Accidents never happen in a perfect world, and accidents are few and far between in the perfectly miserable world fashioned by advanced, decrepit capitalism. It's no accident and it's no mistake that at this moment, ten years into the non-recovery, the president of the United States is a serial bankruptcy artist, a double-self-dealing, empty-headed lout; a "developer" of country clubs for golf-cart night riders and recreational fascists; selling his double-self-dealing loutish self for all the market can bear.
We are, after all, ten years into a supposed recovery which has only magnified the conditions that created the crash.
It's a special vengeance that capital takes on those who only make counterrevolution halfway. And make no mistake, the policies and programs of the last ten years have been half-a-counterrevolution. Whether presented as austerity, or as special investment vehicles, or direct capital injections, or quantitative easing, behind all those masks stands the attack on labor, but an attack, no matter how brutal and sustained, isn't close to being enough.
To all that's been undone-- Brexit, G7, Shengen, Greece, public education, health care, environmental protection, capital passes a single judgement, "Not enough. Not by half."
Now comes the other half, that half that makes it evident that all those who proposed the "rescue" of capital; that all those who couldn't contemplate the "horror" of the complete implosion of capitalism opted for the greater evil. The total collapse of capitalism, even without any prospect for the development of a revolutionary alternative, is always the lesser evil when we confront the survival of the system.
So now we get the Ministry of Cruelty, known to the bourgeoisie as the Department of Justice, where the Minister, twice named for heroes of the slaveholders' rebellion, finds fulfillment in separating children from their parents at the border. "In God We Trust," says the Minister, his hand on the bible,"and.......Arbeit Macht Frei."
"E pluribus unum, my dying ass," says the lout, putting his likeness on everything from currency to toilet paper.
The attack on labor did not begin with the attack on immigrants, on immigrant labor. The attack on labor began some 40 years ago, but the attack on immigrant labor provides a level of cruelty, provides it on a daily basis and in increasing doses, preparing society for the more cruelty to come, and the cruelty that this system, this organization of always the greater evil, requires.
Disband Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau. Disband the Customs and Border Patrol forces.
June 16, 2018
Originally appeared: https://anticapital0.wordpress.com/the-ministry-of-cruelty/
