Us & Them

Us and Them, And after all we're only ordinary men, Me, and you, God only knows it's not what we would choose to do, Forward he cried from the rear and the front rank died, And the General sat, as the lines on the map moved from side to side, Black and Blue, And who knows which is which and who is who, Up and Down, And in the end it's only round and round and round.

Us & Them, Pink Floyd

This is a conversation between my good friend and neighbour Dave, I posted it because it shows where our head states are at this moment in time, it's nothing ground breaking and nothing innovative (yet) but it's a spark. There's something that the majority of us have been ignoring that's so difficult to comprehend, but it's there to be seen and Dave brought this to my attention. Read between the lines and you won't have to apologise to Dave and his ilk like I am.

Dave writes..

Glad you're enjoying the book, it shines yet further light onto the corporate controlled world we live in.

I was inspired to write you this email in reference to a comment you made last to you were at my apartment. You wondered why I gave so much attention to the black struggle in America. I hope I can elocute this properly, but here goes.

No Logo is about big corporations and their influence on us. How they enslave poor people from around the world and how, with government assistance, they control us domestically. Of course we know by now that governments are ultimately beholden to the corporations and neo-liberal policy is based firmly on removing people's rights and pushing us as close to slavery as we can get. Longer working hours, lower pay and destruction of unions in order to keep any resistance to this down. On top of that we are saddled with debt through the materialist fantasies we are shown that we need constantly by advertisers, backed up by willing finance/credit companies. A population in debt is a subservient population.

We see freetrade agreements throughout the world which are the opposite of free. Corporations essentially steal natural resources from countries at a pittance and the governments of said countries collude in the robbery by signing away their Independence through 'aid' and corruption. Organizations like the IMF/World Bank/WTO are set up and controlled by America, who hold a veto over all of these organizations. Obviously the lobbying industry is the what makes the tail of the U.S government wag. The lobbying industry of course represent corporations and as such have the most to benefit from taking advantage of the international agencies. America, or more aptly, American corporations have but one desire - profit. Maximising profit comes at any cost as you see in No Logo. You know already that a C.E.O's primary objective is to make more money. It is illegal in America for them to do anything but maximize profit and that means constantly cutting overheads.

The argument in many people's head though is framed in a US vs THEM scenario (us not u.s). That is why it's so hard for people to comprehend 9/11. The government is a part of US, and US would never attack US. It's unimaginable. I would argue that the US vs THEM scenario is the correct analysis though, but US is the working people of the world. We have solidarity with anyone trying to make their bread, the exploited all over the world. Presently we have laws in the west, built up over hundreds of years which guarantee us our freedoms, our rights and our voice. These freedoms are being eroded by successive governments. America has been that way since the creation of the corporation and Britain is little better. Workers have only had the vote since 1867! After the second world war the government feared a revolution and as such the labour government were obliged to appease the masses. The welfare state was born out of this golden age. Until the 70's the workers movement in Britain was strong but Thatcherism, plus an increasingly marginalized press with less dissenting voices, turned the public against their own good. Did you know for example that people like Foot and Pilger were Daily Mirror writers in the 70's! Imagine that!

Reagan/Thatcher then engaged in the most vicious pro-business anti US policies seen for many a generation. Materialism/capitalism took hold and those policies have continued with successive governments since, becoming more severe every time as apathy and lack of knowledge are shown as positive attributes to have by the press. We have seen with the recent Blair/Bush governments that there are no limits to the virtues of the private/profit sector. Privatised schools/hospitals and war to enrich the very few who have a seat at the top table are the most glaring examples, but every decision that is taken in both the American and British system is made with the people in second place. This is essential for their own survival though. The media barons as well as the funders of both systems do not react well to non-pro business policies and these intuitions have the power to overthrow a government through the court of public opinion, to stop funding the party/candidate and thus see them lose their seat or alternatively cause the economy to crash leaving the party to hold the baby.

So the battle is THEM vs US and it's a battle that US is losing, badly. If it's ok to enslave foreigners or prisoners (prisoners have to perform slave labour in U.S prisons) and they are part of US then if the laws were not in place to protect US we would be enslaved too. We see with the implementation of i.d cards, domestic spying and all the rest of it how our civil liberties are disappearing one by one. I don't envisage slavery to involve whips and chains these days, it's way more advanced than that. I'm thinking more along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World. Maybe the slavery won't be painful but it's certainly won't be human as we know it.

Anyway, back to the black struggle. Blacks literally were enslaved by THEM. I doubt there were many coal miners in Burnley with slaves!!! Due to a fight by US, the blacks gained freedom but it has been resented in the ruling class ever since and they still face the hardest time in the U.S. We only need to see how they are treated on polling day or during Katrina to see that they are second class citizens in their own country. I don't think it has anything to do with colour either these days. It's wealth. These are in general the poorest people in the country, with the worst level of education and health care. These people don't give financial donations to any political party and are more aware than anyone of the fallacy of the American dream (which is the capitalist dream). They experience now, the nightmare which awaits all of us. Righteous, eloquent blacks share the same voice as righteous white/Hispanic or any other people and I respect all of their words equally. I enjoy political hip hop because it's like the protest songs of days gone by. They sing about the traumas they face and the hope of a better day and I can relate to it. They are a persecuted people not because of their skin colour but because they are, in general, not from the ruling class.I would recommend Malcolm X's book to you and I think you would be surprised with the correlation to your own life. I feel that it is more likely that something revolutionary will come out of the black movement than the left wing movement, even though I can never truly align with it. The black movement have their skin colour as their bond while many people still believe that US includes you, me and the governments which rule us. I hold hope that the Internet will shine light into the darkness of the mainstream but if people ever woke up they would be angry. Wouldn't they?

Anyway, this email wasn't meant to be this long and I'm sure you know most of what I wrote already.

Let me know what you make of it all

Dave

I reply....

I had a strange dream last night: I was working, or doing something, I could have been shopping in the Mall, to me both are equally arduous tasks. A man was blackmailing me trying to extort money from my person in exchange for a guarantee that I could remain with my family. I wouldn’t pay up and it was all a bit of a fracas climaxing with me punching my dreamt up oppressor square on the nose.

This somehow brings me to your US and THEM dichotomy, the man causing my stress was most certainly THEM and I am US although most US would point out I am more THEM than US and a lot of THEM would surely acquiesce, as having me in THEM makes THEM THEMer. I believe in dualism I assume the dividing linear to be obvious and clear but the more you think about it the more opaque it becomes (the more I read the less I know). Who are/is US and THEM? Are the sole manipulators of this question THEM by manufacturing a deluded belief in US that we are in fact THEM? And if they are, then where do THEM cease to become US and vice-versa. To put it bluntly I think we’ve been duped with a clever ploy, to think of all those Stone Island jumpers and the $600 CP Company coat I adored back home. I feel well and truly sold.

So the battle is on and it’s a battle that US is indeed losing because most of US don’t know we/they are US and if a majority of we/they start to suspect we/they are US then we/they try to buy themselves back into THEM by aspiring to be THEM. By way of example, procuring $200 trainers for our three year old children made by fourteen year old children working and living in abhorrent conditions in Cambodia, who are so consumed by this world order that they have been successfully detached from the dichotomy we discuss.

The battle is for the very line, not just where it exists but how it exists and whether it exists at all, without it THEM would be lost. Its movement and its permeability are open to change and ironically for once in the arena of world politics it’s to the advantage of THEM if the line is variable, permeable and enigmatic. You don’t need a visa to cross the border from US to THEM and likewise on the return trip.

British society, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the famines of Africa engendered the US and THEM theory in both of our formative years, we both know in which camp we stood and so did everybody else. There wasn’t any need for a wall between the North and the South. Thatcher built the divide and then Major and Blair (especially Blair) made it illusory go away, manufacturing and mining jobs went to the wall (or the developing world) and in their place. Office and Mac/Mc Jobs arrived.

My Dad who was a skilled jig grinder in a steel factory was made redundant, and in exchange the Government ironically found him work finding work for others slightly less fortunate than him: they gave him a job in the local Job Centre. So in exchange for one collar job for a different coloured collar job you somehow move classes. It doesn’t matter if workers use less skill and earn less money, the point is that somehow, once the sting has worn off classes appear to transgress class just because they work in front of a computer screen in an office as opposed to a machine in a factory. How very strange that that transgression is always upwards but communities and societies appear just as fragmented and disillusioned (if not more)

I found the best example of all this in No Logo: the kids from the Bronx sending their used trainers back to Nike, saying on CNN we made you and we can break you. I wish I could find that moment on YouTube.

For once the invisible line that exists wasn’t illusory invisible, it was dissipated of all its invisibility. However the walls and the shackles and the WTO and the Free Trade Agreements and the politics will never dissipate because humanity is too entrenched in the self. Call me misanthropic, but I only ever started seeing society’s downfall when I started working in it.

But you are right in your conclusion, if people woke up they would be very angry, but the problem is that most don’t want to wake up even though they can see it. To coin a phrase, the ‘I’m alright Jacks’ of this world couldn’t give a monkeys. So long as they are drinking Starbuck’s Lattes, shopping in Tescos, wearing Gap tops, Diesel jeans, Nike trainers and driving around in Shell gas guzzling Chelsea Tractors, the revolution can wait for Marx to reincarnate.

keep the faith

Boothy

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