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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2005Workshop TalksClass-made disastersby Htun Lin Every aspect of our daily lives, not just in times of disaster, demonstrates the permanent crises of everyday life under capitalism. A co-worker recently said to me: "Bush will undo in just a few years what it took several presidencies over many decades to build up: civil society. By the time we retire, nothing will be left. Not our Social Security. Not our Medicare. Not even any of our freedoms." How so? I asked. He said, "Look at it this way. There’s all this talk about ownership. We don’t even own ourselves. Any one of us can be picked up just walking down the street. They can call anyone a terrorist. We can be detained indefinitely, without a trial, without anyone knowing our whereabouts. "Our citizenship can be stripped. We can’t even say anything. If they don’t like what we say, they can declare our speech a threat to society. You or I can be disappeared at any time at will, just like they used to do in Chile or Argentina. "It was all illegal then. But by the time the Supreme Court approves Bush’s permanent detentions, in the name of his war on terror, they would become legal to use against us all. "In his ownership society, Bush will make us all indebted to his permanent wars. We won’t even own our own lives anymore." What this worker was anxious about was a creeping fascism fueled by the trend towards fundamentalism--a fundamentalism which dovetails with capital’s abstractions. When Bush says he believes in freedom and democracy, he means it only abstractly. He supports the troops in Iraq, but only abstractly. He sends our soldiers on suicide missions without adequate armor or pay. He believes in charity, but only abstractly. He will gloat about his "generosity" before the check’s even in the mail, while doing little to save lives. He believes in an "ownership society," but only abstractly. He wants each of us to own stocks while dismantling Social Security. We can’t even count on our health care or having a job anymore. He believes in the "sanctity of life," but only abstractly, and concretely does much to destroy it. DRAINING OUR RESOURCES In a way, Bush’s invasion of Iraq is an apt analogy of what he is doing at home. The looting of Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquity with its accumulation of thousands of years of human history followed the invasion. Bush is about to raid the historical accumulation of our collective wealth, and our rights and freedoms--our legacy of previous struggles. All in the name of "individual responsibility" and "personal ownership." Marx once said, "The individual is the social entity." To me, that means society exists for the individual, not the other way around. Individual freedom cannot be sacrificed for the benefit of society. A free society cannot be comprised of unfree individuals, alienated from their own labor, and chained to big capital. They say they want us to "rely on ourselves" for our own welfare, by "investing in the market." They don’t tell us that the market is a gambling house built on what we produce. Many workers who invest in the market believe their investment returns are coming out of the stock market. In reality, it is coming from the collective value of our own labor and the sweat and labor of other workers elsewhere. It is that same market which will turn on a worker’s nest egg, when capital decides that profit margins are not high enough because the cost of labor is not low enough. In Bush’s ownership society, all we will really own is the liabilities associated with capital’s expansion. The stock market’s rise can only come about with the collective demise of workers’ welfare. The only way out of this morass is for average human beings, workers of the world, to unite in the same way we have united in the face of natural disasters. We have already proven to ourselves that we can take concrete actions on our own, without the direction of any government as in the way the whole world came together and solidarized in the wake of the tsunami or September 11. Bush tries to put a human face on his machines of death by showboating occasional rescue operations in front of television cameras to show, as he put it, "American values in action." Imagine if all those military resources, trillions of wasted dollars, were used instead to save lives and promote life. EXTENDING SOLIDARITY If we are to take our lessons from the way we all came together to fulfill human needs in times of disaster, we must also extend that kind of solidarity into everyday life where even mundane needs, from social security to health care to our schools--have taken on crisis proportions. As eloquently stated by my co-worker: "Nothing will be left, if we allow them to carry out their plans to invest not in human needs but capital’s needs." Only the kind of free association of worker to worker, and the kind of solidarity already shown during disaster relief, once it is practiced in everyday life, can offer the kind of vision we sorely need to transcend this inhuman system and all the suffering from man-made disasters, as well as natural disasters made worse under capitalism. |
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