People see this, and often they just see it as Romney being an racist greedy bastard.
What
I wish more people would see, is that this is the future for Americans
under Capitalism. This is Capitalism in practice, anything poverty can
reduce a person to, anything poverty can FORCE a person to submit to, is considered voluntary.
Under
Capitalism, what workers receive in pay and the working conditions
workers endure is primarily determined by the worker's minimum needs and
by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the
number of workers competing for jobs.
Let this not be construed
as a vilification of all capitalists. An individual capitalist may value
employees as human beings, and this confuses some people, just as it
confused people that there were kindly kings, and kindly slave owners.
But their kindness only hid the cruelty of the system.
An
individual capitalist can be kind but the system is tyrannical, an
individual capitalist can respect workers as people but the capitalist
system does not and can not. Capitalism as a system reduces workers to
disposable units of labor to be consumed and discarded onto the trash
heaps of the economy.
And the Free Market SAZ's in China represent the perfect system for Global Capitalism, people are forced to choose between working and living in inhuman slave like conditions and watching their children starve, people are forced to choose
between dying on the streets or being worked to death in conditions
that even keeping animals in would be have people up in arms about. As
if people can choose to live without need or want. All of this is
considered voluntary and ideal, for within the system this maximizes
profitability and that's the whole point of capitalism, to maximize
profits for the capitalist.
Look at the conditions of these
workers again, and the giddy glee over the desperation and slave like
conditions of the employees, because this is a roadmap for the future of
America.
We do have a capitalist system. Capitalism is the private or corporate
ownership and control of property for the profit of the owner, it's a
system of top down centralized control by private investors.
This
system by it's very nature centralizes control of assessable wealth
into fewer and fewer hands, there is an inherent systemic instability in
the accumulation of capital that can only be resolved either through
a collapses in which property owners lose their wealth, through the
redistribution of wealth, or through the abolishment of the capitalist
system.
There are a variety of alternatives, one is the worker
cooperative model, one in which I am employed. That is when workers
share equal equity in the institution (workers own the workplace) and
make decisions democratically (or by a democratically established
system).
Let's contrast shall we?
In the right hand you have a system of centralized control of power and wealth, in which the business owners
and investors profit from the labor of
the workers.
In the left hand you have a democratic system in
which the workers are also the owners. The difference is comparative to the difference between democracy and feudal aristocracy, a more than justified comparison.
There are many other
alternative systems, but these two are comparatively simple.
The Capitalist system starves
people in cage beds in Hong Kong and makes them pay for the privilege.
It forces parents to choose between sacrificing their health and
suffering the pain of hunger and exhaustion on the one hand, and
watching their children starve on the other. It claims voluntary
anything poverty can force a person to agree to.
Capitalism is a system of violence and of force,
both economic and physical for the centralized control over social
property (workplaces) is ultimately enforced by violence.
And the
"We Don't Have Capitalism" argument speaks to free market illusions
conjured by the high priests of wealth and privilege, who have stolen
the language of liberty and twisted it to defend the vicious domination
of a ruling aristocracy, that calls the worker violent for forming a
picket line then calls the violent suppression of the worker by state thugs and corporate mercenaries self defense.
Economic violence harms people just as badly as physical violence, it starves people in cages in
Hong Kong, it breaks the old and the weak, it enslaves children in a
cycle of poverty, and it empowers the domination, the riot, and the
vicious happiness of the aristocracy.
The rule of capital is a
violent rule, the poor are forced to serve the wealthy by hunger and
need of shelter, forced into slavery by debt and poverty, and from this
arrangement, the rich get richer feasting off the labor of the poor and
throwing those they don't need into the trash heaps of the economy. This violent reign which restricts rights to wealth and places property above people justifies itself by claiming to be voluntary, but this
is violence, the violence of Capitalism.
This system claims to be voluntary as if people could choose to live without want and need. It justifies
the rule of the rich by claiming that they are naturally superior to the poor. By claiming that capitalists work harder than the workers they place beneath them who toil to make them wealthy. By claiming that the capitalists take all the risks, risks that the working class must pay for, suffering the cost in decreased wages, poor working conditions, lower job security and unemployment. Following unemployment, workers suffer poverty and the frantic search for new work or are swallowed up in debt and at risk of hunger and homelessness, yet the capitalist can always hire new workers, such is the system of violence that is Capitalism.
Such is the twisted nature of this system of violence that starving in
cages like the poor of Hong Kong is considered freedom, that the rule of
the capitalists and the abject poverty of those that serve them is considered egalitarian. The Working Class is second class under this system,
if workers so much as form a picket line or have a sit in, the state is called to use brute force to crush the worker rebellion, yet in violating the sacred property of the capitalist baron the
worker is the one who is accused of violence. Take a step back and look at the system again, look at how the state rushes to the aid of the Capitalist whenever the workers rebel, look at how the violence of the state defends the domination and power of the capitalist over the fruits of our labor. This is Aristocracy, the Neo-Feudalism that is Capitalism.
“Throughout recorded time and probably since the end of the neolithic
age there have been three kinds of people in the world. The high,
middle, and the low. They have been subdivided in many ways and worn
countless different names and the relative numbers as well as their
attitude toward one another have have varied from age to age, but the
essential structure of society has never altered.
Even after
enormous upheavals in seemingly irrevocable changes the same pattern has
always reasserted itself. The aims of these three groups are entirely
irreconcilable, the aim of the high is to remain where they are, the aim
of the middle is to change places with a high, the aim of the low when
they have an aim for it is an abiding characteristic of the low that
they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently
conscious of anything outside their daily lives is to abolish all
distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
Thus
throughout history a struggle which is the same in it’s main outlines
recurs over and over again. For long periods the high seem to be
securely in power but sooner or later there always comes a moment when
they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern
efficiently or both, they are then overthrown by the middle who enlist
the low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for
liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective the
middle thrusts the low back into their old position of servitude and
themselves become the high.
Presently the middle group splits off
from one of the other groups or from both of them and the struggle
begins over again. Of the three groups only the low are never even
temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an
exaggeration to say that throughout history there have been no progress
of the material kind. Even today in a period of decline the average
human being is physically better off than it was a few centuries ago,
but no advancing wealth, no softening of manners, no reform our
revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
From
the point of view of the low no historic change has ever meant much
more than a change in the name of the masters. By the late nineteenth
century the recurrences of this pattern have become obvious to many
observers.
There then arose schools of thinkers who interpret
history as a cyclical process and claim to show that inequality was the
unalterable law of human life.
This doctrine of course had always
had its adherents but in the manner in which was now put forward was a
significant change, in the past the need for a hierarchical form of
society have been the doctrine specifically of the high. It had been
preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers and the
like who were all parasitic upon them, and they have generally been
softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the
grave.
The middle so long as it was struggling for power had
always made use of such terms is freedom justice and fraternity, but the
principle underlying cause was that as early as the beginning of the
twentieth century human equality have become technically possible.
It
was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and
their functions and to be specialized in ways that favored some
individuals against others, but there was no longer any real need for
class distinctions of large differences of wealth.
But the
earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it
became realizable. Every new political theory by whatever name it called
itself led back to hierarchy and regimentation, and in the general
hardening of outlook that set in round about nineteen thirty,
imprisonment without trial, use of war prisoners as slaves, public
executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the
deportation of whole populations not only became common again, but were
tolerated in even defended by people who consider themselves enlightened
in progressive.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical
society go deeper than this, there are only four ways in which a ruling
group can fall from power, either it is conquered from without, or it
governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it
allows a strong and discontented middle group to come into being, or it
loses it’s own self confidence and willingness to govern.
These
causes do not operate singly and as a rule all four of them are present
in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them
will remain in power permanently.
The masses never revolt of
their own accord and they never revolt merely because they are
oppressed. Indeed so long as they are not permitted to have standards of
comparison they never even become aware that they are oppressed because
there is no way in which discontent become articulate.
As for
the problem of overproduction which has been latent in our society since
the development of machine technique, it is solved by the device of
continuous warfare which is also useful in keying up public morale for
the necessary pitch.
From the point of view of our present rulers
therefore the only genuine dangers are the splitting off of a new group
of able underemployed power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism
and skepticism in their own ranks. The problem that is to say, is
education, it is a problem of continuously molding the consciousness
both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies
immediately below. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be
influenced in a negative way.
Who wields power is not important
provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same, from
the proletarians nothing is to be feared, left to themselves they will
continue from generation to generation and from century to century
working breeding and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel but
without the power of grasping of the world other than it is. They can
only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it
necessary to educate the more highly.
What opinions the masses
hold or do not hold are looked on as a matter of indifference, so long
as they continued to work and breed, there other activities were without
importance. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to
work at twelve, they married at twenty, they were middle aged at thirty,
they died for the most part at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of
home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer,
and above all gambling filled up the horizon of their minds.
To
keep them in control was not difficult, a few agents of the Thought
Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down
and eliminating the few individuals where judged capable of becoming
dangerous. It was not desirable that the proletariat should have strong
political feelings, all that was required of them was a primitive
patriotism which will be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make
an exception longer working hours or shorter rations.
And even
when they became discontented as they sometimes did, their discontent
led nowhere because being without general ideas they could only focus on
petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escape their
notice.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and
until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” ~ George
Orwell, Excerpts from 1984
This is a film based on the book “Death of the Liberal Class” by journalist and Pulitzer prize winner, Chris Hedges.
It charts the rise of the Corporate State, and examines the future of
obedience in a world of unfettered capitalism, globalization,
staggering inequality and environmental change.
The film predominantly focuses on US corporate capitalism, but it is my
hope that the viewer can recognize the relevance of what is being
expressed with regards to domestic political and corporate activity.
It was made completely of clips found on the web.
Music by Clark (warp.net/records/clark)
Warning – this film contains scenes that some viewers may find disturbing.
