Global Research, February 09, 2018
Url of this article:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/
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.’
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 temporality 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 ‘Munchausen
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.
Disclaimer: The contents
of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre
for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate
or incorrect statement in this article.Copyright © Prof. James Petras, Global Research, 2018
