March 24, 2020
By Umair Haque in Eudaimonia and Co
SNIPPET:
You know and I know the real reason Americans are being made to work during a pandemic: money. So that profits rise, so that stock markets rise, so that the rich get richer. So that, in other words, the system doesn’t collapse in on itself. A cynic might have an even darker interpretation: so that Americans know their place. So that they’re so beaten, weary, terrified, and anxious, they never really have the time or energy to question the insanity of all the above.
Because insanity is really the only word for it. What else would you call a society that has a massive surplus of homes, money, medicine, food — and yet 75% of people still struggle to “afford” these things? What the?
That’s insanity, for three reasons. First, no progress is possible. People are just made to work for things they already have. So what reason is there for anyone to really create anything new, positive, life-changing? Why bother, when you can exploit people over what they should already have — which a mobster might just call extortion?
Second, regress tends to happen. When I feel desperate and bitter, when I grow poor and insecure, I’m likely to turn to demagogues, like the idiot America has for President right about now. Third, societies like that fall apart. When I can see that my society has a surplus of the very things I need desperately — why would I trust my institutions? My leaders? The system? Anyone or anything? Bang! A society plunges into distrust and enmity and hostility and superstition that way. It literally begins to disintegrate — just the way America is.
That’s immiseration, my friends. The insanity of a society denying its people the very things it has an abundant surplus of. In America, they used to be things like medicine, food, money, education. Today — even more grimly — the thing Americans are being denied…that they have an abundant surplus of is…have you figured it out yet?
It’s life itself. When you’re made to go back to work, during a pandemic, you risk your life. But there’s literally no reason to. No reason, that is, except more profits for the ultra rich. (Yet that is no good reason at all — because, as we’ve established, society has a massive surplus of just those profits. Not only that, money is denominated by life. If life has no worth — what good is money? All it can really buy is violence, the right to harm life. But I digress.)
Americans were — until last week or so — immiserated over money, food, homes, education, medicine. Society had a huge surplus of these things, and yet Americans never had enough of them, because they were deliberately withheld. Americans were made to compete viciously and brutally over them, instead, so that profits could skyrocket forever.
Today, Americans are being immiserated over life itself. Their institutions are literally telling them they must work — or else. On the one side, they risk losing their lives, yet on the other, they’ll lose their incomes, what little healthcare and retirement and stability they have. What kind of choice is that? A choice that says: on the one side, you don’t live, and on the other, you don’t either.
But these are the outer limits of immiseration, too. It’s one thing for a society to withhold a surplus of homes, food, medicine, money. But life itself? As in the basic right not be infected by a global pandemic, and infect those you love, too? Just so that “the economy” as in profits and stock markets for mega-corporations can “keep going”, as in keep rising forever? What on earth? Can immiseration get more extreme than that, really?
Full article: "Capitalist ideology claims that the world is perfectly ordered and everybody is in their place (i..e. everybody gets what they deserve). This self legitmating aspect of Capitalism is Socially Catastrophic. This is the Victorian view of the world." Rob Urie - Author " Zen Economics"