To Hell with Politics part deux. . .

I was pleasantly surprised to find six sympathetic comments on my rather depressing blog post which I made late last night in a fit of pique. I think I struck a chord with a number of people who are perhaps feeling the same kinds of frustrations that I am concerning these difficult times in which we live. Thank you to all that sent me their sympathies. I didn't even know that many people read my blog, but I appreciate the thoughts.

Whenever you lose someone you care about it makes you think about a lot of things in your life. And the fact that my father spent so much energy thinking about politics, makes my heart ache for our failures in gaining justice for all those causes for which we fight. Whenever my dad began to feel fed up with it all he would just say sometimes 'we need to enjoy being alive.' Indeed, I will always appreciate my father for this advice. It is important just to enjoy the simplest things of life. My dad loved my daughter Cairo so very much, he once told me that seeing her grow up had been the very greatest joy of his whole life. Though he missed her sixth birthday by only a few days, he would have appreciated seeing her joy as the Clown that came to her party turned a balloon into a bunny. These are the little things. These are the joys my father loved to embrace.

When the revolutions of 1848 failed, Karl Marx began, correctly, to believe that Europe was going to go through a quiet conservative period in which the forces of radicalism would be in retreat for many years. He was right. So instead of his normal political activity, Marx began a long period of study that would eventually lead to his monumental work Das Kapital.

I feel a bit like Marx must have felt. We are going through a period in which the right has in some sense gained an ascendancy at least at an abstract level. Certain basic assumptions are lately being made about the 'natural' supremacy of 'markets' and the values that they supposedly promote. Perhaps instead of worrying about the day to day politics which are so frustrating for those of us who are living through hard times, we should be starting a more meaningful discourse about basic values and the big problems with the system itself. I think my father would have appreciated this.

Here is the type of thing I am talking about. The next time you are having an argument with someone who claims to believe in the so-called ''Free-market," ask them if they think that labor should be treated like any other commodity in the market. At first you will probably receive a look of confusion. They won't really know how to answer this question. But keep in mind that this was one of the fundamental principles of many early capitalists. They thought that labor itself was a commodity and that it should be bought and sold like any other commodity. This attitude conveniently reduced human beings to their most basic function in the market. Many so-called free-marketeers will want to react by saying that labor should indeed be treated like other commodities. Anyone should be able to buy and sell labor the whenever and for whatever duration or price they like, so they will assume. But of course any serious exploration of this question will make one quickly realize that we can't treat labor like we treat, say, plastic widgets. We cannot, de facto, buy labor at any price we'd like because of legislated minimum wage laws. But even if some capitalist believes we shouldn't have such laws, there are other more serious problems. When we go shopping for towels we can choose to purchase only white towels. If labor were the same as any other commodity then we should be able to purchase only 'white' labor. Aha! Therein lies the rub. If someone went out to buy only white laborers or male laborers we all know that implies and what would happen. Then ask this capitalist with whom you are having this discussion, 'If people really are commodities why can't they sell themselves into slavery?"

So what does all that mean? Well, it begs such questions as 'what exactly is a commodity' and 'why can't we buy and sell commodities exactly how we would like?" Well the answer is simple and incredibly important. As much as free-marketeers would like us to believe that markets are supreme, the truth is fairly simple, as this question demonstrates, "Our values stand over and above markets, and markets must be held in service to our values rather than the other way around." And when markets fail to serve our values they must be changed or eliminated. Labor must not be treated as a commodity because people must not be treated like commodities. And if our values must be treated as supreme in relation to markets, the capitalist system itself (as most people understand it) must be questioned. A serious and real public discourse must be initiated about these problems before men like Harper take us back to the 'good old days' when children worked in factories. We must take back the discourse on values that the right has tried to colonize. Only then will we begin to win the struggle against modern neo-liberal barbarism.

It is in honor of my father that I will wage a more abstract political fight in the future. Not a struggle for the merely possible or a fight for what is expedient. But a fight for what is right at the most basic level. Harper and his bullies will no longer dehumanize me because our struggle must be for what is most inherently human.

The economic model and its victims. . . .

This morning on the CBC they were talking about a steel-workers’ strike. Not surprisingly the strike centered on the restructuring of pensions, an issue that has been inciting labour unrest all over the world in recent years. What struck me in particular was an interview with people around the community of the strike many of whom took the position, summed up by one interviewee, that “there is a new business model and people need to adjust to it, and if that means reductions in, or even elimination of, their pensions, that is just how it goes.” This position, though apparently widely held, strikes me as not only naïve but profoundly dangerous. It is naïve because it fails to recognize that business has always tried to undermine the power, the conditions, and the prosperity of workers. It was not that long ago in Western history that children worked in factories and mines and some workers were literally chained to their machines. And any effort to improve the wages or conditions of these workers, or to legislate the use of child labour, was met with terrifying predictions by business of economic disaster. These terrible conditions still prevail in many countries in the world and anyone who does not understand that business everywhere would be glad to bring back the bad old days is deeply naïve. Even where some people in business would find such regressive moves distasteful, they are structurally compelled to move whenever possible in this direction. What many people fail to understand is that what workers are actively pursuing are not just better conditions for themselves. Workers struggles are for all of us. Today we have rights to decent wages and working conditions because generations of union activists have struggled for these things. And every generation has been derided and cursed by many in the community while their victories have been enjoyed by all people in the labour force.

The prevailing opinion is dangerous because it fails to understand that it is not the people are not there to serve the economy, rather the economy is there to serve people. If we have an economic model that cannot provide adequate wages and decent pensions then it is the model that is wrong not the people. The simple fact is that the vast majority of wealth in every country and all over the world is in the hands of a very small group of people and there is plenty of wealth in the world for everyone to live a decent life and if someone claims that the model is changing in such a way that will not always, say, good wages, pensions, and a safe work environment, then the model must be changed. It is as simple as that. In the days when children worked in factories wealthy business people assured us that if we tried to change the business model it would just end in disaster. But here is the simple fact; the regions of the world which have seen the greatest number of regulations of such things as workers’ safety, environmental standards, and workers’ rights, as well as the strongest efforts at redistribution have seen the highest standards of living. The economics of this, and an idea that many would not like us to understand is that workers rights, high wages, and pensions, instead of being a drag on an economy are overall a impetuous to innovation. This has always been central to the development of capitalism. In fact capitalism grew in part out of the ravages of the black-death which made labour scarcer and more expensive, forcing innovations throughout the productive economy. When labour is expensive capitalists have been forced to innovate which has beneficial side effects for all of us. One of Marx’s most important insights was that the capitalist economy tends toward reification; that is the illusion that the economy is a set of relations between things and not between people. Capitalists will, of course, tell us that any efforts at changing the economic model will be disastrous. But the fact is that the economic model that exists today did not happen spontaneously, it was a creation of individuals acting quite consciously in particular ways. This is evident in the fact that we do not have a ‘free-market’ economy but a highly regulated economy the processes of which have been consciously designed to function in certain ways. The problem today is made more complex by the process of globalization. But it is still essentially the same problem and until people understand that we can make the economy serve the interests of everyone if we choose and as long as we let people promote the myth that the economic model is a force of its own then we will continue to be victims of the brutal self-interest of a small minority of wealthy and powerful people. It is a story as old as civilization which is rehashed for each generation but the struggle will and must continue.