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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)

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