How daily pleasures reinforce injustice
You’ve had a tiring day at work, and you’d like nothing more than to come home, change into comfy clothes, have a can of pop or a glass of wine, and order some dinner. As you go through the thousand other tasks pending, maybe you’re eyeing the parcel you ordered, waiting to be opened. Or the couch that invites you to sink into it, in front of the TV.
The assumption here, of course, is that “you” are a person with a home and a job that allows for a home life.
But what if you, and I, the great Canadian middle class, took the time to stop and think about the implications of these benign actions? And realize these options are possible because highly vulnerable people work under barbaric conditions to make it so, and that we are primed not to question the profiteers in exchange for petty comforts?
Would we want to think that the comfy clothes we’re slipping into are likely the product of child labour and forced labour prevalent in at least 18 countries?
Children as young as five are reported to be recruited and forced to work in cotton fields. Where they can be beaten or sexually abused for not meeting stringent daily quotas.
It’s impossible to live a life of principle under this late-stage capitalism, the latest term to describe this out-of-control freight train thundering across tracks of destruction around the world. Capitalism is not limited to the relationship between capital and labour. It has a stake in colonialism, resource extraction, ecological destruction and the use of labour forces to maintain racial and gender domination.
A New York Times investigation last week showed that sugar for companies such as Coke and Pepsi comes at least in part from sugar cane fields in western India where women, working without access to toilets or sanitary pads, are pushed into hysterectomies at a young age to stop them from having periods or dealing with any gynecological issues that would, heaven forbid, necessitate taking a break. If it means they risk early menopause, osteoporosis or heart disease, on their own heads be it.
No Coke, then. Uncorking a bottle of wine, instead? Spare a thought for the abuses of workers in this industry. An Oxfam report outlines the “forced labour, poverty wages, excessive working hours and severe health and safety risks for workers in the Italian wine industry,” responsible for almost a fifth of global wine production.
The dinner you’re about to order, is that from Uber Eats? That parcel, delivered by Amazon? Both so strongly represent the concentration of corporate power at the expense of workers that they have birthed terms such as Amazon capitalism and Uber capitalism.
All this is before we get to the climate implications of home deliveries.
At what point does knowledge become responsibility to act? Free societies mean people have the freedom to choose. Our simple daily choices are turning us into unwitting participants in injustices.
There is plenty of evidence of the crises that make our lifestyles possible, but it is either overwhelming to confront the reality of this bleakness or simply inconvenient.
Of what use is choice if we choose inaction and therefore injustice? Governments can intervene to make corporations and the ultrarich pay more taxes so the working class that enables our comforts can also enjoy basic dignities. If we choose, instead, to vote based on the latest culture war issue and jeer at the vulnerable, what does that choice say about us?
In addition, middle-class lifestyles are so heavily scheduled, they leave little time for reflection. Too busy to think is a thing.
There is no conspiracy. The builtin impulse of capitalism is to accumulate and expand capital. To keep making profit, an enterprise must undervalue labour — necessitating us do ever more to keep earning — and also devalue the less visible contributors to its success, which is why housework, care work and even lifesaving work such as firefighting is either free or not paid at par with its societal value. But stockbroking is well compensated.
In horrible irony, the angst against capitalism itself gets commodified into entertainment, streamed by companies that maximize their profits with anti-capitalist shows and films without having to change their own structures.
So when we finally sit in front of that TV and lose ourselves in the exquisite craftsmanship of “Squid Game” or “Succession” or “Black Mirror,” we may derive satisfaction from feeling shock and anger at the cruelty and greed of the powerful. Then we go back to punching the clock.
As with hamsters on wheels that keep going, and much like a scene in a dystopian show on our screens, there is no jumping off.