How Does It Feel To Be A ‘Human Commodity?’

True wealth lies in the scarcity of one’s wants—as opposed to the abundance of one’s possessions.

by Chris Maser 

We, as a society, are losing sight of one another as human beings—witness the Wall-Street money chase in which numerous, large corporations discount human value as they increasingly convert people into faceless commodities that are bought and sold on a whim to improve the corporate standing in the competitive marketplace. After all, market share translates into political power, which translates into higher profit margins, both of which exacerbate the corporate disregard for people, the rampant destruction of Nature, and the squandering of natural resources.

There was a time when people were valued for what they were as individuals. Although American workers have long had an enforced workweek of 40 hours, there currently is an insidious infringement into personal life due to pagers and cell phones, which allow corporations to “own” employees 24 hours a day. Businesses seem to have no moral compunctions about calling employees whenever they choose—”for the good of the company.” For those who would choose to live by the corporate proverb, “for the good of the company,” the Families and Work Institute said that in 2001 employees are more likely to:

• lose sleep
• have physical and emotional health problems
• make mistakes on the job
• feel and express anger at employers
• resent co-workers who they perceive are not pulling their weight
• look for different jobs

Because consumption and consumerism dominate social discourse and political agendas of all parties, consumerism hogs the limelight at center stage as the prime objective of Western industrialized societies, which, in the collective, are known as “consumer societies.” Within these consumer societies, the purpose of consumption is: variety, distraction from daily stresses, pleasure, power, and the status that one hopes will bring with them a measure of happiness and social security. None of this comes to pass, however, because people themselves are increasingly seen as economic commodities. How can a commodity find security from another commodity? In this sense, the marketplace satisfies only temporarily our collective neuroses, while hiding the values that give true meaning to human life.9

Author James B. Twitchell puts it nicely: “Once we are fed and sheltered, our needs are and have always been cultural, not natural. Until there is some other system to codify and satisfy those needs and yearnings, commercialism [consumerism]—and the culture it carries with it—will continue not just to thrive but to triumph.”*

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*While benefitting from one’s efforts cannot be said to be inherently evil, and can actually be quite just; corporations are not individuals and the decisions they make are totally devoid of the considerations of an individual; serving only to further profit at any price. In other words, while an individual’s ethical system may hold any number of things as a supreme value, a corporation’s supreme value has to be profit; because that is its precondition for survival.

Two notable examples of this are the fact that many corporations that notoriously pollute the environment will move manufacturing facilities to countries with fewer environmental regulations rather than invest the money to comply with stricter regulations in their home country. Likewise, corporations have no loyalty to the people of the nation in which they were formed, and seek to reduce the cost of labor through any legal method, which increasingly puts the people in Western nations in direct competition with low wage or even slave labor in the Third World; with devastating long term effects in terms of both national wealth and labor displacements. Corporations even sponsor the importation of alien labor, forcing domestic wages lower, stressing social service systems, and placing the genetic continuity of the domestic population at risk. All for a profit.

These examples, again, show no difference between Capitalism and Bolshevism in that, in the end, both systems have the same effects and therefore only differ in methodology. Legislation in Capitalist systems serves to create de-facto state enterprises in important sectors such as media and electricity, while pollution, wage depression and globalization without regard to cultural preservation or preservation of human bio-diversity work the same in both instances. — John Young, EAU

 

2008-01-01