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Understanding Root Causes
By Charles Sullivan
01/27/06 "ICH" -- -- Imagine, if you will, that you are fielding
a baseball team. You are a player on a team that possesses
immense talent. Your opponent has never lost a game. The
opposition is undefeated not because its players are superior to
your own, but because it makes the rules of the game to assure
its own victory. It wins because your team has to play by a
fixed set of rules that it does not. Although you have an
excellent pitcher on the mound, the strike zone is microscopic
and in constant flux. Your opponent’s pitcher, however, enjoys a
huge strike zone. Your opponent also owns all of the umpires
officiating the contest. Who but a fool would play such a game
with the expectation of competing, much less winning? The
outcome of that game, no matter how well your team performs, has
already been determined. To participate in such a charade is an
exercise in futility.
Those of us who demand a better America find ourselves the
unwitting participants in just such a game. We are in good faith
trying to operate in a system that is inherently unjust.
Corporate lobbyists have overrun the capitol, as well as every
branch of government, including the judiciary. Corporations lord
immense power over both people and process, when they should be
servants to the people. Legislation is sold to the highest
bidder. Workers, comprising some ninety percent of the populace,
have no representation or protection against the industry
predators that exploits them. We are bound by rules that our
rulers are not. We cannot possibly compete in this system; much
less create democratic freedoms and equality. The system
operates on monetary capital, not moral capital. The system does
not deserve our loyalty or our participation. The time has come
to create a new game with a level playing field. Working people
are weary of serving ‘The Man.’
Justice cannot be served without the full participation of the
people in the process, and at every level.
Thinking that we can reform a system of economics and politics
that is rotten to the core only serves the interest of wealth
and power. Reform can do no more than maintain the status quo;
it will assure the continuation of the present system in which
power and influence is concentrated in the hands of a few, at
the expense of the many.
Let us finally have the courage to acknowledge that the root
cause of virtually everything that ails America can trace its
origins to capitalism in its various incarnations. We have built
our political and economic institutions upon a rotten
foundation. The system cannot long stand. Under capitalism, the
large majority will always be subservient to the small minority.
To call this form of plutocratic despotism a democracy is an
insult to our intelligence. How can any nation declare itself
free when the great majority of its people are wage slaves to
plutocrats and corporations? When they are cannon fodder for its
powerful military?
If ever we are to have a chance at becoming a free and
democratic society, rather than the permanent war economy we
have become, capitalism must go. Working class people must come
to see capitalism as the enemy it is. The way to democracy lies
in putting the means of production into the hands of the workers
themselves. But first the economy must be pried lose from the
fingers of the plutocrats and the corporatists who claim to own
it.
Political freedom can only occur through economic emancipation.
Not only can the present economy not long endure—it must
inevitably collapse of its own excess and waste. Meanwhile, we
must organize the work place with an old revolutionary unionism
that was in vogue more than a hundred years ago. It was
revolutionary unionism that gave us the weekend, paid vacation,
and the eight hour work day by prying them from the hands of the
capitalists.
Loyalty to a system that is inherently unjust cannot provide
justice to the masses. This will only assure the unbroken
continuation of the unjust outcomes that are injurious to the
great majority of the people. America is dying from the cancer
of capitalism. The malignancy cannot be cured by giving her a
few aspirins. Radical treatment is the only hope for her
survival. The alternative is the certain death of hope for the
vast majority of the people. Hope lies in the smoldering rubble
of empire.
Working people must be more than the property of their
employers. We must be more than machines to be exploited by
those with wealth and power. Workers must emancipate themselves
from the system of power and corruption that enslaves them and
smothers their dreams for social and economic justice. The way
to that freedom is through the economy—industrial freedom.
The machinery that produces wealth for the small minority
through the enslavement of the great majority came into being
with public funds. For example, huge tracts of land were given
to the railroads at the behest of corporate lawyers—an advantage
not enjoyed by people of average means. Never mind that this
land was stolen from the Indians. However, capitalism allows the
private ownership of the economic engines that drive the
country. It fosters the concentration of wealth at the top by
exploiting everyone below the top. That which was created with
public funds belongs to the public, not to those with the
capital to buy control through the courts and congress. Power to
the people means that those who produce should enjoy fully the
fruits of their labor, not merely a small percentage of it. This
is assuredly the most just and expeditious means of self
emancipation from industrial slavery.
Through the deliberate perversion of language, with the aid of
the commercial media and its lackeys, truth has been distorted
almost beyond recognition. We the people must wake up from our
stupor and understand how and why we are in the present
predicament. Let us speak plain and clear truth to power whose
meaning cannot be mistaken: Power to the people!
It is the pervasion of language that enables those who plunder
the earth, which enslave the work force; and buy legislation
from the law makers that legalizes criminality, to be called
patriots or super patriots; while those who defend the earth
from corporate marauders; who uphold and defend the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights, are labeled unpatriotic or terrorists.
We cannot allow this perversion of language to stand. Its sole
purpose betrays our just cause and serves those with wealth and
power, by betraying the core values that govern the behavior of
the rest of us.
George Bush and his minions are not an aberration. They are the
natural and expected fruit of capitalism run amok. Capitalists
believe in plutocratic and corporate rule, the concentration of
wealth and power. They are the product of a system of economic
inequality and privilege that exploits the huge majority of the
population and subjugates them into wage slavery as ‘at will’
employees. It preys upon the just—those who play by the rules.
The quagmire in Iraq, and the one to come in Iran, and in
hundreds of other places, is the result of the social and
economic injustice fostered by capitalism. Treating the symptoms
will not affect a cure. Only addressing root causes can do that.
By engaging in party politics, the practice of pitting
conservative against liberal, liberal against conservative, we
are playing into the hands of the status quo. I have been all
too guilty of this practice myself. It is an easy trap to fall
into. By so doing we are unwittingly creating a diversion, a
smoke screen, for the empire builders and power brokers to
continue to play the game safely out of public view, assuring
the same results, regardless of which party is in power.
To illustrate this point, consider the difference between George
Bush and John Kerry in the last presidential election was more a
matter of semantics than of substance. Both men are the product
of wealth and privilege; neither of them represents the great
majority of the people, the working class. Neither do their
cohorts in Congress, an increasing number of which are
millionaires. The appearance of choice is only an illusion,
designed to deceive and to paralyze. By such means the
system—capitalism—wins and the people lose by being the
unwittingly servants of empire. The ruling class remains in
power and the working class remain their obedient servants. We
must stop working against ourselves. We have enough to do to
overcome the real enemy.
As incredible as it may seem, the average liberal and the
average conservative have more in common with one another, than
they have in common with their respective political parties and
their champions. The great majority of conservatives and
liberals are victims of a system that not only does not serve
them—it exploits them. Thus when conservatives take to heart the
rhetoric of the vitriolic Rush Limbaugh, a wealthy white man, a
product of the system; a member of the ruling class—they are in
fact working against their own self interest. They are allowing
themselves to be exploited and played for fools, while thieves
make off with everything they own. Who benefits? Limbaugh and
the ruling class who are using the system for their own
ends—that is who benefits. Ordinary people of average means
would be wise not to set foot into that trap because it does not
serve their cause. We are spending too much time and energy
fighting one another, rather than the real enemy, the system
itself—capitalism.
History bears me out on my assertion that capitalism has never
served the interest of ordinary working people. It never will.
The sooner we understand this fact, the better.
Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer
living in the Eastern pan handle of West Virginia. He can be
reached at
earthdog@highstream.net.
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