Priorities. posted by Richard Seymour

The religion of socialism, some idiot once said, is the language of priorities. This has allowed every wet-eared reformist to evade choices and propound dogma as if it were pragma.

The fundamental choice of capitalism is always-already made for us, and is not one we can unmake unless we represent a material force greater than the combined power of capital and the various national and transnational institutions which supports and regulates its functioning. If we can't do that, we'd better at least be aware of the choice we are making. Slavery, for instance.

To put a round figure on it, according to US sociologist Kevin Bales there are about 27 million slaves in the world right now. In Brazil, there are said to be thousands of slaves mining charcoal or working on the Amazonian estates, while in India bonded labour is often a life-long obligation. Hardly news. The civilised integument of capital was built around the institution of slavery, and Brazil imported almost 40% of the 11 million Africans transported to the New World. But capitalism was supposed to have somehow got over these serpentine origins - either because of the military genius of Toussaint L'Ouverture or the moral calamity of William Wilberforce, depending on whether you learnt history properly or were taught it at a British school. So, what gives? Answer at the end of this post.

But a much more widespread phenomenon is what is euphemistically known as 'sweated labour'. Yes, yes, yes - you've heard all this before. Nike, Reebok, Gap, exploiting people somewhere over There. Places like Itsamnesia and Wherethefucksthatistad. It's a lot more common than that. Sweat shops persist in developing countries like Haiti, where Disney subcontractors pay 28 cents an hour to workers. (For attempting to rectify this state of affairs, Aristide was removed from power by the US and France, acting under the rubric of the UN). And also in the Phillipines, where people work more than 60 hours a weak to stitch Levi Strauss jeans. Never mind Nike trainers in Vietnam, Adidas and Gap in Indonesia and toy production for Wal Mart, Disney and Hasbro in China. But how about California? At one particular facility in El Monte, workers - mostly illegal immigrants - were found locked into garment factory surrounded by razor-wire. When not working, they slept 10 to a small room. They worked 20 hours a day, seven days a week for 70 cents an hour. That's one example. In the US, the Department of Labor estimates that more than half of the 22,000 clothing manufacturing shops qualify as sweatshops today. The tragic deaths of 21 Chinese cockle-pickers on Morecombe Bay alerted Britain to the fact that sweated labour took place here as well - and prompted Tory MP Ann Winterton to make a filthy racist joke about it.

Then there's child labour. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are 352 million children working in the world today, of whom 211 million are aged between 5 and 14. Suffice to say, we aren't talking about washing the car or cutting the lawn. The overwhelming majority of children who work do so in labour-intensive agriculture.

And the arms trade. This is one of the few remaining industries at which Britain excels, although it faces stiff competition from the United States. It is "dangerously unregulated" according to Oxfam, which is a masterpiece in understatement. It is so protected by government secrecy that only rough estimates can be made as to the scale of the global arms trade (note, this does not include domestic contracts or government guarantees to producers), but as of 1999 it was believed to be worth a total of $20 billion. That's enough to buy Tammy Faye a new wardrobe. It is an industry that governments are curiously eager to sustain at all costs. For instance, although Indonesia is known to engage in war crimes in Aceh, and although it has a record of horrendous human rights abuses, the British government will actually provide Export Credits to Indonesia to help them buy the latest tools. In a nation where 52% of the people live on less than $2 a day, the one thing they really need is for the government to buy more weapons.

These would seem on the face of it to be just a selection of some of the intractable problems that the world is faced with that must arise from a number of causes. What connects them? Simply this. Slavery and sweated labour are forms of hyper-exploitation that are not seperable by any clear line from the ordinary, day to day exploitation that takes place in advanced capitalist societies. For instance, when research into the national minimum wage in Britain was being looked into, it was discovered that among the worst sufferers of low pay in Britain were 16-18 year olds, many of whom had to accept hourly rates of £1.60 an hour and less. Naturally, the government responded to this astounding fact by excluding 16-18 year olds from the national minimum wage. In all sorts of working environments, particularly call centres, workers are subjected to high pressure drives for greater productivity. Often they have to ask permission to visit the toilet, and many are docked for the privilege. Wages are low, hours are long and tedious, and management are often brittle and abrasive.

Similarly, the priorities of profit mean that companies respond to market demand, which is not the same thing as human need. It is need, backed up by purchasing power. If it makes more money to produce guns for warring states than it does to produce medical equipment and food for their populations, then the guns win every time. If it is more profitable to allow Africans to die from AIDS than allow the production of cheap drugs, then AIDS has a free run. If it is profitable to encourage farmers to inject their cattle with chemical substances that poison our milk, that is what will be done. If it creates higher returns to cover food with harmful MSGs that also make it very addictive, then your Happy Meal will be one MSG-covered motherfucker. And if it turns a quick buck to expose citizens to carcinogenous chemicals rather than pursue safer products, you get all the lumps. As the film The Corporation shows, corporations are legally bound to pursue nothing other than the maximisation of shareholder profit. This involves criminality on an epic scale (cue list of companies that have broken the law over the years), as well as the exploitation of people and planet. But, as companies are also "externalising machines", that is to say, organisations structurally compelled to try and transfer costs to someone else, they rely on states to regulate markets, provide infrastructure, use their diplomacy and foreign policy to create good investment climates, fight wars that clear markets etc.

I mean to say, as clearly as I can, that the priorities of capitalism are utterly inhuman, dangerous, driving us toward catastophe in the form of war and environmental breakdown, poisoning us, exploiting us and then lying to us about it. It is a global problem and it can't be shirked by isolating each aspect of it and producing some proposal for reform by stages (or by numbers). At the very least, we can agree that these fuckwits don't have the answer.