David Cormack
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What if the State doesn't care?
🕑 Added 2021-02-28 02:25:16 +0000 UTCA few of my friends that were big-time Labour supporters are starting to go through some disillusionment. They genuinely believed that freed from an NZFirst handbrake, and free from the perceived "nuttiness" of the Greens that maybe Labour would really deliver something left wing.
Except Labour is not a left-wing party. You might charitably call it left-of-centre, but it's definitely not out there being all leftist.
And that's fine, it has every right to chart its own ideology, just like ACT can be the party of white supremacists and free marketeers fused with tough on crime conservatives in some unholy alliance, and National can be whatever dominant faction at the time wants it to be.
But Labour is not left.
Every year capitalist governments allow people to starve to death, it allows children to go hungry and for the sick to go untreated. It allows people who do intense back-breaking labour to go underpaid and it allows for capital to accrue capital and for the owners of that capital to benefit from this despite doing nothing productive for society.
This is not a fair system. The family you are born into, the city you are born in, the socio-economic status of your parents, these factors overwhelmingly determine your future. You might have incredibly long bootstraps, but there will just be no pulling yourself up by them through no fault of your own.
If you step back and look at the world as a whole, nations operate the same. The United States was able to get insanely rich because cotton was one of the most sought after commodities of the 19th century, and the US had a near monopoly on it, being worked by slave labour. Pay your workers nothing to produce an expensive item? Bonanza.
Australia is often called the lucky country because geographically it just so happens to be the location of a lot of minerals that have become in-demand, meaning it can profit that way; despite a lot of the mining required to get at those minerals being utterly destructive to the planet.
So what do you do when it seems the Government is operating under a system that is designed to leave poor people struggling?
Libertarians would say leave it to the corporations, but that is a dreadful idea and would only be the current capitalist system writ large.
No, you as an individual collectivise with your fellow individuals and work within your community. If the State isn't going to help, then we ignore the State. Think of the Israeli kibbutz, something free from central government and more local. Smaller free associations that might be self-governing in some respects.
We are social, co-operative creatures inherently, so we need to tap into that again if we are to provide for our brethren. Because now there is an underclass that is just not being served, in fact are largely ignored and then taken out and beaten for political purposes.
Getting to this kind of utopia is hard. It requires a lot of co-operation and organisation, but it’s something we should aim for; no one person is materially more deserving of privilege ahead of another so let’s start living that way. The State might serve you, but does it serve everyone? And who is missing out that really needs help?
Comments
Sue Boyde
The local, community structures are the only ones likely to survive. But poor people tend to be segregated into poor neighborhoods, and do they have the resources to create organisations like this?
