Treating society like a business. That's the real problem

Peter Brabeck Letmathe is the chairman and former CEO of Nestle, the world's largest food production company.  In an interview in the Wall Street Journal he shares his philosophy on how we can provide water and food to the people of the world in the years ahead: "We can feed nine billion people" he says, "And we can provide them with water and fuel.  But only if we let the market do its thing."

Letmathe has some neck on him when you think about it.  The market just did "its thing" and fell over the edge of an inescapable abyss only to be dragged from the depths by public funds and state intervention. Neo-liberal policies throughout the world have brought us to this point.  US capitalism is in the process of liberating Iraqi oil production from state ownership and the pigs have their snouts at the trough for the rapid freeing up of Libya's state owned oil industry.

The lack of water, sewage systems, food and medicine in the underdeveloped world are not due to lack of resources, money, technology, skill or Labor power, these conditions are the by-product of the market "doing its thing".  The destruction that Katrina wreaked on the gulf coast, the BP disaster and the catastrophic environmental and social consequences of the nuclear disaster that followed Japan's earthquake and Tsunami, are the result of the market "doing its thing".

Everything from freeways to war, education to health care, transportation to social security, the capitalist class want their hands on it, except of course, when the market does "its thing" and implodes.  In the US they want to privatize all the public services privatize profits, socialize losses. 

Huy Pham committed suicide after being told he would be laid off

In Costa Mesa California, the city has issued layoff notices to half of its employees telling them that they will be without a job on September 15th.  We first wrote about this back in March when a worker committed suicide after hearing of the city's plan.  As we have written in earlier blogs, after a successful offensive against auto workers, blaming their wages, benefits and pensions for decline of the US auto industry, therefore hurting all of us, they have moved on to public sector workers.

It's almost an exact scenario repeated. "You get attacked every day in the media...with people calling you a parasite and worthless------- and you're just trying to do your job." says one Costa Mesa city worker.  Before taking his own life, the city employee said to a co-worker that "We just want to come to work and help our families.  Why does that make us the bad guy"   But it's not about being the bad guy, it's about economics, globalization, competition and the crisis of capitalism. Public services eat in to profits and tie up capital. Public expenditure also crowds out private capital and reduces opportunity for profit making. We can see they are preparing the ground for privatization of the US postal service because it's not making a profit.  Who cares-------it's a social service. 

The reason this false claim that public services and public workers are the cause of the economic crisis can get an echo is there is literally no serious organized response to it from the heads of organized Labor.  Many public sector workers bought the argument, and still do, that the decline in living standards and US economic power in general is a lot to do with those greedy auto workers.  Many of us in the public sector felt safe then.  "It's not happening to us" so lets bury our heads, nose to the grindstone and hope things get better.  But those workers must recognize they earn to much.  Now it is us that earn too much, have it too good. Hell, some of us have pensions you can actually live on. It is public sector pensions that is destroying American living standards, what the bosses, Democrats and the Labor hierarchy calls, the "middle class".

Many workers thought that we got a better deal, a more humane less competitive workplace and better wages and  benefits because we were "special".  Many of us, private and public buy in to this crap that we have a good job because we are special.  We have what we have because workers before us fought and died for it.  The truth of history is that the bosses resisted workers' organizations and democratic rights with unparalleled ferocity and violence. They fought the civil rights movement, women's rights and resisted all liberation struggles with violence. In Britain while they are "looking in" to the cause of the recent uprising from the "Motley Crew" they are dishing out severe sentences, even giving four years to youth that urged the group on on Facebook.

We all think it won't happen to us, but it does.  They pick us off as individuals, as individual Unions and if we maintain an existence as individual communities fighting all our separate issues, they pick us off there.  Many of us in the public sector never gave a thought to the savage assault waged against workers in the private sector which has led us to a situation where workers in auto, once a benchmark for what we all can achieve are not much better off than many non-Union workers. and have to pay Union dues.  And we all ignore those on welfare, after all, why don't they accept anything? And we have all given barely a thought to our youth who are faced with a future of poverty and despair, we should not kid ourselves here; they intend to drive us to conditions that existed prior to the great rise of the CIO in the 1930's and the civil rights movement that followed.

The crisis of the youth in the inner cities, overwhelmingly youth of color is catastrophic, there is no other word for it. And under such conditions, who wouldn't belong to a gang?  The bourgeois have gangs, they run society through them.  The National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Round Table etc. etc.  And of course, the state and all its functionaries, the courts, the police and with them, the prisons.  When the despair and tolerance at the oppressive and violent conditions of a hostile system turns in to anger and resistance then the youth are blamed because their methods are not genteel enough.  They don't go through proper channels like "civilized" people should. Well for those of us in the Labor movement who might criticize the methods of the youth we might want to offer them an alternative first.

It is unfortunate that when the anger can no longer be tempered by the drug dealer, television or the pulpit, the youth and disenfranchised strike out without a clear objective and goal but simply to hit back.  I've seen the same frustration on ineffective pickets lines that workers are left on for months as their leaders attempt to convince increasingly aggressive bosses to ask for slightly fewer concessions. Resistance without organization normally takes many forms on the road to a clearer objective.  We wrote of the Oscar Grant rally here in Oakland when the bosses sent all the downtown workers home early to protect them from the "rampaging mob". Most of these workers were all public sector Unionized workers, all themselves under attack like the workers in Costa Mesa and throughout the country. But it is their strategy of isolating all struggles and strikes, preventing them from becoming generalized and all powerful.  That protest against the killing of Oscar grant, police brutality and racism, should have been organized by the Labor movement linking Unionized workers with the youth in the struggle for jobs for all, health care, a $20 an hour minimum wage, free education and housing etc.  The youth would then see that we are with them in their struggle for a future, we would all become more confident seeing such a united display of power.

Meanwhile, Steve Mesinger, a Costa Mesa council member makes clear their intentions; public sector workers and services, health care, education, parks, transport etc., have to be cut back---the city, like all cities, has to be run, "like a business" he says.  Sandy Genis, a former mayor agrees that "trimming costs and reforming pensions is necessary" but thinks its too politicized. In the past, presumably when she was mayor, this was done in"in collaboration" with the Unions. Her concern is that the aggressive approach will hasten social disturbances and force people to take action other than e mailing their council member. The concern for social unrest is what is prompting the likes of Warren Buffet and other billionaires to make all the noise about taxes; they are concerned these right wingers are going to far too fast and they could lose a lot more than a few pennies in higher taxes that can usually be avoided through loopholes anyway.

The problem is that they run society like a business.  Public expenditure is money out, it is capital that is not expanding, increasing itself, not generating profit therefore it is hostile to society as they see it. But education, health care, housing, working collectively free from coercion, these are all necessary and a part of creating an environment that nurtures human creativity.  These things don't have to make profit.  They are social needs and the capital for them is there, it is simply allocated by its owners in areas we would not, wars and plunder for example.  Warren Buffet's wealth would solve the municipal deficit problem; he never earned that money, he stole it.  They will not allocate capital for social needs without us forcing them to and ultimately without us taking possession of this wealth that is, after all, the product of our Labor.

To do this we need unity yes, but to unite the forces at our disposal we have to fight for something, have to have a program that we can organize around. People have to see there is something to be gained, that their material well being is advanced through this unity; unity for the "moral good" is the liberals answer but it is a weak unity, not based on class solidarity but guilt and feeling sorry for people.  The decision to enter the struggle is an important one, there is a lot to use and workers don't take it lightly, any workers.

We cannot avoid a fight unfortunately, the bosses won't let us.