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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2004Workshop TalksBush offers us front half of cowby Htun Lin “The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into collective possession of a modern nation is — the national debt.” —Karl Marx Bush’s stated goal for his second term in office is to turn America into an "ownership society." What was only whispered during the election campaign—privatization of Social Security—has come squarely in the crosshairs of Bush’s war against workers. He claims he has "earned political capital, and I intend to spend it." What he is about to spend, in fact to squander, is what it took over half a century to accumulate since its creation under FDR’s New Deal: a Social Security fund to protect workers’ welfare and security in retirement. Workers who are old enough to remember the Great Depression know only too well the devastation wreaked on workers’ lives by capital’s inherent chaos and disorder. Social Security was created as a social safety net for workers. But Congress kept picking the lockbox to borrow funds to pay for budget deficits. Bush is about to take off with the box altogether to benefit the private sector. More to the point, his "privatization" scheme for Social Security is a ploy to profit the stock market. When Bush says he want us workers to be part of an "ownership culture," it is not to invest in our future, but in the self-expansion of capital markets. What they want us to own is all that ails capital—to own all the risks and liabilities, the sickness and disease of capital’s anti-human ventures, especially its militarization and permanent wars. Subsidizing the stock market by piling on more national debt is socialism for capitalists against the interests of workers who are being asked to dig ourselves and our children deeper into debt. In northern California 30,000 grocery workers are facing huge cuts in health care benefits because employers say they have to match Wal-Mart’s standard of exploitation. Wal-Mart’s advantage comes both from importing goods from China’s slave-wage industries and getting even more unpaid labor from their workers here by making them work off the clock. EVERYDAY THIEVERY But this "primitive" mode of accumulation in our "post-modern" economy using the most vulgar form of thievery is not just a Wal-Mart phenomenon, since it has become labor policy practiced by businesses large and small ("Forced to work off the clock widespread in Economy," NEW YORK TIMES, Nov. 19, 2004). Bush’s ownership scheme and investment scam is exploiting our natural instincts and desire to create our very own "nest eggs," but transforms it towards the expansion of capital, not human needs. They want us to feed a system that perfects our own demise. All value in the stock market comes out of our own hides. When politicians say they want to "grow" the economy, they mean at our expense. Once capital deems the price of our labor is not low enough, it will move operations offshore, in spite of all the sacrifices our own union leaders already urged us to accept. They want us to own capital’s future of permanent social insecurity where each worker assumes the cost of competition. Workers create everything, but all we really own is our labor power, which once sold, we relinquish ownership. As much as existing society praises the virtues of ownership, we can’t even own the most private of all properties—our own labor. As Marx put it, our "conscious life activity" has been alienated from us. Capital’s riches come about at the cost of our own pauperization. It is the ultimate form of taxation without representation. What is there to invest when one doesn’t even own one’s livelihood? Asking an unemployed worker to "invest" in his own future is like asking for blood out of a turnip. Bush accomplishes this by also making workers own his permanent wars and pay for his quagmires in places like Iraq. HOBSON'S CHOICE In war, we are compelled to obey the draft when the commander-in-chief is unable to recruit all the volunteers he needs. Or we "volunteer" when our own economic needs leave us little choice. In the factory, we risk our limbs to dangerous machines speeded up. On the battlefield, we often lose not just our limbs, but our lives as well, or our minds. Capital’s inherent man-made disasters will be resolved only by transcending this current inhuman system where all powers expended by us human beings go towards the endowment of capital and its self-expansion. Only by reclaiming, through workers’ own free association, our working lives will we ever achieve a society where the supreme value is the human being as an end in itself. |
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