Making America Great Through Exploitation, Servitude and Abuse
By James Petras
February 11, 2018 "Information
Clearing House"
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The public denunciation by
thousands of women and a few men that they
had been victims of sexual abuse by their
economic bosses raises fundamental issues
about the social relations of American
capitalism.
The moral offenses are in essence economic
and social crimes. Sexual abuse is only one
aspect of the social dynamics facilitating
the increase in inequality and concentration
of wealth, which define the practices and
values of the American political and
economic system.
Billionaires and mega-millionaires are
themselves the products of intense
exploitation of tens of millions of isolated
and unorganized wage and salaried workers.
Capitalist exploitation is based on a rigid
hierarchy with its private prerogatives,
which enables the oligarchs to demand their
feudal privileges, their seigniorial sexual
predations.
US capitalism thrives on and requires
unlimited power and the capacity to have the
public treasury pay for its untrammeled
pillage of land, labor, transport systems
and technological development. Capitalist
power, in the United States, has no
counterpart; there are few if any
countervailing forces to provide any
balance.
Today, 93% of US private sector workers have
no organized representation. Moreover, many
of the 7% who are in unions are controlled
and exploited by their corrupt union
officials – in league with the bosses.
This concentration of power produces the
ever deepening inequalities between the
world of the billionaires and the millions
of low-wage workers.
The much-celebrated technological
innovations have been subsidized by the
state and its educational and research
institutions. Although these are financed
by the tax-payers, the citizen-workers are
marginalized by the technological changes,
like robotics, that they originally funded.
High tech innovations flourish because they
concentrate power, profits and private
privilege.
The hierarchical matrix of power and
exploitation has led to the polarization of
mortality rates and moral codes. For the
working poor, the absence of competent
health care has led to the massive use and
abuse of prescription opioids and other
addictive drugs. For the upper class, it
has led to the flagrant physical and
psychological abuse of vulnerable employees,
especially, but not exclusively young
working women. The prestigious bourgeois
media blur the class polarization by
constant reference to what they term ‘our
shared traditional democratic values.’
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The pervasive and growing
vulnerability of workers of both sexes
coincides with the incorporation of the
latest technological innovations in
production, distribution and promotion.
This includes electronic and digital
advances, artificial intelligence, robotics
and extensive surveillance on workers, which
incorporate high profits for the investors
and long hours of demeaning monotonous work
for those who manufacture and transport the
‘products’.
The proliferation of new technology has
grown in direct relation with the abject
debasement of labor and the marginalization
and trivialization of workers. Amazon and
Walmart approach trillions of dollars in
revenue from mass consumption, even as the
Chaplinesque speed-up of robotized humans
race to fill the overnight delivery orders.
The entertainment industry amuses the
population across class lines with
increasingly vulgar and violent offerings,
while the moguls of film entertain
themselves with their young workers – who
are depersonalized and even raped.
The more egregious immorality exposes itself
one time too often and is condemned, while
the victims are temporarily lionized for
their courage to protest. The worst
predators apologize, resign to their yachts
and mansions and are replaced by new avatars
with the same power and structures in place
which had facilitated the abuse.
Politicians rush to embrace the victims in a
kind of political and media ‘Munchhausen
Syndrome by Proxy’ when one considers their
own role as enablers of this
dehumanization.
The problem is not merely corrupt and
perverted individual miscreants: It is the
hierarchy of inequality which produces and
reproduces an endless supply of vulnerable
workers to exploit and abuse.
The most advanced forms of entertainment
thrive in an environment of absolute
impunity in which the occasional exposé of
abuse or corruption is hidden behind a
monetary settlement. The courage of an
individual victim able to secure public
attention is a step forward, but will have
greater significance if it is organized and
linked to a massive challenging of the power
of the bourgeois entertainment industry and
the system of high tech exploitation.
Sexual abuse of an individual in the
workplace is just part of a chain that
begins with exploitation of workers in
general and can only be stopped through
collective worker organization.
Can anyone say with a straight face that the
US remains a nation of free and autonomous
citizens? Servitude and moral degradation
are the outcome of an atomized, impotent
laboring class who may change one boss for
another or one vulgar president for a
moralizing hypocrite. We hope that the
exposés will start something but without
class conscious organizations we don’t know
what will arise.
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. https://petras.lahaine.org
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