| From Unity, 6 March 2010 |
Capitalism is built on bullyingby John MalloyAs we inch towards progress, however limited, on the outworkings of the Hillsborough Agreement—a shared future document agreed within the joint Office of First and Deputy First Minister—and movement on the devolution of policing and justice etc., a common cliché that attaches to reporting these events is of moving away from the “past,” as if such histories were nearly extinct rather than possessing current resonance and menace.The details of the base sectarianism that motivated the killers of Thomas Devlin or the activities, however strategically incoherent, of the “dissident” republicans, however, challenges such a narrative. They also render all the more essential the need for alternative economic and political strategies that attempt to define and develop a “people’s politics” in order to fight both this menace and the economic orthodoxies that emerge from Belfast, London, and Dublin. On the latter point the gap between the real material concerns of the vast majority of people and the cloistered world of the Westminster village has been shown by the longevity of the media circus’s interest in an allegation of a bullying culture within 10 Downing Street. A genuine discussion of such a serious issue—prevalent throughout the workplace—is impossible in this context, however, not only because it is a matter of months from a British general election but also because it slots too easily into the type of discussion of Gordon Brown’s every move that owes more to amateur psychiatry than to rigorous journalism. If the attack-dogs of the mainstream capitalist media were to reflect a more honest analysis of the nature of power and the type of policy that emanates from the neo-liberal capitals of London and Washington, however, there would be no surprise that rights, empathy, sensitivity or even concern for human life are secondary to securing profit and maintaining imperial control. With a full makeover of the rival salesmen moving into full swing before election day we should not forget the blood-soaked polices they both support. As millions around the world marched, opposing the lies that were to lead to the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, New Labour and their loyal opposition rubber-stamped the “weapons of mass destruction” fiction and underwrote the “at any cost” vast military spending that sees the highest form of capitalism—imperialism—bully the peoples of the world and steal their resources to ensure that our planet—capable of being a common treasury, feeding and fuelling us all in a self-sustaining manner—is plundered for private profit. Bullying, therefore, is not confined to “office politics”: it is the threat which lies at the root of the capitalist system. It is the reason that the collective challenge to it from trade unionism is so feared and resisted, in the British context, by the most restrictive anti-union laws in western Europe, and why the European Union and its courts support the “race to the bottom.” It is also most explicit in the wider context where, if normal faux democratic “constraints” are not serving ruling-class needs, there are no depths—from overthrowing democratically elected governments to torturing the extraordinarily rendered in Guantánamo Bay—to which capitalist barbarism will not sink. |
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