[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the evolution of the perennial and evolving seeking of profit in Capitalism. It covers the topic in a bit on an eclectic manner… For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—Private property (and the ‘right’ to seek profit?), the bourgeoisie will say, is inviolable and sacred! (Note that, as a religious adjective, ‘sacred’ implies the divine acceptance of the preeminence of individual wealth over any social or collective right).
—Americans have long seen their country as morally exceptional, but is their exceptionalism really moral in the economic, social and cultural rights sense? (adapted from Joseph S. Nye)
1. The minority international community that calls itself ‘the Global West’ actually lives in a dissociated moral world. On the one hand, it claims universal principles that it purports to defend as guiding its actions; on the other, it engages in practices that clash with those principles. (Angeles Diez) …wither human rights (HR) in this contradiction.
2. The productive and economic system of many nations in the Global West is subjected to a process of almost total control by large corporations; their governments are sub-servient to the latter; the working class has no say or almost no say. (Nothing new here…).*
*: The workers’ passive way of defending themselves is to wait for the political class to listen and to take into account their denunciations and demands. But the latter never or seldom come up with concrete solutions to workers’ grievances –will workers finally/ever get the message…? (Revista Primera Piedra).
No say? Trade unions do not appeal to the new generations since these organizations demonstrate a lack of depth in the preparation of their leadership with respect to what should be a social, HR, ecological, welfare and gender preoccupation in their struggles. (Primera Piedra)
3. A mini-course on unionism: During the 19th and early 20th centuries, workers formed unions to a) fight their bosses andtheir profit-driven system, and b) to improve their economic and social condition. Threatened by growing union power, the business class retaliated with physical force and racist, anti-communist attacks. To keep those unions weak, employers convinced union officials that they should work together to secure labor peace –meaning, a subservient workforce. Employers court union officials as partners in managing the workforce, which means depriving workers of their right to decide.
4. As a result, conservative union officials have too often taken social issues off the table; they have limited bargaining to economic issues and directed workers to channel their social concerns through the electoral system. The loss of workers’ decision-making power at the workplace has eroded their decision-making power in every non strictly labor aspect of life and society.
5. Regrettably, today’s unions are institutions of class compromise that strive to balance the interests of workers and employers. This is an impossible task, because the two classes have opposite interests. So, the business class gets richer every year while workers lose ground.
6. Union officials cannot change this social arrangement without challenging the de-facto right of the business class to dominate work and society. Under the contract-bargaining system, union officials must restrict workers’ demands to what employers will accept. Furthermore, labor laws prevent the crises that strikes cause by reducing the class struggle to a series of isolated contract battles. Workers do have the experience of fighting back in solidarity, but obstacles keep wearing them down and they often surrender.
7. Union officials regularly settle for less than what workers demand. To get more, they would have to seriously disrupt the employer’s business, and the State would retaliate with strike-braking legislation. When workers cause more than a temporary disruption, employers appeal to the State to physically remove demonstrators, criminalize them, and ban or bankrupt their organizations. In every affected nation, workers have demonstrated and struck against the loss of public services, the crisis of overwork, and the increased cost of living. And in most cases, the union establishment has blocked angry workers from using their class power to challenge the root cause of their distress, the drive for profit (and the push to war…) and the disregard for workers’ rights.
But there is also ‘the older’ constraint
8. Colonialism has continued in many forms since political independence and sovereignty of colonies were greatly conditioned by economic and financial dependencies, unequal contracts, privileges granted to companies of the former colonizing powers, including the expulsion of peasants to make way for mega-development projects. Add to this the continuity of social relations based on the colonial principle of the ethno-racial-inferiority-of-the-other, of which colonialism and racism are the most obvious expressions. Little known are the facts that: a) At the time of colonialism’s end, the colonized did not always mount much active resistance, and b) in the same year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) was signed, the new universal rights were denied to the entire colonized world —not to mention workers [including during Apartheid and the Nakba (the massive expulsion of Palestinians from their territory)].
9. Acts committed by anti-colonial fighters have always been called state terrorism –only years later recognized as heroes of anti-colonial liberation. (Note: only in 2008, after he was elected president, was Nelson Mandela removed from the US list of terrorists…) So, you see? Scandalous double standards have been at play: This is how the global North devastated the native populations not distinguishing good violence from bad violence. This is the structural blindness of history’s victors!** (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
**: This is complemented by a remnant of the old colonial mentality, the one that also says you are nobody unless you actually have a land of your own. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
And now, beware of the new insidiously constraint growing on us
–Politics is about who has the right to tell whom what to do. It is thus about power. (Yanis Varoufakis, ex Greek economist ex-finance minister)
–Behind politics are powerful corporations that have the power to tell us what to do. A new distribution of wealth thus requires –that is, demands– a new distribution of power. (Antoine Barnabe French legislator, 1761-1793)
10. Capitalism is now actually housed in the cloud where it concentrates its authority in specific corporate hands that hold the power. At the new Capitalism’s core is ‘technofeudalism’ which is de-facto replacing Capitalism as the Capitalism we knew as-of-today. We are talking about a system that uses elements of feudalism commandeered by today’s technology. Yes, it is feudal lords that populate the cloud today. Their data management power commands huge resources that, none-other-than WE supply to the cloud for free –every hour, every day. This means WE are the serfs in this new system.
11. Huge profits*** are accruing to those who more-and-more get to know too much about us (as we use the internet on a daily basis). The greater the power of the ‘cloudalist class’, the faster the march of technofeudalism, i.e., the less we-the-people can do to avert this looming and growing situation that will eventually lead us to catastrophe (Y. Varoufakis)
***: Countries dominated by the power of money, by the voracity of profit, by the unrestricted power of the privileged… respect legality only when the Constitution and laws are made by and for them. (Louis Casado)
Bottom Line
–In its multiple political-economic, socio-psychological, cultural and religious dimensions, neoliberalism continues to be an incessant factory of non-alternatives and false alternatives. (B. de Sousa and Santos)
12. Just consider: neoliberalism condemns all that is public, the collective; equally the ideas of community, fraternity solidarity and HR. There is only room for the individual and his or her selfish interests. The basic issue remains the same in the New Perspective delineated above, i.e., to protect the wealth of the privileged and to continue to live at the expense of the wretched of the earth (plus millions of us who are not wretched, but use and feed the internet).
13. As you now, the reforms implemented by neoliberalism include the privatization of water, energy, education, health, social security and the franchising of the rest of services, in addition to the destruction of labor legislation, that is, the social protection of the workers. Add to this the facilitation of national and foreign investment, the sale of ecosystems to the highest bidder, the reduction or simply the elimination (or the skimming) of taxes on/by the wealthy and big corporations…**** In short, everything is a commodity, everything is bought or sold, everything is a matter of price. There is no common destiny, there is no society, there is only the individual, each one for his own and to hell with the rest.
****: The general budgets of states are substantially financed by the taxes paid by those rendered poor, starting with the VAT. (L. Casado) This being so, inflation is taxation without legislation. (Milton Friedman)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com