We are now being told that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and we will soon emerge from this pandemic. That of course means different things to different people, to the financial mafia, the corporate bosses and their minders, the state, it means get back out there, put on your harness and start grafting to make their tills ring, start sweating to fill their coffers. It will also be their dream that you will go back under worse conditions than before, new contracts stripping away at your rights and conditions, slices off your income, and more unemployed chasing your job, to make you too nervous to demand justice, for fear of joining the unemployed.
However, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel as an opportunity to restructure the way we live, how we shape society for the benefit of all our people, instead of scratching a survival while we feed the ravenous insatiable appetite of a corrupt parasite class, that has plundered and pillaged the fruits of our labour for generations.
There will be choices, there will a need for decisions, and we have to be the ones that make these decisions, we have to be the ones who make those choices and they must be for the benefit of all in society. There is no compulsion to go back to the society of gross inequality, injustice and corruption. I'm sure we all have the imagination to visualise a fairer society, to organise resources in a fairer manner. All it takes is the collective power of the people, solidarity among the people, and community organisation. I doubt that there will be a better opportunity than now, for us to come together take control of our lives, and build that better world for all, free from the profit motive and the slavish dictate of "the economy".
However, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel as an opportunity to restructure the way we live, how we shape society for the benefit of all our people, instead of scratching a survival while we feed the ravenous insatiable appetite of a corrupt parasite class, that has plundered and pillaged the fruits of our labour for generations.
There will be choices, there will a need for decisions, and we have to be the ones that make these decisions, we have to be the ones who make those choices and they must be for the benefit of all in society. There is no compulsion to go back to the society of gross inequality, injustice and corruption. I'm sure we all have the imagination to visualise a fairer society, to organise resources in a fairer manner. All it takes is the collective power of the people, solidarity among the people, and community organisation. I doubt that there will be a better opportunity than now, for us to come together take control of our lives, and build that better world for all, free from the profit motive and the slavish dictate of "the economy".
The following is an article by David Graeber published posthumously in the Jacobin. Thanks Tommy for the link.
David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep
At some point in the next few months, the crisis will be declared over, and we will be able to return to our “nonessential” jobs. For many, this will be like waking from a dream.
The media and political classes will definitely encourage us to think of it this way. This is what happened after the 2008 financial crash. There was a brief moment of questioning. (What is “finance,” anyway? Isn’t it just other people’s debts? What is money? Is it just debt, too? What’s debt? Isn’t it just a promise? If money and debt are just a collection of promises we make to each other, then couldn’t we just as easily make different ones?) The window was almost instantly shut by those insisting we shut up, stop thinking, and get back to work, or at least start looking for it.
Last time, most of us fell for it. This time, it is critical that we do not.
Because, in reality, the crisis we just experienced was waking from a dream, a confrontation with the actual reality of human life, which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.
How about this: Why don’t we stop treating it as entirely normal that the more obviously one’s work benefits others, the less one is likely to be paid for it; or insisting that financial markets are the best way to direct long-term investment even as they are propelling us to destroy most life on Earth?
Why not instead, once the current emergency is declared over, actually remember what we’ve learned: that if “the economy” means anything, it is the way we provide each other with what we need to be alive (in every sense of the term), that what we call “the market” is largely just a way of tabulating the aggregate desires of rich people, most of whom are at least slightly pathological, and the most powerful of whom were already completing the designs for the bunkers they plan to escape to if we continue to be foolish enough to believe their minions’ lectures that we were all, collectively, too lacking in basic common sense do anything about oncoming catastrophes.
This time around, can we please just ignore them?
Most of the work we’re currently doing is dream-work. It exists only for its own sake, or to make rich people feel good about themselves, or to make poor people feel bad about themselves. And if we simply stopped, it might be possible to make ourselves a much more reasonable set of promises: for instance, to create an “economy” that lets us actually take care of the people who are taking care of us.
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