RC8 wrote:
And make no mistake, this violence is perpetrated not primarily by evil multinationals, but mostly by local citizens against their kin. Multinationals are allowed to come in and thrash the place because local oligarchies do not care or respect their fellow citizens like they do in most developed countries, and local oligarchies get away with it because ordinary people do not care that much about themselves or fellow ordinary people. Obviously there is a well-oiled machine trying to keep things this way, but this was also the case elsewhere under capitalism.
I just fundamentally disagree with this, and the issue I have is that this is not really a matter of opinion, but rather should be rooted in historical analysis. Cultural developments that are only 50 years old are now taken to be essential truths that cannot be revoked. This is of course absurd. The individuality of human experience is real, but not the only way that humans organize, and as such is not the only way power develops and sustains itself. There are no essential cultural qualities of any arbitrarily defined group of people, these traits are developed and they are in a constant state of flux.
There's nothing about Canadians that predetermined your union status there, but the history, the geopolitics of the country, the way various interests have developed power, and the hard work that many have done, have led to that meager benefit, while simultaneously deployed murderous and environmentally apocalyptic work across vast swathes of the country.
There is no utopian system that will abolish all wrongs, but there are systems that don't actively support that sort of behavior. When power is brought to bear on a community, blood very well may be shed, but that is not sufficient cause to condemn the entire community.
I do, generally, wince when the very real wrongs committed by individuals on each other are waived away as systemic concerns, as if they can't "help" it. There are plenty of individuals who are at fault here (indeed I would argue that all of us are, to a large extent, individually culpable/complicit). There are billions of humans who don't bother killing or raping or stealing from each other every day, though. Why can't we have social organizations that reward their behavior, instead of those that engage in violence, who don't care about their fellow citizen? We can at least move towards that kind of society. I, similarly, wince when in meetings of the so-called "organized left", I see people actively digging for statistical proof that, even though Obama engaged in mass deportation of undocumented Americans from the US, it is "getting worse" under the current regime. There is a desperation to blame Trump individually, and by extension the culture he represents, for what things are like now, even though he is clearly just symptomatic of a long, continued tradition of oppression that cuts across culture (or actively perpetuates it, when it suits the aims of power).
"Evil multinationals" are more powerful than you give them credit for, in that they are not just themselves alone, just as individuals in small communities do not belong only to themselves. They are the limbs of deep-seated power, that has designed the nation-state as the boundary to transcend for global domination. These aren't conspiracies, it's all out in the open, you can see it with only the most cursory glance at history. At the end of the day, individuals will fade, their experience will become artifacts for future generations, cultures will flex, wane, adapt, and change. What will remain, and has remained, are the forces that shaped them.
