Tuesday, July 07, 2020

Tokenism

600 Americans own as much as a full 60% of Americans, or 200 million people. About half of the billionaire wealth has accumulated from passive stock market gains over the past ten years. Protests in the streets don't impact the people who have taken so much while doing so little. Instead, the often self-destructive uprisings usually target small businesses that are themselves part of the victimized lower-to-middle income segment of the population. Whenever there's talk of public banks or public health care or public schools, the wealthiest Americans use their media power to try to convince us that working together as a society is a step toward communism. The protests that seem to work, such as Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street, are temporary answers to a systemic pattern of oppression that seems to have no end. There has been many people's protests, around the world and the super-rich have fortified themselves against any threat.

At this moment many authorities are busily meeting to discuss removing various statues and renaming buildings in the wake the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed. The Establishment hold up their hands and declare “mea culpa” for the past. To the symbols of slavery we say good riddance but we also understand the motives of gesture politics. 

Are our rulers really intending to right the wrongs of history? Or make the past crimes harder to see? Does erasing the record of exploitation provide a decent wage, affordable housing, free healthcare?

 If the aim is to address inequalities then “white supremacy” is only just a symptom, not the cause of poverty among the minorities and migrants. If the monuments legitimized our old masters, their elimination is hiding the new ones and the continuance of capitalism.   

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