Skip to main content

THE CAPITALIST ECONOMY VS SOCIAL WEALTH



by

Michael Laxer

May 7th 2020

People need to differentiate between two things...the needs of the capitalist economy versus what could be done collectively in countries like Canada with our social wealth.
It is absolutely true that with the system as designed now people are desperate to get back to work as they face destitution, homelessness and bankruptcy. It is also true that the capitalists want everything open and want us all back at work tomorrow.

Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead is their mantra and so it would be. They could not care less about the lives of workers and especially about the lives of those workers most likely to die...women, racialized workers, marginalized workers.

That those workers are far more likely to die is a FACT. That is already how it is playing out. Calls to rapidly reopen are INHERENTLY racist and misogynist, classist and colonialist. If you don't like that fact, I don't really care. People are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.

We, as a society, absolutely have the amassed social wealth to get through a pandemic without throwing workers, women, people of colour and marginalized communities into the death machine we are throwing them into.

We can absolutely afford to lockdown most industries, services, enterprises and to allow shopping for necessities in a disciplined and socialized way but we have, instead, constructed a society based on the needs of profit, individual consumerism, and vast inequality.

Under a socialized economy with socialized housing, transit, industry, wages, and "wealth" locking down for the interests of workers and public health would have been not simply much easier but would have been done without question and with the needs of the people placed first as they should be economically.

China and Vietnam, as well as Cuba, have provided glimpses of that, especially impressive for Cuba given the devastation of the embargo.
NEVER confuse the interests of the capitalist economy with the interests of the workers. They are NEVER the same. There is a reason that big business and capital want you back on the frontline to die for their money.

Never has the case for a socialized, planned economy been more easy, or more important, to make.

Instead of pandering to bullshit about fake bailouts or to crumbs tossed to workers or to demented narratives about "reopening" even if this will kill millions of working people, let's make THAT case instead.
Today. Now. Always. Solidarity.
 
Michael Laxer is the co-owner of Community Roots Books, Movies, Art & Games in Toronto. (https://www.ebay.ca/str/communityrootsmedia)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HOW THE COVID PANDEMIC HAS CHANGED PANHANDLING by Jim Ward

Panhandling, i.e., begging for small change on the street, has been under considerable threat since the coming of Covid. Of course, the practice has been under threat before whenever the good burgers of some city find that the poor have resorted to “inconveniencing” the public and they feel the “moral” need to criminalize it. But Covid is causing different constraints. In these times very few people carry cash with them. In fact, many retailers will not accept cash, since it may well be ‘dirty money’. The term panhandling had its origins, so I’m told, during an economic depression in the United States in the late 19th century. That depression hit the panhandle area of northern Texas particularly hard and it caused many workers to head to New York City, where the ‘Buddy can you spare a dime?’ request was given birth. The practitioners of this art became known as the panhandlers. Back in the early 1970s I conducted studies of panhandling approaches in six North American cities, one of th...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET: THE FATAL ERROR OF INDIVIDUALISM by Bill Lee

  I suspect I am not alone in remembering that I was taught in high school English class that Shakespeare’s great tragedy, Hamlet, was about a man who simply could not make up his mind to take action and get vengeance for the murder of his father. The lesson that Shakespeare was laying down for us, we were told, was that Hamlet dithered, was indecisive, and that his failure to act decisively led to his own downfall and the death of others. But that was, and is, a superficial reading of the play. I had the opportunity while at university in Houston, of studying under, and knowing, a very perceptive English professor and my mentor, who helped his students understand the real tragedy. It is one that has never left me and a teaching that I urge all of us to think about. What we learned in that English class was that the real tragedy of Hamlet was more social and political than personal. It was not simply that he was indecisive but that, more importantly, he refused to acknowledge and u...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bleak Times for Trump’s USA? by Bill Lee

“If we don’t put a stake into the heart of this administration, there  may not be an election in 2028.” Gavin Newsom, Governor of California The news from the US of A about the wild and weird pronouncements and actions of the abhorrent individual sitting in the most powerful seat in the land, DJ Trump, is bleak. There is his destructive mania for imposing tariffs on every nation in the world: his corrupt attempt to block public knowledge of the truth of the sordid matter of the Epstein files; his racist hatred of Brown and Black people and his inhumane policy of arresting them willy nilly and illegally deporting many; his war on the hard won rights of women and other minorities; his ignoring of court orders (he owns a more or less corrupt Supreme Court); his impossible and unhinged comments on wanting Canada to become the 51st state of the USA; and his increasingly wacky and garbled speech, are only the most recent concerns. But probably the most dangerous of his right-wing campaig...
Post a Comment
Read more