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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2004Workshop TalksToo risky to let capitalism continueby Htun Lin Those who don’t work for a living like to brag about how they take risks. They belittle us workers for seeking job security and social security. They claim it is the entrepreneur who brings "value" to the economy. They say, "Our free enterprise system works on taking risks." They don’t say what kinds of risks. Usually they are merely referring to how much money (usually someone else’s money) they’ve thrown into investing into a business which they hope will reap them a profit in return. They pay their workers a modicum of wages in return for their work, just enough so that he will return to work another day. What the businessman pockets as pure profit he never actually worked for. What the capitalist means by work is the "risk" he took in investing in such a venture--a risk he took using other people’s money and other people’s labor. Unscrupulous businessmen may refuse to pay your wages altogether, as is the case with so many sweatshops which pull up stakes to pitch their tent in another part of the globe. In Bhopal, India, Union Carbide was the single most powerful producer of chemical products and provider of employment and economic opportunities in that region. After a devastating chemical explosion killed and maimed tens of thousands of its inhabitants (an industrial disaster of historic proportion second only to Chernobyl), Union Carbide eventually sold all its holdings in Bhopal to Dow Chemical. The citizens of Bhopal launched a class-action lawsuit to attain redress and compensation for the victims of the industrial disaster--a disaster which was man-made--since company officials cut corners on safety for its workers and the surrounding environment in order to maximize profit. In other words, the risks they took in their free enterprise capitalist ventures by freely risking the lives of the workers and the native citizenry who have to live in the wreckage left by those ventures. Armed with an army of lawyers, the executives at Dow and Union Carbide have, for nearly 20 years, successfully blocked any meaningful compensation for the victims of Bhopal, even though they had won their lawsuit against the corporations for their atrocities in the courts of their capitalist governments. Filing one motion after another to delay settlement, the companies have made redress and compensation a moot point, as many of the original victims of Bhopal have since died from their injuries. The value of Michael Moore’s latest film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," is not in the outrageous conspiracy theories and innuendoes made against Bush, but in the profoundness of its central underlying theme--that America’s imperialist wars are fought abroad by first winning its race and class wars back home. Moore portrays how America supplies its modern military-machine with more bodies as fodder for its hi-tech cannons by harvesting recruits amongst the urban ruins the casualties of its race and class wars. Capitalists like to talk of "risks," but it is the sons and daughters of workers who have to take those risks, and have to die on the battlefield, just as their parents sacrificed a lifetime on the production floors, only to join the "army of the unemployed," as machinery accumulates to represent dead labor produced with the expenditure of living labor. Capitalism not only thrives on, but its own survival depends on, extracting surplus labor, that portion of the worker’s daily labor which remains unpaid, which is extracted as surplus value. It is no wonder then that Marx once characterized labor power as the capitalist’s ultimate "commodity of commodities." Both Russia and China used to call themselves Communist. I don’t think it’s any accident of history that state-capitalism in both Russia, which renounced Communism, and China, which maintains one-party rule by the Communist Party, have since transformed into havens for private capitalism. Capitalist investors from everywhere are flocking there to exploit their near-slavery working conditions. It wasn’t a change of heart which did this, but the philosophic underpinnings of their Communist ideology--which was an ideology shared by the West, which saw workers as mere "masses" to be controlled, used, and then discarded. With such a tightly-knit collaboration between the state and the corporation, what is in store for a future ruled by the factory clock? There’s no escape from this dominance of a single ideology, capitalism, without transcending it--with a genuine socialism where "human power is its own end." |
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