Africa, by Medina Bedru

Africa

What will i teach my children here in this foreign land...
i trace back to memories, roots...the scent of damp red earth,
muddy fromt he summer rain...in this mystical land...deep in the veldts-
the echoes of war cries reverberate...
and i am set alight....my feet pattering as i recall the strength of warriors, t
he unwavering resolve of my mother in this land where struggle is beautiful.
i will tell them of the ochra seeds we cacooned like hope, braided into our hair,
about capoeira fight music and the ciphered codes of language and dance
about our internal genocide, the beauty and the tragedy of it all...our freedom fighters- the mandela's and the menelik's and the anan's of our time
i will tell them that 'getting by' is the noose that will lynch us...i will tell them of my father's 2km run to school everyday and candlelit study vigils...or my mother's backbone shielding us with ther tiny body from flying debris as they bombed homes
i will tell them Africa is heart...the heart of me laughs at the beauty of this land...the fu-fu and injera scents wafting through thatched huts, the laugh-at struggle loosensess of my culture, the steady beat of drums in the mad heat of indignation, the wife/the mother-her torturous wail piercing the night sky as she holds her limp child in her arms and her tears dampen the earth, like the first drops of summer rain.
i will tell them of dancing at the funeral, of the celebration of life,of a love so strong it it sets free.

medina bedru

Does capitalism need an injection of thymotic consciousness or soul?

The news these days is redundancies. The Brisbane Times reported on on 2 March 2009 that “Anglo Coal Australia (ACA) announced it will lay off 650 staff and contractors.” .
A MSNBC report dated 26 January 2009 stated that “A slew of American heavyweight companies, including Caterpillar, Pfizer, Sprint Nextel, Home Depot and General Motors, announced cuts Monday adding up to 45,000 jobs lost”.

There are massive redundnacies going on here in Australia and overseas. The corporations affected argued the redundancies are engendered by the current economic crisis. But is is possible, one has to ask, that there is a much deeper problem? Is is possible that the conceptual framework within which labour is understood in the conventional production formula plays a part or has serve to exarcebate the problem?

To appreciate the point I am trying to make. Pick up any economic textbook and you will find that the productivity equation is a proximate of the following:

Input Output

Labour + Raw Material + Machinery = Product + Profit


This formula views the human factor as nothing more than an input, a commodity, that ranks pari passu, with raw material and machinery used in the prodcution process. Because the modern firm has to be “rational”, argue the economist, and rationality postulates production at the least possible cost the maximum quantity, the inputs of the different sides of the above equation are likely to have a tense commaradrie when profit margins are squeezed. I am asking my readers, is it time we as a society review our productivity models and inject to the machine of our capitalist system, to which we must attribute much of our successes, a new thymos?

Man can’s simply be an input. We are radically different from every other element in the production equation. We feel, desire, reason and above all, we desire the desire of other men. Is there something morally wrong with a society that views the human capital as nothing more than a commodity and is thus willing to throw it out of the production process when profits are sequeezed?

In Dal Capital, Volumn I (1887), Karl Marx addressed the burgeoisie in the following tone: “You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and have the odour of sanctitity to boot, but you are a creature with no heart in its breast”. Is is remotely possible, given the focus of the modern corporation on profit and its veiw of labour as a mere commodity, that Marx was right?

I have to say at this point that I believe the capitalist economic system has been vigorously tested and it is, in my view, better than any system we’ve tested thus far. But as Hobbes says in Leviatham “Nothing made mortal is imortal”. The system is man made and though it might be superior to alternative tested systems, it is not infallible. On this basis, should we, as a society, revist the assumptions we’ve put into this system of ours and inject in it, a human feeling?
After all, it is , on face value, void of feelings. This lack of thymotic consciousness, is in my view, one of the elements at the roof of the massive redundancies the world will be experiencing over the next years. It is not that some of these corporations will not survive the storm. They have been trained to think that rationalism means profit this year must always be better than previous years. Losses aren’t permitted.