A new dawn inworker survival?

THE EDITOR: Listening to David Abdulah on TV on Friday, informative as the discourse was, I couldn’t help but shake my head at the perennial combat between the owners of capital and “those on the ground,” as he would describe them, with the former exploiting the latter to maximise their key mantra: profit.

I shook my head because the battle between the two politico-economic competing systems has been the way in the world, both geographically aligned, the one basically west and the other east, Cuba being the exception inter alia in Latin America, the conflict even taking a military tone, with the Western use of the term “communist” to describe all potential enemies.

Both systems, theoretically, can boast of positives, capitalism often being touted as the engine of democracy as in the US and Europe, with socialism as the quintessential equality among all men with no class or power structure.

Of course that is only the theory in both instances, for the profit maximisation of the first can only be achieved through diminishing returns for those on the ground, even to the point where the latter can become expendable as is the current case in TT.

To be sure, there are the usual compensation packages for workers with the drive towards profit maximisation, but ironically the question of the “sustainability” of such packages never arises even as that issue is the driving force behind cutbacks and retrenchment.

As to communism/socialism, Orwell’s Animal Farm is a poignant message of how a so-called “equal” society can degenerate from its ideal into a situation where “some animals are more equal than others,” with Napoleon the original champion of the animals against humans becoming “human” himself.

It is evident, therefore, that in both systems “those on the ground” will inevitably be victims, so the question arises as to the purpose of Abdulah’s et al intended march since workers are doomed to suffer at the hands of power and profit.

You may ask whether the people on the ground will ever be able to retrieve their situation. History has recorded many such efforts in the French, Bolshevik and American Revolutions, but eventually power structures always emerge with the “people” always on the receiving end.

But the question to ask is whether those on the ground in Macron’s France will be the forerunners of a new dawn in worker survival?

As usual I leave the answer up to you.

DR ERROL BENJAMIN via e-mail

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"A new dawn inworker survival?"

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