Depression is Normal Response to a Sick Society

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444 retired

I have purposefully stayed away from reading about the recent mass murder in Colorado because I know pretty much everything I need to know about it as far as the ruling class is concerned. The perpetrator’s ethnicity, their religion, their country of origin and so forth; if he was gay that would be in there, or he might be gender fluid, or might have no sex at all, I don’t know.  The capitalist mass media will explain all the details it figures I need to know about the situation.

 

So our young people and those who venture in to the world of information will know the guy was mentally ill, he was a Muslim probably though all I know so far was he had an Arabic name but, hey------ they’re all terrorists aren’t they. When I was growing up, the Irish Catholics from the occupied northern Irish counties were as well. We will have the usual discussion about gun control and the banning of weapons like the one the perpetrator used in this instance and while I am for sensible gun control I do not believe owning weapons is the root cause of all this.

 

Right wing politicians backed by the gun manufacturers will be in the forefront against of the resistance to any sort of gun reform. I remember when I bought my first pistol, a rather nice Ruger 357, a fine piece of machinery indeed, The guy at the counter, concerned as he was with the safety of the community otherwise he wouldn’t have been selling us weapons that make us safer, asked me a couple of questions. He wanted to be sure I wasn’t a nut job (sorry if this offends nut jobs). He asked me if I was of sound mind. I told him I was and that it was for home protection.  Plus, I had an English, accent---isn’t that enough.

 

Why I can’t be bothered reading or watching the news about this mass murder is that the causes of these actions will not be discussed at all. There will be the nauseating “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims” and the mass media will delve in to various aspects of the man’s private life and, there will no doubt be a wave of anti-Muslim feeling and my advice to my Sikh friends, is be on your guard. Sikhs aren’t Muslims the reader may be thinking to themselves. They’re not but they sometimes wear turbans and they look like Muslims, brown, beards, you know, they just don’t look American.

 

2020 has been the year of the global pandemic, isolation, fear, and for hundreds of thousands the loss of loved ones, fathers, mothers, grandparents or a partner who died alone in a hospital bed in order to protect others. To make matters worse, this global medical crisis, a product of capitalist industrial food production, has occurred within another global crisis, the 4-year reign of the degenerate Donald Trump and his regime of fascists, religious fanatics, serial sexual abusers, orb rubbers and the like.

 

In the midst of all of this suffering, children out of school, millions of women leaving the workforce to care for them, an epidemic of homelessness, job insecurity, ongoing police violence, and other side effects of the pandemic, the fortunate sons, continue to keep dancing until the music stops as Chuck Prince, the former disgraced CEO of Citibank once said. It should be noted that in the corporate world, you can still perform poorly, even be somewhat disgraced, and still be compensated well for it. Despite his poor performance (with our money) Prince “retired from both his CEO and chairman duties …..while still receiving a $38m pay package.”

 

The music kept playing for the wealthy during the past period as US billionaires raked in the dough. Their wealth rose to $3.88 trillion by October 2020, from $931 billion 7 months earlier. Here’s a few of these parasites that have done very well.  

 

Being depressed, or a little down seems like a natural response to the world in which we live. Capitalist democracy (bourgeois democracy more accurately) is not like Athenian or Greek democracy where the slaves were not allowed to participate, we have the right to vote, we’re free/ Well, we’re free to vote for one of Wall Street’s candidates to lead us every four years. This is inevitable as workers and the middle class has no party of our own. We now have the other Wall Street party in power with “Worker Joe” Biden at the helm. All will be well we are told. But we know better. The cost of this capitalist crisis like the crash of 2008, will not be borne by those whose policies cause it but by the victims. “Worker Joe” Biden reminded the US worker that we have to be more competitive when it comes to China. We know what that means, worker harder for less.

 

Universal or socialized health care is too costly in a society where we are forced to spend close to a trillion dollars a year on defense when there is no nation on earth powerful enough to invade us. There’s never much haggling in Congress about that expenditure; there’s too much money greasing too many palms for that.

 

Meanwhile, the most efficient agency in the US is under assault. The United States Post Office ensures that every person gets their mail but those in power treat it not as a crucial public service but as a business. The market gurus that determine the day to day running of the USPS has a plan to make it more efficient, this doesn’t mean better for the worker. It wants to avoid $100 billion in losses and has lost money the last 14 years according to the reports. But what does that mean? Military spending is a big hole they pour our money in to and we receive nothing for it; don’t kid yourselves……. it’s for offense not defense. The Postal Regulatory Commission has given the USPS “more leeway” to raise prices. These are all agencies run by people who see the world from the eyes of a business person and with profit as the main driver. They don’t see offense spending the same way, it’s an investment for them with great returns.

 

The US postal service employs 640,000 workers and unlike Amazon, they have a. union and certain rights and benefits that brings. The massive propaganda painting postal workers as shiftless and lazy is about privatizing it. That’s why the US Congress, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “…is unwilling to answer the Postal Service’s calls for relief.” This crucial public agency lost $9.2 billion in the latest fiscal year, so it needs money, so what. During this pandemic, US billionaires increased their total net worth $637 billion  as of October 2020, just think of that staggering figure for a moment and it's used to buy private islands, yachts, and all the luxury items that the super rich like that remind them how smart and special they are. Amazon, meanwhile should be taken in to public ownership and incorporated in to the USPS.

 

See, we cannot see ourselves separately from larger society. We cannot shut out larger society like propaganda claims with arguments that decisions we make are entirely our own and if we are in bad shape it’s simply a matter of bad choices or we have lost god or religion and other such excuses.

 

We see all the misery, the homeless, the war and these mass killings they have a powerful debilitating affect on us. We see that a pedophile and sex trafficker like Jeffrey Epstein who provided young women and girls to the rich and famous suddenly kills himself. No one believes it. He had a private island where he provided these young women to the wealthy. He counted among his friends, Britain’s Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Alan Dershowitz and yes, William Barr Trump’s Attorney General who investigated Epstein’s mysterious death. Despite being close friends or business partners with him visiting his private island or traveling on his personal plane, none of these people knew anything about his pedophilia or sex trafficking. It’s common to portray workers as stupid, but we’re not that stupid.

 

Leon Black, a billionaire coupon clipper has just resigned as Chairman of the capital management company he founded and he paid Epstein $158 million for “tax and estate planning services.” Naturally, an independent review, found “no evidence that Mr. Black was involved in the criminal activities of Mr. Epstein…”. Wall Street Journal 3-23-21.

 

The reality is, most of the US population has no faith at all in the US mass media, the US Congress or pretty much any politician. In a bizarre way, this contributed to the rise of Trump as well. The other major factor has been the disgraceful role of the heads of organized labor in the US to provide an alternative political vehicle that workers can look to, join and fight for our own independent interests.

 

Humans are naturally gregarious, collective creatures, it’s how we have survived and been so successful over thousands of years. Capitalism is based on exploitation, selfish individualism and the lie that the rich get rich through hard work and because they’re smart. Nothing can be further than the truth. Under feudalism the king was king by God’s will, he was God’s representative on earth until Cromwell and a few others suggested cutting of his head and a new day ensued. It turned out to be a lie.

 

Like all social needs, the market has failed us in this pandemic, particularly so in the US where the market ideology is strongest and on many levels is touted as the answer to all things. But the pandemic has revealed to millions the weak underbelly of US capitalism and whose labor is important and who’s isn’t. Workers though have always known the answer to this. The offensive that is waiting for us after the honeymoon period that Biden will be allowed will be met with fierce resistance from the US working class after the experiences of this pandemic.

 

If you are depressed or feeling alienated and insecure. This is a normal response to the world in which we live, it is not simply mental illness. You are human and the sight of homeless people saddens you; you can’t shut it out. War does not make you happy no matter who is dying. The ruling class uses every weapon in its arsenal to divide us, it blames immigrants, or the poor, people who look different speak different languages hold different religious views.

The obsession with identity politics is another means of diverting attention from the real problem which is capitalism and that capitalism is a class society in which a minority gets wealth and power through the exploitation and robbery of the rest of us, it is the way society and the production of our social needs is organized. Racism, nationalism, religious sectarianism xenophobia and misogyny are all tactics to divide us and convince one section of the working class, through bribery or special privileges (temporary as they are)  we are better than another, that we are “special”.

 

There are only two great social forces in society, those that own capital and buy labor power and those who sell their labor power. It is on this class basis we must unite as this is where our power lies.