to devote to taking care of each other and to doing the things that really personally satisfy us. We wouldn’t have to go to jobs that we hate, just so we could eat. We wouldn’t have to struggle to make ends meet on wages that aren’t enough. We wouldn’t have to worry about being without health care. We wouldn’t have to fear becoming homeless, or live in poverty in devastated neighborhoods. We wouldn’t have to have work define our lives; we could focus on being happy. And isn’t that what life is supposed to be about?

The only thing in our way is a ridiculous system where our society’s productive property is in private hands. It may seem like a big job to change that, but history has shown that a system that can’t meet the basic needs of the people can and will be changed. Together we can do it.