A few more short thoughts on recent Supreme Court decisions, and some connections between them:
1. That mashup—Corporations are people, my friends, and some people are more equal than others—is a distressingly apt line:
Two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings—AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors—have deeply undercut these centuries-old public rights, by empowering businesses to avoid any threat of private lawsuits or class actions. The decisions culminate a thirty-year trend during which the judiciary, including initially some prominent liberal jurists, has moved to eliminate courts as a means for ordinary Americans to uphold their rights against companies. The result is a world where corporations can evade accountability and effectively skirt swaths of law, pushing their growing power over their consumers and employees past a tipping point.
2. Is the Court’s contempt for labor leading or following a more general social contempt for labor?
3. Remember, reproductive labor is the first form of labor, the basis of all other labor.
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And one non-Court related note:
I will never be an orthodox Marxist—I lack the optimism required of the orthodox—but if you want to understand the political culture in the US today, you’d do worse than to start with the domination of capital over our entire political-economy.
This doesn’t mean that all is determined by capitalist relations, that there is no autonomous space for politics and culture, or that there is no resistance to capital.
But it does mean that you can understand a lot if you understand that if capital is up against any other interest—labor, community, environmental, educational, safety, public—capital almost always wins.
If capital has no interest, then the politics is up for grabs.
We are left fighting over scraps.
AbsurdBeats 