What to Do?

I was just reading a series of articles about the tragic results of the monstrously cynical treatment of the Palestinians (catch it here and here) and I was thinking about posting something about, you know, what the hell can ordinary people do to stop our leaders from causing one atrocity after another.

Then, I thought that I really didn't know what to say. So I thought that my blog entry for the day would be based on whatever was the top story at the CBC. Which turned out to be:

"After five quiet years, an explosion of refugees in 2006"

At the end of 2005, there were roughly 21 million people in the world on the move — refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons — forced from their homes because of war, famine or persecution. A year later that number had spiked to 33 million, an increase of 56 per cent, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in a just-published report.

I don't know why people are still fleeing Vietnam in such large numbers. Perhaps a right-winger can pontificate about the relentless evil of Vietnam's communist overlords and how this is the result of the defeat of the benevolent, capitalist West.

Except that thesis would really be blown all to shit by the fact that a large part of this international refugee crisis explosion comes from worsening conditions in Gaza (links above); The continually-increasing violence and misery in Afghanistan; US meddling in Somalia, and the charnel house that Iraq has become.

Even if Vietnam's huge refugee creation has something to do with their communist government, there is no way in hell that we here in the West can venture to say that we are a better option for the people of the world.

It's not as if we can hold our heads high about the situations in Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, or The People's Republic of the Congo, either. In those countries, we either backed super-corrupt despots who bled their countries dry until they were overthrown, or we armed perpetual insurgencies that wasted scarce resources and turned governments into authoritarian paranoids, or we imposed IMF programs that exacerbated poverty and enflamed ethnic tensions (that were themselves vestiges of imperialist-colonialist policies).

There are people in the West, "liberals," or "progressives" (and by this I'm including "social-democrats" like Canada's NDP, and European left and green party supporters) who believe that our system works. That while right-wing idiot parties, such as the US Republicans, or Canada's CPC, are horrid, that we have the democratic power to oust these parties and replace them with more moderate, sensible alternatives.

Even those who are aware of the delusion behind this belief (as those who elected Democrats in the 2006 mid-term elections, only to find out that this "anti-war" party was all rhetoric are finding out), there's still the belief that "Oh well, this is terrible, but it's still possible to work within the system to limit the damage and effect change in the wider society.

This sort of thinking is, I think, to a great degree inspired by the inability of even the most sensitive people to fully grasp the horrors that we've unleashed, and will continue to unleash, upon the people of the Global South. "It really is happening somewhere, far away. And don't we all see these refugees in our countries, starting life over again, in conditions far more peaceful?"

We don't really grasp the enormity of the hunger, the starvation even, the fear, the cold, the sadness and misery, the psychological scars of these people fleeing from rapist warlords, and our own militaries' air-strikes, and our own soldiers' bloodlust. (Think the US in Iraq if you're a shit-head starting to seethe because I'm dissing "the troops.") And we forget that the people who manage to get to the rich countries that have visited this upheaval upon them, where they can take shitty jobs and go through a cruel and humiliating process of applying for status and be condemned by racist morons for stealing jobs and living off welfare, are merely a trickle from the ocean of people condemned to filthy, dangerous camps. These camps are often in countries that are desperately poor themselves, but these countries are expected to support these numbers with fitful foreign aid and their own resources which are a fraction of ours, the people who caused the problems in the first place.

No, ... between 2005 and 2007, 10 million, ten million, 10,000,000 extra refugees were created in the world, and many millions of human beings have found themselves in this desperate condition because of us.

I have called for peaceful revolutionary change through the democratic process. Through breaking the power of capitalism to manipulate and distort government policies in the West by increasing the power of workers within their workplaces. This really seems to me to be critical and essential. We will not bring an end to this system of horror without radical, sweeping change. And it is a horrible system. It is a system that depends upon, relies upon, media manipulation, lowering living standards in the wealthy countries, propping-up dictatorships in the resource colonies of the South, both with our tax dollars and the bullets and death-squads that our tax dollars support. It is a system that occasionally sees the recourse to war and invasion in order to maintain itself.

Let's consider Iraq, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan. These were wars fought for control of oil. Iraq, the second-largest proven reserves of easily-obtainable Middle East oil was set to switch from pricing its oil in US dollars to Euros. This would have had an adverse effect on the US currency, which is threatened by US trade and current account deficits, which are to a large degree a cost of the "globalization" that has seen the dismantling of US industry in exchange for manufacturing capacity in poor countries where labour is cheaper. Inequality has grown within the US, and the trade balance is negative and unsustainable, but the owners of capital benefit from exchanging "expensive" domestic labour for cheap sweat-shop labour in the "developing" countries. Furthermore, the system depends on cheap fuel, for our unsustainable consumerist economy, and for the central importance of the automobile society.

Because of this, Iraq and Afghanistan have been invaded, their peoples traumatized, our hands drenched with blood. (Statements about WMDs, bush II's desire to bring "democracy" to the Middle East, the hunt for the evil Taliban or Osama bin Laden, will be met with suitable scorn here.)

We can devote ourselves to the futile quest to elect Democrats, or Liberals, or even NDP, Labour, Social Democratic, or Green parties, as if they can legislate away our undemocratic economic sector's dependence and preference for imperialism. We can follow the same path of marching in the streets calling for peace, shouting out our anger at imperialist governments that ignore us (as we've been doing for forty years with negligable effect). Or, we can seek to find the weakness of our system, and to clearly identify what latent, potential strengths we have within our political equations, and try to get to the heart of the problem, and bring an end to this inhuman system.

A Continuation

I handed the entry above to my partner (code-name "ephemeral") to see if it justified the use of a fair bit of my morning before going to work. She told me that it doesn't explain the "revolutionary alternative" and that I should go into more detail as to how my "solution" can somehow alter the present political equation.

I've got some stuff to do, some places to go, before heading off to work and such, but rather than write a separate entry tomorrow, I'll spend a minute to try to outline the revolutionary potential of "workers as citizens" and how it could conceivably bring an end to this nightmare.

If we democratically elect a political party dedicated to enshrining the human rights of workers within their workplaces as the law of the land, ... as constitutionally protected rights, ... here is what I envision happening.

Increased taxes on the wealthy and on corporations will be imposed, and these powerful groups will not be able to retaliate. Businesses will not be able to carry out threats to move elsewhere or withhold investment because their workers will not allow them to move and workers will have a say in their workplaces' investment decisions.

These increased government revenues will help governments pay for the transition period as workers, environmentalists, and policy planners decide what is a sustainable level of production and consumption in the West. Part of this transformation is going to inevitably mean the dismantling of much of the auto-industry, (which also means the steel industry, and the petroleum industry), and the switch from huge amounts of consumer goods towards necessary services, and the switch from petro-chemical based corporate farming to sustainable, organic agriculture.

If some "Green Party" simply tried to legislate all of this within the present status-quo, it would be a debacle. This is a gigantic enterprise and it cannot be centrally-managed. It has to be done at an industry, firm, and local level. If businesses lay-off workers and justify this with claims that the expenses of meeting environmental regulations, or whatnot, require this, there will be a backlash against environmentalism. If, however, people realize that our present way of life is unsustainable and that they are part of the problem, they will (under workers as citizens) be able to negotiate the ways that their own industries can reposition themselves to work more cleanly and efficiently, as well, they can negotiate with their firm and with governments that possess the revenues to help them, an equal income to finance them as they retrain for some more suitable line of work.

What does all of this (admittedly hurried and vaguely presented) have to do with, say, Iraq? Obviously, if we move away from the automobile society, away from the plastics economy, away from petro-chemical agriculture, there will be less need for oil. Therefore, there will be less "need" to invade countries and install Quisling despots to guarantee our access to this oil at favourable prices. Won't this mean poverty for the people in the oil-producing "less-developed" nations? Not at all. For one thing, few of the people in the OPEC countries ever get to enjoy these oil revenues anyway, and I'm pretty sure that the people of Iraq (at least) are starting to see their oil as a curse instead of a blessing.

But here's something else. As we in the wealthy countries transform our economies towards a more sustainable direction, we will be doing so while maintaining the investment in current high-level science and technology that are helpful in mitigating the harshness of nature. I don't believe the majority in the West want a headlong rush into eco-primitivism. We will be able to decide what technologies are essential and non-negotiable, in a democratic, rational fashion. We will keep the safety net of modern technological capabilities until we either no longer need it, and we can continue to invest in new technologies that will benefit us in the future.

In so doing, we will provide an alternative model for the "less-developed" nations, whose leaderships have traumatized their people by subjecting them to what they imagine is the same path to unsustainable "development" that the West did.

Okay, but what about the sweat-shop workers in the poor countries? Those jobs are terrible, but aren't we going to pull the rug out from under them if we bring textiles and manufacturing jobs back here?

Not necessarily. For one thing, we can provide a model, and aid assistance for more local development. Our tax dollars can go to provide a living income for all the peoples of the world. This will mean more dollars in the pockets of individuals in the South, able to spend on goods and services produced locally. If we in the West can make localized production sustainable, it will be sustainable everywhere.

As well, in some industries, such as pharmaceuticals, our corporations depend to some degree on flooding poor countries with subsidized products (or merely naturally cheaper products) which strangle nascent industries there, or devastate established ones. A more equitable arrangement of production and technology, to serve the people of the world, not a miniscule wealthy elite, is something that will be democratically popular and easily affordable.

The point is, that this is a huge job, and it has to be done organically, democratically, with as much input from those affected as possible, and we have to start not yesterday, but last week, if we're going to avoid oblivion.

And one of the consequences of doing this job is that it will reduce the capitalist economy's present need for under-priced resources and cheap labour from the Global South, which is such a major, if not central contributor, to the the refugee crisis that was the subject of today's post.

I said in an earlier entry that we have to account for the centrality of our economic lives to our lives in total. The power that the masters of production have over the world has to be realized, and dealt with, or our nominal political power will continue to be as relatively useless as it is at present. What good is a vote if you can't eat? What good is an anti-imperialism mindset if you depend upon it to survive.

I've got to get going. Please excuse any spelling mistakes and whatnot.