Thursday, January 09, 2003

Solidarity Forever With all the editorial gnashing of teeth over the Bush plan to deepen the federal deficit and give hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to the wealthiest people in the country, it is useful to look at how we got in this fix.    We are paying for the collapse of communism.  Not that the statist, bureaucratic “communist” regimes were worth preserving, but the existence of a different ideal helped spark fear among the wealthiest elites, and helped keep them honest.   Culturally, capitalism works best when every social tie is atomized, where humans are rootless, autonomous units guided by marketing efforts, where  relationships with things becomes the only way to mediate relationships with  people.   One way to drive people in this direction is to relentlessly preach a radical individualism that holds that all social outcomes, whether poverty or wealth, sickness or health, success or failure, criminality or celebrity are totally determined by individual effort.   The lie behind the façade, like the little Green man in the wizard of Oz, is that no corporation, nor CEO, can exist for one second in isolation.  They are totally dependent on an arbitrary set of laws that exonerate them from social costs (shortened life spans, crime, urban decay, environmental degradation, global warming, war) but let them reap profits from within a tightly controlled safety zone, where only a fraction of true costs get counted.  Much of what drives our politics is fights between different corporate groups over their place within this golden circle.   The classic antidote to this atomization of individuals has been “solidarity”.  Solidarity is the watchword of all unions, which are built on the premise that relationships, a commitment to share benefits with all, to leave no one behind, is the best antidote to the atomization and isolation so beneficial to the elites.   It is time to resurrect this concept—that solidarity among Americans means there is a limit to the income inequality that we will tolerate, a limit to the social costs corporations can impose, and an entitlement to a European quality of life, with vacation, health care, retirement, unemployment, training and an adequate welfare system.  It is no accident that these largely exist in Europe today because of trade union and social democratic and communist movements.  Those movements started with the simple concept of solidarity.  So should we. 10:03:51 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 2/2/2003; 5:54:53 PM.