“We’re back to work.”
An Israeli occupation soldier posted a video documenting himself shelling Gaza with heavy artillery after the reignition of the genocidal war on the war-torn region.
Viju: In a world of alienated labour, everything is work if it is paid.
Binu: You are absolutely right.
Can you write something on this?
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Alienated Labour
It is a Marxist term describing conditions of work in a capitalist society. In this system the worker is alienated from his work because he doesn’t own the enterprise – work place, machinery, raw material, power etc. He merely sell his labour power – ability to do work – at a certain rate per hour/day/week/month. He has no other involvement – for example the product – it can be biscuit or bomb! Nor does he have any ethics-whether the product is good for society or for nature. He can be involved in the production of health foods or poisons.
Wars
Wars are special cases – they involve the worst crimes – that of killing another human beings. So special inputs are given to justify the ‘work’. Two most common inputs have been ’racism’ and ‘nationalism’.
Racism
Because the ‘other’ person is different and poor therefore he is inferior. This is the basic logic of racism and has been used through out the colonial era and today attitude towards lower castes and immigrants. It has been used to insult, hit, kill, loot burn, mass lynching and genocide.
Apartheid, meaning “separateness” in Afrikaans, was a system of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by the white minority government in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s, leading to the oppression of non-white citizens. Today this term has acquired a general meaning and is used in connection with Israel’s policy towards Palestinians.
Nationalism
Ho Chi Minh was asked if he was a communist or nationalist. He replied ‘I am a patriot’. Patriotism means love for one’s people and land. Patriotic wars are to defend these. Many ‘national liberation wars’ fall in this category.
Nationalism assumes that my ‘nation’/country is more important that others and has a right to loot, wage wars or colonise. Soldiers and ordinary people are indoctrinated with this philosophy/attitude in almost all the countries – including the so called communist countries. This is the most widely used inputs to soldiers in almost all the wars – except in ‘national liberation wars’. The later should actually be called ‘patriotic wars’ to remove the confusion.
Mercenaries
These are a special class of soldiers who do not owe allegiance to any country. They sell their ‘labour’ to any side which pays them more. In that sense they do pure ‘alienated labour’.
There are also ‘mercenary’ arms dealers and arms manufacturers who sell arms to any one, often to both the sides of the conflict. Today major capitalist economies have become war economies. They encourage, intervene and even start wars to support their business and economies. In fact today ‘war’ is the biggest business and all the major capitalist countries are involved in it – at an enormous cost to humanity.
So defeating capitalism is the most important task facing humanity. Down with capitalism!
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Note: I have used male pronouns through out for convenience. Apologies!
T Vijayendra (1943 – ) was born in Mysore, grew up in Indore and went to IIT Kharagpur to get a B. Tech. in Electronics (1966). After a year’s stint at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, he got drawn into the whirlwind times of the late 60s.
Since then, he has always been some kind of political-social activist. His brief for himself is the education of Left-wing cadres and so he almost exclusively publishes in the Left-wing journal Frontier, published from Kolkata. For the last ten years, he has been active in the field of ‘Peak Oil’ and is a founder member of Peak Oil India and Ecologise. Since 2015 he has been involved in Ecologise! Camps and in 2016 he initiated Ecologise Hyderabad. In 2017 he spent a year celebrating the Bicentenary of the Bicycle. Vijayendra has been a ‘dedicated’ cyclist all his life, meaning, he neither took a driving license nor did he ever drive a fossil fuel-based vehicle.
He divides his time between Hyderabad and organic farms at several places in India, watching birds and writing fiction. He has published a book dealing with resource depletion, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, a novella, an autobiography and a children’s science fiction story on the history of the bicycle, apart from booklets on several topics. His booklet, Kabira Khada Bazar Mein: Call for Local Action in the Wake of Global Emergency (2019, https://archive.org/details/kabira-khada-bazaar-mein) has been translated into Kannada, Bengali and Marathi and is the basic text for the emerging Transition Networks in these language regions. His last book ‘Vijutopias’, which has 12 short stories, is an entertaining book full of hope and energy in these dismal times.
Email: [email protected]
