Imagine if nations acted like businesses...First of all, they'd all be dictatorships. If you complained, you would be told to that you're always free to go to another dictatorship. If you continued to show dissent, you would be deported.
Bigger nations would be considered better - "if they weren't a good country, they wouldn't be big". The USSR and red China would be admired for their success.
If this sounds far-fetched, take a look at how a corporation is run - no matter how much business media talks about how they love "markets" and "competition", companies don't have markets in them, and they don't compete against themselves. In fact, most corporations try to buy ("merge") their compeditors!
Corporations are really just controlled economies in minature - so really, if nations acted like businesses, we'd think ourselves free because we get to choose which communist dictatorship we live in!
"There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery.
In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee.
Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?" --Bob Black, _The Abolition of Work_
All business and capitalism is based on an imaginary concept called "property". Basically, property means that if someone tries to eat your bread, you can club him, or you can get the police come and club him. If someone wants to bake bread in your oven, you can shoot him. It doesn't matter if the oven was stolen - there's no "Santa Claus" keeping track of what "belongs" to whom. Basically, something is your property is anyone else touching it gets clubbed.
As a pacifist, I can't stand this idea. If there is an oven sitting empty, I want to bake bread in it. I don't want to make a contract with the owner of that oven, I don't want to give the bread to the owner and get minimum wage in return - I just want common sense. Authoritarians fill the world with imaginary things like "wages" "deflation" "interest" "stocks" and of course "money" - all of them are nothing but elves and brownies. People should use ovens to make bread - period.
What is MONEY?
mby boog highberger. This originally appeared in *The Gentle Anarchist*#15, Fall 1987y
Thinking about money in this society is like being a fish wondering about the nature of water. We build our lives around money, we live money, we breathe money, we swim in it like fish in the sea. Millions of people spend (so to speak) 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year doing nothing but playing with money-printing it, minting it, counting it, recounting it, taking it from here, sending it there, juggling it, smuggling it...sitting in offices in huge buildings making phone calls and shuffling bits of paper, adding & re-adding endless columns of numbers to make sure that they come out exactly the same...yeah, but...
"I don't know what money is today, and I don't think anybody at the Fed does either."Richard Pratt, Chairman of the Board of the Federal Home Loan Bank, 1982
Money is not an accident. Neither was it the "invention" of some particularly progressive culture or clever individual. Money in various forms has arisen independently, in different ages and on every continent wherever the local economy has evolved beyond the level of subsistence. Wherever there is surplus, trade inevitably follows, and primitive barter economies progress almost inevitably to money economies, as certain articles of recognized usefulness slowly come to symbolize wealth and are accepted at a fixed value. In an area where cattle are the common form of wealth, money is born when a cow comes to have the value of 1 cow, regardless of its size, weight, health, or other physical characteristics.
From there the process of abstraction continues: cattle come to be represented by tokens bearing pictures of cattle, the tokens evolve into coins symbolizing value in general, and on down to our own day where value is symbolized by marks on paper and the magnetic configurations of silicon wafers. And the inevitability of money is clear even in the present day. Wherever national governments have attempted to impose worthless currencies as the means of exchange, black markets dealing in "hard" currencies have arisen. This phenomenon perhaps reached the peak of absurdity in the 1970sin Communist Laos, where the official money of the country was the "kip", but the only money accepted by the Laotian government was the US dollar. The Soviet Union is the only country in the world where counterfeiting is a capital offense (so to speak).
Money is Inequality
John Locke thought that money arose before society, and that by its use people have consented to class society:"it is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they haying by a tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one, these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things, in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of Society, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver and tacitly agreeing in the use of Money."
Georg Simmel, writing two hundred years later, was not nearly so naive about the nature of money and society. Simmel recognized that money is "entirely a social institution", and said that "When barter is replaced by money transactions, a third factor is introduced between the two parties: the community as a whole, which provides a real value corresponding to money." Those who become "rich" are those who manage to monopolize big chunks of the social wealth for their own ends. Far from being a tacit agreement, this is done despite the sometimes violent resistance of those whose share of the social wealth is being taken away. The division of labor in society depends on a money economy. And so does capitalism. It's very hard to extract surplus value in a system based on barter exchange.
The growth of the state has gone hand in hand with the growth of the money economy- the emerging nation-states imposed taxes payable only in money, replacing taxes payable in kind and driving more and more people into alienated labor and the money economy. Like S. Herbert Frankel says, "a trustworthy, disciplined monetary system is indispensable for the free unfolding of the extended division of labor on which the growth of world economies depends... A reliable standard in which long-term debts can be expressed is indispensable for the growth of capital." So capitalists didn't invent money... but perhaps we can say that money invented capitalism. For once money has been born into the world it quickly begins to recreate the world in its own image.
Chrematophobia: Fear of Money.
Money Is Midas Like King Midas, money turns everything it touches to gold, or at least into commodities that can be exchanged for gold. Unique living beings become standardized things."Trade is the reduction and quantification of the world to commodity equivalents, the leveller of quality, skill, and concrete labor to numerical units that can be measured by time and money, clocks and gold." -Murray Bookchin
And as money itself becomes more abstract and divorced from concrete reality, so do the society and people that use it. As Simmel puts it, "The increasing replacement of metal money by paper money and the various forms of credit unavoidably react upon the character of money-in roughly the same way as in personal relations when somebody allows himself to be represented by others, so that finally he receives no greater esteem than is accorded his representatives...The idea that life is essentially based on intellect, and that intellect is accepted in practical life as the most valuable of our mental energies, goes hand in hand with the growth of a money economy."Money Is What Money Does" Featured on the back of the Swiss 1000-franc note, the highest valued item of currency in regular circulation in the world, is a figure of the Grim Reaper
.Money Is the Secret Name of All Things
In many ancient cultures, to know the name of something was to control it, to have power over it. In the Christian Bible, Adam is given authority over the animals of the world when God allows him to name them. In the underworld of the ancient Egyptians, the dead had to pass through a series of gates to reach the Kingdom of Osiris, the Land of the Blessed. The key to passing through each gate was to know the secret name of the gate and the secret name of the gatekeeper. Today everyone and everything has the same secret name: MONEY.
Money Is White Sugar
"What we call the primitive is a mature system with deep capacities for stability and protection built into it. In fact it seems to be able to withstand everything except white sugar and the money economy trading relationship; and alcohol, kerosene, nails, and matches." - Gary Snyder
Money is electricity: power stripped from its context and refined to its purest form. We have created elaborate networks for its circulation. We have devised ingenious instruments and mechanisms to let it do our work for us. It jumps through hoops at our command but it is no longer clear who is the master...
Money Is A Pyramid Scheme
It's highly appropriate that there's a picture of a pyramid on the back of the US dollar bill, because money is the original pyramid scheme. Here's how it works:
You go to work to help make something for the boss. At the end of the week you get a few pieces of paper that are a promise that somebody else will give you some stuff you want. So you worked all week for the promise of a promise. But where did the boss get the money to pay you? Well, either he sold the stuff that you had already made for him (and pocketed his share),or he "borrowed" it. And where did this "borrowed" money come from? From a bank. And where did the bank get it? From somebody like you, who had some money to save, who wanted to wait a while to cash in their promises. So the bank gives the money to the boss, who gives it back to you. And all thisworks just fine, most of the time. The only problem is when everyone wantsto cash in their promises all at once and they find out there are more promises than stuff. Every pyramid scheme eventually crashes, and when a pyramid scheme crashes somebody always gets burned. Guess who?
Money Is Sh*t
Freudian psychoanalysts equate money and feces. Ernest Bornemann says that "according to ancient Babylonian doctrine, gold was referred to as the 'feces of hell', and Theodor Reik mentions that the Aztecs used to call gold the 'feces of the gods'." Freudians also make a connection between money and guilt. Again according to Bornemann, "capital accumulation and indebtedness are as closely related as feces accumulation and feelings of guilt." Unfortunately Bornemann uses this sound base of symbolic insight as a jumping off point for some painfully goofy flights of imagination, as when he speculates that "there is no reason to assume that a desire for the private ownership of the means of production would have to persist in a socialist society with appropriate weaning and toilet training."
"Money is like muck, not good except it be spread." -Francis Bacon
The phrase "money doesn't smell" was coined by the Roman Emperor Vespasian who had taxed the collection of urine because the ammonia it contained was used by the Romans to do their laundry. The Roman Emperor Tiberius feared that he was made of feces, and forbade Romans to enter public toilets with rings or gold coins showing his portrait.
Money Is A Disease
A 1972 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found 21 different disease-causing microorganisms living on samples of paper money. 42% of the bills tested carried one or more of the pathogens. In medieval Russia, there existed silver coins so small that it was impossible to take them by hand from a table. When transactions took place, the buyer emptied his purse on the table, the amount to be paid was separated out, and both parties then picked up their share of the coins with their tongues and spat them into their respective purses.
Money Is Freedom,
Money Is Slavery;Money
Is Community,
Money Is Alienation
Yeah, and money is a paradox...
What money gives on one level ittakes away on another. Money frees us to realize our wildest desires-money is pure choice-but at the same time it binds us to a system of wage slavery in which we have to sell our time to survive. Money strengthens our connections to our fellow human by tying us into a system of production that makes us all mutually dependent... but at the same time it cheapens and destroys even the most intimate of our interpersonal relations by reducing them to the level of commodity exchanges. Locke celebrated the fact that "money... replaced the utter dependence on nature by a new dependence, a dependence on other individuals and on society." Locke looked forward to the promise of such freedom with an optimism that seems naive from our jaded 20th century perspective.
As Frankel explains it: "Today we have more freedom but are unable to enjoy it properly; money makes it possible to buy ourselves not only out of bonds with others but even out of bonds with our possessions. We develop a rootless search for ever new things because money is our only nexus with them. Money's abstract power to command anything ultimately seems to command nothing."
An important point to remember: In the face of short term economic upheaval, conservatives are correct to insist on accepting only gold and silver as"real" money, since they are relatively rare and can't be manufactured out of common materials by the government. But ultimately the value of gold and silver as money rests on faith and trust in the future, just like paper currency does. When the real crunch finally comes, it may be useful to remember that there are more calories in paper than in silver or gold. And here we come to yet another of the paradoxes of money: while money depends on trust at the personal level, that trust ultimately depends on the power of the issuing authority.
Our currency is backed not by the gold in Fort Knox but by the guns in Fort Knox. The value of money, whether gold or paper, ultimately rests on faith, and the value of the US dollar rests on the faith that the US domination of the world economy is backed by the US Army, Air Force, and Marines.
For several hundred years economists have recognized that our money has value "to the extent of our faith in a viable tomorrow." Thus it seems surprising that no economist has drawn a connection between the dawn of the nuclear era and the chronic inflation that has characterized the post-war economies of the industrial nations. Perhaps this can also help explain the willingness of both liberals and conservatives in this country to rack up huge federal deficits-what's so bad about stealing from tomorrow when there's not going to be a tomorrow?
Money Is Information
Money is information-the only problem is that it's not very much information. Commodities have no history. There are no tenses in the lenguage of money-prices are always now. Interest rates, stock prices, and commodity index futures all provide information about the economy and provide clues as to how to most efficiently organize society's resources. But as with prices, lots of information is lost in the translation of daily life into economic indicators. Countless facts about millions of people doing millions ofdifferent things get reduced to a few bits of data which are interpreted byeconomists like Chinese mystics prophesying from the pattern of I Chingsticks-all economics is voodoo economics. Through their interpretation of the magic signs, the best allocation of economic resources is determined-but best for who? Priests who prophesy against their masters usually don't have much job security...
This development is an inevitable consequence of the increasing abstraction of money. When money becomes intellectualized, intellectuals control money and the economy. And, as always, the intellectuals are controlled by the governments and corporations that sign their paychecks. And thus the productive forces of a society are organized to maintain the existing power relations of that society. Simmel again: "Money is thus one of the great cultural elements whose function it is to assemble great forces at a single point and so to overcome the passive and active opposition...by this concentration of energies. We should think of the machine in this context." Welcome to the machine...
"Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills." Clifford Odets"
When people have billions of times more money than others, it is not because one worked billions of times harder - it is because one used a system of violence to his advantage.
Business (capitalism) is based on owners making unfair deals with workers - when the owner goes to the opera, somebody has to pay for it.
Under capitalism workers aren't trading what they make for money - they are selling themselves (prostituting, if you will) for an amount of time. The deal is that they'll get paid if they obey the guy with the money, who is using his property (and the government, which protects his property) as a way to gain authority. Of course, it usually isn't the owner who's literally giving the orders - someone else is hired for this task - but in the end, the owner of the property calls all the shots concerning his property.
This authoritarian control alienates workers from their own work, and from themselves. Workers no longer govern themselves during work hours - that is, THEY ARE NOT FREE.
Capitalism makes human beings a commodity, like logs or fertilizer, if only for a certain amount of time. Basically, it's like temporary slavery. It is, as Proudhon said, an "outrage upon human dignity and personality." [_The Great Transformation_, p. 219]
Democracy considers work to be a source of pride and joy, a creative act that is part of being human. When a person's control of their work is taken from them, they are hurt, and most likely they will hate work. In some "primative" societies, there is/was no "incentive" to work - yet it always got done, because humans are humans.
Separating work from other activities of work causes bizarre results - for example, why is it when a cook works at a restaraunt and is paid, yet is not paid for doing the exact same thing at home? Thousands of years of common sense activity based on sharing and mutual aid are flushed down the toilet by wage labour.
In conclusion, capitalism claims it's about "economic freedom" - which is precisely what it is not. Economic freedom means working for yourself and those you co-operate with - not following a bosses dictates.
The same old lie is being repeated everywhere: "we'll all be rich if we eat the poor". We're told how much cheaper our cars and radios and handcuffs are, our cheap golden calves and human-hair shirts. They say it's because of the rich and their heroism. "It's good for the rich man to watch Lezarius starve" they say. There's a word for this, it's called "evil". Whenever you see someone trying to defend "those poor rich people" just translate it to what they really mean - "evil is good".
President Reagan told a joke, which I'll shorten:
I'm at a farm (eating pork) and I notice a three legged pig with three medals, so I ask about it. The farmer says that it saved his life once, then it saved his wife's life, then his son's life. "And a pig like that, well, you don't eat all at once!"
He claimed it was about "how collectivists treat those poor rich people". In fact he'd plagerized it from a socialist joke, with the pig being a worker and the farmer's family being management. Notice how suddenly the joke actually makes sense?
When human beings and their work gets turned into economic units, it's only natural that human ethics are replaced by the "ethics" of the account book, in which people are valued by how much they earn.
John Steinbeck on mathamatical ethics:
"Some of them [the owners] hated the mathematics that drove them [to kick the farmers off their land], and some were afraid, and some worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling" [_The Grapes of Wrath_, p. 34].
Murray Bookchin argues that it leads to a debasement of human values:
"[S]o deeply rooted is the market economy in our minds that its grubby language has replaced our most hallowed moral and spiritual expressions. We now 'invest' in our children, marriages, and personal relationships, a term that is equated with words like 'love' and 'care.' We live in a world of 'trade-offs' and we ask for the 'bottom line' of any emotional 'transaction.' We use the terminology of contracts rather than that of loyalties and spiritual affinities." [_The Modern Crisis_, p. 79]
With human values replaced by the ethics of calculation, and with only the laws of market and state "binding" people together, social breakdown is inevitable. As Karl Polyani argues, "in disposing of a [hu]man's labour power the [market] system would, incidently, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity '[hu]man' attached to that tag." [Op. Cit., p. 73]
Little wonder modern capitalism has seen a massive increase in crime and dehumanisation under the freer markets established by "conservative" governments, such as those of Thatcher and Reagan and their transnational corporate masters. One can't help but wonder where the "primative" societies managed to hide all of their crime and insanity.
Basically, the hiearchy of values in capitalism puts human beings down below property and commodities (logs and fertilizer, as mentioned above). An property owner is no different than any other human, yet they use that property to control humans.
Capitalism only values a person as representing a certain amount of the commodity called "labour power," in other words, as a *thing*. Instead of being valued as an individual -- a unique human being with intrinsic moral and spiritual worth -- only one's price tag counts. (What's the difference between a Chinese political prisoner in a gulag and a unionized American again?)
Through capitalism all social relationships -- and so, ultimately, *all* individuals-- are commodified. In capitalism, literally nothing is sacred-- "everything has its price" -- be it dignity, self-worth, pride, honour -- all become commodities up for grabs.
Erich Fromm: "The conflict between capital and labour is much more than the conflict between two classes, more than their fight for a greater share of the social product. It is the conflict between two principles of value: that between the world of things, and their amassment, and the world of life and its productivity." [_The Sane Society_, pp. 94-95]
The amount of insanity and inefficiency caused by this system is probably impossible to guess. For an example, I will focus on one particular insanity, "consumerism", when people try to fill an empty void in their soul through the hording of property. Of course, objects can't replace freedom, so more is gathered, and more.
This process is, of course, encouraged by the advertising industry, which tries to convince us to buy what we don't need because it will make us popular/sexy/happy/free/etc. Of course, it doesn't - freedom and popularity cannot be bought (and if they could, nobody would sell them!). We only feel free when (gasp) we actually are free.
Of course, this is not an argument against wealth - it's just a statement that freedom and humanity is better than wealth. Most wealth is good ( "Most", because bombs and slaves are wealth), and some wealth, like gold bars, is useless, and shouldn't have been worked for. Democracy will create more wealth, through efficiency and the actual enjoyment of work, and will make that wealth go farther, through sharing etc.
According to the _British Medical Journal_ "what matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed. The more equally wealth is distributed the better the health of that society," [Vol. 312, April 20, 1996, p. 985]
Research in the USA found overwhelming evidence of this. George Kaplan and his colleagues measured inequality in the 50 US states and compared it to the age-adjusted death rate for all causes of death, and found a pattern: the more unequal the distribution of wealth (measured in income), the greater the death rate.(Early death, that is) In other words, it is the gap between rich and poor, and not the average income in each state, that best predicts the death rate in each state. ["Inequality in income and mortality in the United States: analysis of mortality and potential pathways," _British Medical Journal_ Vol. 312, April 20, 1996, pp. 999-1003]
Other effects were studied as well. The more unequal states also had more people in jail, higher murder and violent crime rates, less people with medical insurance, more babies born underweight, and higher per person costs for medical care and police protection. They spent less per person on education, had less books in their schools, and worse reading and math skills, and lower high school completion rates.
Remember, these aren't poorer states, they're just states with a bigger gap between rich and poor! While the poor have worse housing, food, and medical care, and live in areas with worse pollution, these problems are made worse, most likely by the psychological hardship of being low down on the social ladder. [see George Davey Smith, "Income inequality and mortality: why are they related?" _British Medical Journal_, Vol. 312 (April 20, 1996), pp. 987-988]
The poor are not the only victims of this system. Authoritarians must alienate themselves in order to keep their illusion of superiority ("it's lonely at the top"). Rich people are corrupted (read about the lives of Roman emporors and their families) and become spoiled and apathetic.
They respond to this boredom by trying to get more wealth than they can possibly use to make their lives more enjoyable. Eventually the excess money is spent on conspicuous consumption, like massive guilded mansions that are never visited, and end up cold and lonely.
One of the key ideas of democracy is that true wealth is in relationships, freedom, love etc. ("The best things in life are free"). Authoritarians don't like this, because they only profit if people work. They consider a miserable nation with skyscrapers superior to a happy one without - after all, they get profit when people make things, not when people actually enjoy themselves!
For this reason authoritarians try to artificially raise the value of objects, while destroying relationships and freedom, which they cannot profit from.
Does capitalism satifsy human needs?
If a company actually satisfied its costomers, it would go out of business, because those costomers would have no reason to come back. When business types talk about satisfied consumers, they don't mean permanently satisfied, they mean satisfaction in the way of a junkie who's just got a "fix" - Crack is a good consumer product, Utopia is not.
If the goal of business was about actually doing its job, instead of making money, the world's products and lifestyles would be greater than anything we can imagine - but the only way to get business to do its job is to get rid of capitalism. The art of capitalism is to addict, to satisfy only as much as a drug "fix" satisfies a junkie.
"According to [capitalists], if an industry or an institution is making a profit, it is satisfying "wants" whose origins and content are deliberately disregarded. But what we want, what we are capable of wanting is relative to the forms of social organization.
People "want" fast food because they have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn't taste much better anyway, because the nuclear family (for the dwindling minority who have even that to go home to) is too small and too stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating -- and so forth. It is only people who can't get what they want who resign themselves to want more of what they can get. Since we cannot be friends and lovers, we wail for more candy." --Bob Black, _Smokestack Lightning_
What capitalism DOES do is advertise. A lot. A tiny example:
"Overworked? Underpaid? Relax, you can still afford a great haircut"
"A woman's work is never done ...etc." - Ads for a chain (Mcdonald's style) barber. How do you translate this message? "Forget freedom and human dignity, forget even women's lib - services are cheap!" I can't help but wonder what the barbers (or rather, "haircutters") think of this ad - after all, they're obviously overworked and underpaid themselves, in order to pay for all of these ads while keeping prices low.
A billboard with a massive Whiskey bottle and the caption: "Actual size (too bad)". What a thing to see while driving! Road casuallties among Americans alone are the same as an annual Vietnam war, and we're meant to be dreaming of alcohol by the gallon as we drive?
Companies have learned the effective capitalist way of listening to their customers. Back in the days of inefficiency, they would do expensive things like improving products. Now they know better, and simple change their advertising. In the 80's everything was "low fat" or even "fat free". In the 90's the result has been mountains of "green" and "ethical" products, services, and investments.
From _Eat the State_: "[Coffee] comes courtesy of the self-congratulatory Thanksgiving, or Equal Exchange, an outfit in Boston which, as its name suggests, claims it has smoothed out the inequitable wrinkles in the coffee trade between the Third World and the First.
The coffee is perhaps consumed at a table made of choice hardwood certified as having been harvested under "sustainable" forest practices. The coffee machine is powered by "green electricity" offered by Working Assets. And who knows? The coffee pot was perhaps acquired with a Nation credit card...For every decision in the liberal day, there's a certificate of good behavior being flaunted by some of the most disgusting corporations on earth.
Which gas station to patronize? Dimly, into the mind of our person of good will, comes the memory that the World Wildlife Fund last year nominated Shell Oil as a company of conscience for its drilling procedures in British Columbia. Buying a car? Don't buy American and feel good about it too. Our person of good conscience may opt for a costly Mitsubishi 4-wheeler, nourished by the recollection that Rainforest Action network last year issued its imprimatur to two Mitsubishi subsidiaries for agreeing not to use old growth timber as material for its packaging and pallets.
There's nothing wrong with rewarding businesses for decent behavior. The trouble is that the hucksterism so rarely gets questioned, and the good behavior consists in promising to mug two old ladies instead of three.
Take Equal Exchange. Here is a non-profit in Massachusetts which makes the very big claim that it is rectifying the iniquities of First/Third World trade in coffee beans. "Feed your soul as well as your body," the outfit's ad proclaims in the New Yorker, raising the battle standard of fairness. They buy "direct" from small farmers, they say, eliminating the middleman.
No, they haven't. They've taken over the function of "conscience" middleman from the ordinary first-world coffee brokers and there's really very little evidence that the Third World growers, as opposed to the soul-fed coffee drinkers at First World tables, do better because Equal Exchange is doing the brokering. They buy from grower co-ops, Equal Exchange boasts. But so do ordinary First World coffee brokers, paying the same prices.
But if Equal Exchange is having little or no impact on conditions of production in the Third World, it certainly is having an effect, a baneful one, on small local businesses across America. Equal Exchange flies a buyer from a First World co-op grocery store on a two week jaunt to Costa Rica, courtesy of the American taxpayer; the group tours the coffee fincas and a good time is had by all. On return, the buyer might expand the coffee rack of Equal Exchange, with bins provided by Equal Exchange. This means less business for the small local roaster, local sales people, and local distributors. Lo and behold, what do we have but the Conscience Industry's equivalent of General Foods or Proctor and Gamble, with the non-profit's executives scarcely paying themselves starvation salaries.
"Sustainable" logging practices, yielding lumber for that virtuous coffee table? Start with the word "sustainable." These days fundraisers and grantwriters string it round each sentence like an adjectival fannypack, bulging with self-congratulation. Mostly, the term is meaningless or a vague expression of hope. In the case of timber, it's a haphazard and often highly debatable designation that amounts to little more than a vague pledge that the timber is not virgin old growth.
Working Assets' offer of "green" power has been an astounding piece of effrontery, since the consumer has not the slightest way of knowing whether the electricity thus provided comes from solar or nuclear, or hydro or coal burning generating stations. The Nation's credit card offers a low interest charge, to be sure, but you'd better not be late with your payments.
Imagine singling out a major oil company as morally in good standing! It's far less rational than pumping Amoco's gas because Johnny Cash stands behind the product. At least that's an aesthetic decision. World Wildlife thus singled out for praise Shell last year, the same oil company in whose interests, absent any bleat of protest by Shell, Nigerian generals hanged Ken Saro Wiwa and his companions. And imagine giving Mitsubishi, as Rainforest Action Network did, the opportunity for this prime destroyer of Asian forests the chance to hang a "good behavior" sign around its neck."
Is capitalism efficient?
At a tremanedous cost in labour and capital, humanity struggles to remove a basically useless metal from under the earth. We then form it into pure bars, and then what do we do? We put it in deep in safes, back under the ground again.
How about advertising? Check out the latest statistics on this one...But in fact, by capitalist logic advertising is good, because it creates demand. When a child screams because s/he wants an expensive toy, and the parent slaves away to get enough money to buy it, and the child, instead of playing with it, demands another, that's GOOD!
Generally, capitalism means efficiency for the producers, but massive inefficiency for the consumers. Every middle class house has "junk" in our garages, atticks, and basements. A block with ten middle-class homes will have ten lawnmowers etc.
Wage labourers have no reason to be efficient. They are paid for working, not for actully getting things done. If they discover a new technique that needs less workers, they won't tell anyone!
But aren't rich people good because there's no crime in rich niebourhoods?
Don't laugh, this is actually an argument I saw in a newspaper, from a right-wing think-tank. Whatever billionaries paid this think-tank sure aren't getting their money's worth!
For those who are white, richly dressed, or able to outrun security guards and kitten-fed attack dogs, rich niebourhoods are quite safe.
Of course the rich commit crime (in the literal, sense possetion of stolen property not included) but for them it is "white-collar", or, to put it bluntly, just plain white. Corporate criminals steal and kill from a distence - through fraud, monopoly, low safety standards, pharmecitical drug dealing etc. It's the difference between using a bayonet and firing an artillery gun. Since all of the victims are in other niebourhoods, the rich must be nice fellows.
This argument is like saying that all those folks in the Warsaw ghetto should have converted to Nazism because there are so few beatings in Hitler's cottage. It is pathetic, but it follows the right-wing think-tanker's motto: if you can't convince them, confuse them!
This is like the right-wing argument that if we all acted like Hong Kong (which isn't totally capitalist anyway, but that's irrelevent) we'd all be as rich as Hong Kong. A parallel to this argument is that is we all build vaults in our basements, we'll be as rich as any bank. In any society you can't have all people being stock market wizards or CEOs of software companies with the initials MS - somebody has to scrub the toilets. And in capitalism, there has to be a majority of workers to be profited from. Right-wingers get us drooling with their Forbes magazines and their worship of riches - yet without some massive technological breakthrough, every person on earth will not be able actually create billions of dollar's worth of wealth with any tools.
Capitalism is like a lottery - it's obvious that the vast majority lose. Yet lottery ads always show the winner, just like Forbes and other propaganda - they don't show the losers, the ones from which the winner's money came from.
Is taxation theft?
Property is theft. Since taxation is when a person owes their government property, it is still theft - it's merely a case of disonor among theives.
However, there's a diffence between taxation in a dictatorship and taxation in a half-democracy (though right-wingers consider all governments to be dictatorships, because the rich cannot buy extra votes - they only get one vote like everyone else, which doesn't account for their super-human status.)
In a dictatorship, taxation can be considered theft even if property isn't. However, in a half-democracy, the people (in theory) have decided that a certain amount of private property should become public property. When the taxman comes, the transation is already over - the vote has already decided what is property of whom (Again, in theory). When the "man with a gun" comes to force the money out of the taxee, it has already been public property for a long time - therefore it is the withholder of taxes that is the thief (but only in a true democracy).
If a government ordered a parent to buy food (which costs money) for their starving baby, right-wingers would consider this "gunpoint robbery". A righteous parent, says the capitalist, would tell their hungry infant to quit being lazy and start an acting career!
As brackets express, I find this whole argument moot, seeing that property itself is thievery and is incompatible with true democracy - though it's a great example of just how low capitalists are willing to sink.
What is Laissez-fare?
It sounds intelligent because it's in a foreign language. What's its translation? "Lemme lone you cottinpikkin [representative of the people, at least in theory]" Yet business doesn't leave the government alone, and it sure doesn't leave the people alone. Business propagandists call us at dinner, send us literally tons of mail, and control every source of information we have. (Television, newspapers, radio - it all depends for survival upon advertising. It all depends for survival on the successful brainwashing of the people. Just imagine, someday even our senses might be filled with advertising - we might buy brain-helpers that make us think faster and remember more - except that a third of our thoughts will be commercials...)
"Economic freedom" means freedom for those that own economies. Take a look at the example:
Here's what authoritarians and their "economic freedom" did to New Zealand, from 1985 to 1995:
Among the goodies brought by this "free market revolution":
Was it worth it? Sure, if you like to create human misery to get low inflation, corporations that don't pay taxes, and a new class of millionaires.
The whole thing was thought up by a tiny minority (about 15 people!), called the "Wednesday club", made up of government officials, politicians and spokesmen, who spread fear of a "debt wall" and "currency crisis" whatever that's supposed to be. What people needed was a "free market revolution" (should we bring out the molotov cocktails?). Their slogan was "There is no alternative" which was parroted by the Canadian conservative government under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Watch out Americans - you might see your leaders joining in the chorus sometime soon.
What's especially scary is that Sir Roger Douglas, the finance minister who designed the whole New Zealand catastrophe, now advises for a Canadian provincial (State) government, while other politicians talk about New Zealand's disaster as a good thing (for the rich and/or sadistic, it is). Meanwhile, the Canadian business press use the same strategies as the government that ruined New Zealand - talking about an evil debt and currency crisis and other nasties. The "liberal" mainstream press offered no dissent, questioning nothing.
(This just in: New Zealand Employment Minister Peter McCardle says the decline in the Asian markets has caused the job losses. What he conveniently forgets is that the Asian crisis didn't start in 1984, or that the rich are somehow getting surviving this "crisis".)
Since racism, sexism and homophobia (hatred of homosexuals, mainly based on fear) . The primary cause of these three evil attitudes is ideologies that justify (and demand!) domination and exploitation, in other words, "theories" that "justify" and "explain" oppression and injustice. As Tacitus said, "We hate those whom we injure." Those who oppress others always find reasons to regard their victims as "inferior" and hence deserving of their fate. Elites need some way to justify their superior social and economic positions. Since the social system is obviously unfair and elitist, attention must be distracted to other, less inconvenient, "facts," such as alleged superiority based on biology or "nature." Therefore, doctrines of sexual, racial, and ethnic superiority will always be inevitable in hierarchical, class-stratified societies.
1. Racism
In ancient times there is no record of people even taking notice of race, even when there was slavery. The beginning of racism was in early capitalist development in both America and Europe, which was strengthened by the bondage of people, particularly those of African descent. In the Americas, Australia andother parts of the world the slaughter of the original inhabitants and the "Inheritence" of their land was also a key aspect in the growth of capitalism
So basically, racism is a tool useful for those profiting from of cheap labour at home and imperialism abroad.
As foreign nations are crushed by force, it is very convientent to say that the dominant nation owes its mastery to its "racial" characteristics. Thus imperialists have frequently appealed to the Darwinian doctrine of "Survival of the Fittest" to give their racism a basis in "nature."
In Europe, one of the first theories of racial superiority was proposed by Gobineau in the 1850s to establish the "natural right" of the aristocracy to rule over France. He claimed that the French aristocracy was originally of Germanic origin while the "masses" were Gallic or Celtic, and that sincethe Germanic race was "superior", the aristocracy had a natural right to rule. Although the French "masses" didn't find this theory particularly persuasive, it was later used as "evidence" by proponents of German expansion and became the origin of German racial ideology, used to justify Nazi oppression and murder of Jews and other "non-Aryans". Notions of the "white man's burden" and "Manifest Destiny" developed at about the same time in England and America, and were used to rationalise Anglo-Saxon conquest and world domination on a "humanitarian" basis.
The idea of racial superiority was also found to have great domestic utility for authoritarians. As Paul Sweezy points out, "[t]he intensification of socialconflict within the advanced capitalist countries. . . has to be directed as far as possible into innocuous channels -- innocuous, that is to say, from the standpoint of capitalist class rule. The stirring up of antagonisms along racial lines is a convenient method of directing attention away from class struggle," which of course is dangerous to ruling-class interests [_Theory of Capitalist Development_, p. 311].
In others words, employers have often deliberately nutured racism among workers as a "divide and rule strategy.
Racism (like other forms of bigotry) can be used to split and divide the working class by getting people to blame others of their class for the conditions they all suffer. Thus white workers are subtly encouraged, for example, to blame unemployment on blacks instead of capitalism, crime on Hispanics instead of poverty. In addition, discrimination against racial minorities and women has the full sanction of capitalist economics, "for inthis way jobs and investment opportunities can be denied to the disadvantaged groups, their wages and profits can be depressed below prevailing levels, and the favoured sections of the population can reap substantial material rewards." [Ibid.]
Thus capitalism has continued to benefit from its racist heritage. Racism has provided pools of cheap labour for capitalists to draw upon (blacks still, usually, get paid less than whites for the same work) and permitted a section of the population to be subjected to worse treatment, so increasing profits by reducing working conditions and other non-pay related costs.
All this means that blacks are "subjected to oppression and exploitation on the dual grounds of race and class, and thus have to fight the extra battles against racism and discrimination." [Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, _Anarcho-syndicalists of the world unite_]
2. Sexism
Sexism had always been "natural" - it was always assumed that a woman was the property of her husband (though this attitude has been conviently forgotten by "family-values" authoritarians). As Carole Pateman notes, until "the late nineteenth century the legal and position of a wife resembled that of a slave. . . A slave had no independent legal existence apart from his master, and husband and wife became 'one person,' the person of the husband." [_The Sexual Contract_, p. 119] Indeed, the law "was based on the assumption that a wife was (like) property" and only the marriage contract "includes the explicit commitment to obey." [Ibid., p. 122, p. 181]
However, as soon as women started to question the assumptions of male domination, numerous theories were developed to explain why women's oppression and domination by men was "natural." Because men enforced their rule over women by force, men's "superiority" was argued to be a "natural" product of their gender, which is associated with greater physical strength ("might makes right"). In the 17th century, it was claimed that women were more like animals than men, thus "proving" that it was righteous to treat women women like sheep. More recently, authoritarians have embraced socio-biology in response to the growing women's movement. By "explaining" women's oppression on biological grounds, a social system run by men and for men could be continued.
Women's subservient role has a massive economic value for capitalism Women often provide necessary (and unpaid) labour which keeps the (usually) male worker in good condition; and it is primarily women who raise the next generation of wage-slaves (again without pay) for capitalist owners to exploit. Moreover, women's subordination gives working-class men someone to look down upon and, sometimes, a convenient target on whom they can take out their frustrations (instead of stirring up trouble at work). As Lucy Parsons pointed out, a working class woman is "a slave to a slave." It is estimated that women do 60% of the world's work, while getting 10% of the pay and owning 1% of the property.
3. Homophobia
The oppression of lesbians, gays and bisexuals is linked with sexism. A patriarchal, capitalist society cannot see homosexual practices as the normal human variations they are because they blur that society's rigid gender roles and sexist stereotypes. Most young gay people keep their sexuality to themselves for fear of being kicked out of home and all gays have the fear that some "straights" will try to kick their sexuality out of them if they express their sexuality freely.
Gays are not oppressed on a whim but because of the specific need of capitalism for the nuclear family. The nuclear family, as the primary - and inexpensive - creator of submissive people (growing up within the authoritarian family gets children used to, and "respectful" of, hierarchy and subordination) as well as provider (providing victims to vent frustration on, for example) for the workforce fulfils an important need for capitalism. Alternative sexuality represent a threat to the family model because they provide a different (equal!) role model for people. After all, in a straight marriage the man can be the authoritarian (admitted by Southern Baptists, silently accepted by other capitalists) but what happens to the pecking order when there's two, or none? This means that gays are going to be in the front line of attack whenever capitalism wants to reinforce "family values" (i.e. submission to a pecking order, "tradition", "morality" and so on). The introduction of Clause 28 in Britain is a good example of this, with the government making it illegal for public bodies to promote gay sexuality (i.e. to present it as anything other than a perversion). Therefore, the oppression of people based on their sexuality will not end until hierarchy is eliminated.
Bigotry is wrong morally, but that's not enough to keep opportunists away from it. However, for the literal majority, theirs is no advantage.
Sexism, racism and homophobia divide the working class, which means that whites, males and heterosexuals hurt themselves by maintaining a pool of low-paid competing labour, ensuring low wages for their own wives, daughters, mothers, relatives and friends. Such divisions create inferior conditions and wages for all as capitalists gain a competitive advantage using this pool of cheap labour, forcing all capitalists to cut conditions and wages to survive in the market (in addition, such social hierarchies, by undermining solidarity against the employer on the job and the state possibly create a group of excluded workers who become scabs during strikes). Also, "privileged" sections of the working class lose out because their wages and conditions are less than those which unity could have won them. Only the boss really wins.
This can be seen from research into this subject. The researcher Al Szymanski sought to systematically and scientifically test the proposition that white workers gain from racism ["Racial Discrimination and White Gain", in _American Sociological Review_, vol. 41, no. 3, June 1976, pp. 403-414].
He compared the situation of "white" and "non-white" (i.e. black, Native American, Asian and Hispanic) workers in United States and found several key things:
(1) the narrower the gap between white and black wages in an American state, the higher white earnings were relative to white earnings elsewhere. This means that "whites do not benefit economically by economic discrimination. White workers especially appear to benefit economically from the *absence* of economic discrimination. . . both in the absolute level of their earnings *and* in relative equality among whites." [p. 413] In other words, the less wage discrimination there was against black workers, the better were the wages that white workers received.
(2) the more "non-white" people in the population of a given American State, the more inequality there was between whites. In other words, the existence of a poor, oppressed group of workers reduced the wages of white workers, although it did not affect the earnings of non-working class whites very much("the greater the discrimination against [non-white] people, the greater the inequality among whites" [p. 410]). So white workers clearly lost economically from this discrimination.
(3) He also found that "the more intense racial discrimination is, the lower are the white earnings *because* of . . . [its effect on] working-class solidarity." [p. 412] In other words, racism economically disadvantages white workers because it undermines the solidarity between black and white workers and weakens trade union organisation.
So overall, racist white workers think they are gaining some advantage from racism, but are in fact screwed by it. Thus racism and other forms of hierarchy actually works against the interests of those working class people who practice it -- and, by weakening workplace and social unity, benefits the ruling class.
In addition, a wealth of alternative viewpoints, insights, experiences, cultures, thoughts and so on are denied the racist, sexist or homophobe. Their minds are trapped in a cage, stagnating within a mono-culture -- and stagnation is death for the personality. Such forms of oppression are dehumanising for those who practice them, for the oppressor lives as a *role*, not as a person, and so are restricted by it and cannot express their individuality *freely* (and so do so in very limited ways). This warps the personality of the oppressor and impoverishes their own life and personality. Homophobia and sexism also limits the flexibility of all people, gay or straight, to choose the sexual expressions and relationships that are right for them. The sexual repression of the sexist and homophobe will hardly be good for their mental health, their relationships or general development.
Oppression based on race, sex or sexuality will remain forever intractable under capitalism or, indeed, under any economic system based on domination and exploitation. While individual members of "minorities" may prosper, bigotry as a justification for inequality is too useful a tool for authoritarians to discard. By using the results of racism (e.g. poverty) as a justification for racist ideology, criticism of the status quo can, yet again, be replaced by nonsense about "nature" and "biology." Similarly with sexism or discrimination against gays.
The long-term solution is obvious: dismantle capitalism and the hierarchical, economically class-stratified society with which it is bound up. By getting rid of capitalist oppression and exploitation and its consequent imperialism and poverty, we will also eliminate the need for ideologies of racial or sexual superiority used to justify the oppression of one group by another or to divide and weaken the working class.
As part of that process, all people should encourage and support all sections of the population to stand up for their humanity and individuality by resisting racist, sexist and anti-gay activity and challenging such views in their everyday lives, everywhere (as Carole Pateman points out, "sexual domination structures the workplace as well as the conjugal home" [Op. Cit., p. 142]). It means a struggle of all working class people against the internal and external tyrannies we face -- we must fight against own our prejudices while supporting those in struggle against our common enemies, no matter their sex, skin colour or sexuality. Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin words on fighting racism are applicable to all forms of oppression:
"Racism must be fought vigorously wherever it is found, even if in our own ranks, and even in ones own breast. Accordingly, we must end the system of white skin privilege which the bosses use to split the class, and subject racially oppressed workers to super-exploitation. White workers, especially those in the Western world, must resist the attempt to use one section of the working class to help them advance, while holding back the gains of another segment based on race or nationality. This kind of class opportunism and capitulationism on the part of white labour must be directly challenged and defeated. There can be no workers unity until the system of super-exploitation and world White Supremacy is brought to an end." [Op. Cit.]
Progress towards equality can and has been made. While it is still true that (in the words of Emma Goldman) "[n]owhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex" [Op. Cit., p. 145] and that education is still patriarchal, with young women still often steered away from traditionally "male" courses of study and work (which teaches children that men and women are assigned different roles in society and sets them up to accept these limitations as they grow up) it is also true that the position of women, like that of blacks and gays, *has* improved. This is due to the various self-organised, self-liberation movements that have continually developed throughout history and these are *the* key to fighting oppression in the short term (and creating the potential for the long term solution of dismantling capitalism and the state).
Emma Goldman argued that emancipation begins "in [a] woman's soul." Only by a process of internal emancipation, in which the oppressed get to know their own value, respect themselves and their culture, can they be in a position to effectively combat (and overcome) external oppression and attitudes. Only when you respect yourself can you be in a position to get others to respect you. Those men, whites and heterosexuals who are opposed to bigotry, inequality and injustice, must support oppressed groups and refuse to cooperate with racist, sexist or homophobia attitudes.
This equality means that only if each worker is a free and independent unit, co-operating with the others from his or her mutual interests, can the whole labour organisation work successfully and become powerful." [Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Op. Cit.] For example, gay and lesbian groups supporting the 1984/5 UK miners' strike resulted in such groups being given pride of place in many miners' marches.
We must all treat people as equals, while at the same time respecting their differences. Diversity is a strength and a source of joy - we should reject the lie that equality means conformity.
Needless to say, anarchists totally reject the kind of "equality" that accepts other kinds of hierarchy, that accepts the dominant priorities of capitalism and the state and accedes to the devaluation of relationships and individuality in name of power and wealth. There is a kind of "equality" in having "equal opportunities," in having black, gay or women bosses and politicians, but one that misses the point. Saying "Me too!" instead of "What a mess!" does not suggest real liberation, just different bosses and new forms of oppression. We need to look at the way society is organised, not at the sex or nationality of whoever is giving the orders and whipping the slaves!
Take this case from kindly old England:
On 16th November 1986, Satpal Ram went out to eat at a restaurant in Lozells, Birmingham, UK. He was racially abused by a group of six white people at another table, one of whom (3 inches taller than Satpal) broke a glass and stabbed him in the face with it. Satpal managed to push his attacker away, but was stabbed again in the face and arms. In fear of his life and unable to escape, he defended himself with a small knife he used for work. After the melee they were brought to a hospital, the racist aggressor refused medical treatment and (obviously) died, causing Satpal to be sentenced to life imprisonment as a "high-risk" offender.. (This is what conservatives call "getting tough on crime"). In Twelve years he has been transferred more than 50 times (about once every two months), making it difficult for his family, friends and supports to find him.
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