Hello Friends and Comrades,
It’s a very bleak week. Israel continues to carry out mass ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people. But Palestine Solidarity rallies of tens of thousands are continuing to take place across the globe. “On October 18, more than 8,000 people demonstrated on the steps of the Minnesota Capitol building to show solidarity with Palestine and to highlight the U.S. role in endorsing and funding the ongoing Israeli war on Palestine,” according to FightBack!News.
This month’s first Special for Socialist News and Views was SNV Special Interview: Closing Time (A Documentary). Closing Time is a feature length documentary film by Jennifer Neverdal about how “the government, how police solve problems by just pushing them away.” It includes some footage from the George Floyd Uprising, as well as footage related to evictions of unhoused folks from encampments and their aftermath and repercussions. Many of these folks are Indigenous and have been getting moved off the land, not only recently through encampment evictions, but for generations of displacement and removal of Indigenous people. After these evictions, in which people sometimes only have 5 minutes to gather their belongings, Neverdal says people evicted from the encampment “don’t know where they’re going to go. They’ll spend some time just wandering the street for awhile until they can gather together and form another encampment.” Then, Neverdal says, “the game of whack-a-mole starts all over again.” In the Interview, we link this displacement, especially of Indigenous people, to the displacement of Palestinian people (which we have covered before) and displacements taking place for construction of Cop City.
According to Wikipedia, “The terms Entfremdung (‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement’) and Entäusserung (‘externalization’ or ‘alienation’), derived from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, indicate that people are ‘alienated’ because they are not at home in the modern social world.” How can a person be less at home in the modern world then when they literally are not able to have any form of stable home, housing or community?
In our second Special the month, Capitalism, Crime & Alienation, we spoke with Mary Smith of Tacoma, Washington, who was shot by a stray bullet in front of her home. She was out on the street in front of her home to move her car late at night because of a ridiculous parking situation for residents of her area of the city. To be able to sleep in, she needs to move her vehicle late at night to take advantage of $2 all day parking on Saturdays. During that shooting, three people were hit, and Smith still has a bullet in her hip, which will stay there. Smith says gunfire is common in her neighborhood — her windshield and tire on her previous vehicle have been hit by bullets, and now she has “a different vehicle, and that has also been hit by gunfire.”
Smith says her neighborhood is majority People of Color and, as parking fines in the neighborhood stack up, at a certain point fines double and “a lot of people end up with three thousand, four thousand dollars in fines, and then they can’t renew their tabs unless their fines are paid.” She calls this “unnecessary” and “institutionalized racism,” but she says their addresses to city council fall on deaf ears. One way to pay off fines is to do community service from a list of organizations provided by the city of Tacoma. Listen to the podcast to hear about Mary Smiths ridiculous experiences with this list — including being forced to do hard labor while the leader of the program slept, or being asked to protest at an abortion clinic.
Alienation is also discussed more specifically in this Special. Smith says she believes “our social relationships are a reflection of our economic system.” Smith says in college she followed someone named T. Berry Brazelton, who spoke of future generations of “children that didn’t develop conscience, or adults that didn’t develop conscience because they didn’t have someone to bond with,” and we are lacking meaningful relationships and we are being moved around. Many parents today, for example, are working multiple jobs. She says a lot of people feel “hopeless” and “powerless” right now because of “this economic system that is in decline.” Smith says she thinks “guns equal power…whether you are a police officer or a kid.” In fact, she says the majority of the shootings in Tacoma over the last year have involved juveniles, and “that is a trend that is continuing.” She says that bullying and gun use among young people shows that many people are feeling powerless.
In addition, she says youth social programs have been reduced. When she was growing up in Portland, she says she thinks things were a little bit better “because sometimes the system can offer concessions.” Smith said they had treasure hunts, hula hoop contests, and teams sports offered in the community, and she says, “I think happy kids grow up to be happy adults.” Now, “capitalism is less able to make concessions, and so if kids want to get into sports, usually it entails a price.” This alienates kids from their communities. When people don’t value themselves properly they don’t value the people around them either.
Smith says if those in power really care about people’s health and safety, why would they allow people to be on the streets, and why don’t they provide us with healthcare? She says the encampments of unhoused folks have become “scapegoats” for crime, even while they are setting up community “without running water, without electricity, without sanitation.” They break up these communities because they have become an “embarrassment to capitalist elites” who are making “exponential wealth” at the expense of the rest of us. This is part of the ongoing marginalization, alienation, and estrangement of us from our communities.
SNV Special Interview: Nurses Forward Part 2 came out this past month as well. Part 1 can be found here. Nurses Forward is a rank-and-file reform slate running for the board of Minnesota Nurses Association. In the previous special, we had discussed extensively about their platform, so in this special, we decided to start by discussing their direct experiences within their workplaces as nurses.
German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse writes the two following passages in Reason & Revolution in 1941:
“The materialistic proposition that is the starting point of Marx’s theory thus states, first, an historical fact, exposing the materialistic character of the prevailing social order in which an uncontrolled economy legislates over all human relations.”
“The worker alienated from his product is at the same time alienated from himself. His labor itself becomes no longer his own, and the fact that it becomes the property of another bespeaks an expropriation that touches the very essence of man.”
Healthcare operating, essentially, as a business under capitalism is a great example of not only how “an uncontrolled economy legislates over all human relations” but also “the fact that it [a workers labor] becomes the property of another bespeaks an expropriation that touches the very essence of [hu]man.” Tami Andersen from North Memorial Hospital, who works on a Medical Surgical unit, says they are always looking “to fill capacity,” which includes filling rooms with another surgical patient shortly after it is exited by another, and getting admissions from the Emergency Room — even overnight. This is to keep their 20 beds filled at all times.
Jayme Wicklund from St. Paul Children’s Hospital said her biggest challenge is “the lack of resources that we have in the Neonatal ICU” (Intensive Care Unit.) She says what the hospital has done is scatter their Neonatologists, Nurse Practitioners and Respiratory Therapists across Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Coon Rapids which has lead to a lack of consistency, which then resulted in many providers leaving. Now, they are relying on traveling providers, and in some cases, “for the first time ever in a year and a half, we fly people in from New York to be Neonatologist.” In some cases, needed staff are unable to respond to a delivery where a baby was not breathing — they were not able to immediately get access to the needed areas of the hospitals. This is part of the ongoing professionalization that is going on in nursing, teaching, and many other fields as the capitalist class seeks to further commodify areas of work in which working people had previously been able to win concessions and establish some professional control.
Ernest Mandel wrote in 1970 in The Causes of Alienation, “The first and most striking feature of economic alienation is the separation of people from free access to the means of production and means of subsistence.” He also writes, “the second stage in the alienation of labour came about when part of society was driven off the land, no longer had access to the means of production and means of subsistence, and, in order to survive, was forced to sell its labour power on the market.” Though he is, in this instance, referring to the state, he says of alienation it is “the loss of rights by people to institutions which were in reality hostile to them.” The fruits of our work belong to the capitalist who employ us and, ultimately, we lack control over our work environments, at least as individuals.
In our regular October Episode, we had three reports on Indigenous people’s movements for dignity and democracy across the globe including in Guatemala, Gaza, and Minnesota. August Eviction At The Wall Of Forgotten Natives is the title of our Episode.
Even though the Indigenous population in rural Guatemala lacks access to even basic necessities, a local human rights activist reports that Guatemala is currently going through a “sociopolitical crises involving the Attorney General’s Office,” and her investigation of the president elect. The social movements there are demanding the resignation of the Attorney General, Consuelo Porras. Non-violent protests and blockades are taking place across the country to make this demand, which has lead to significant reductions in access to food and fuel, even for ordinary people. Even in this situation, people who lack resources themselves continue to show solidarity and share resources with protesters and those at the blockades.
Gaza also continues to experience a blockade, but in this case, by the colonizers in power. Gaza remains cutoff from food, fuel, and electricity by Israel. According to our report from the ground in Gaza, Israel continues to bomb hospitals, schools, colleges, and other places where people are seeking shelter or relocating from other destroyed locations. If Israel really “wants to save the civilians,” they could, “simply not target them.” Israel claims that Hamas is using civilians as “human shields” but it was the Israeli Government, in concert with imperialist governments in the UK and US, that ultimately pushed 2.2 million people off of their land, alienating them from subsistence and means of production, and onto a 5 mile x 25 mile strip of land in Gaza.
Here in Minnesota, Indigenous people were also pushed off their land and continue to be. In the final portion of our regular Episode, we cover the eviction by State Troopers, of mostly Indigenous unhoused people, at the Wall of Forgotten Natives on August 24th, 2023. This happened the day after a regular face at the camp named Dan Dan died while, according to those at the scene, paramedics and police stood by without properly intervening. But on the day of the eviction, Troopers certainly pulled out all the stops in order to evict unhoused Indigenous people. State Troopers put up crime scene tape, showed up with zip ties on their belts, and brought out a long-range acoustic device (LRAD). I called this a “sound weapon” in my discussion with the Troopers.
Luckily, that day the occupants of the encampment were able to leave with their stuff before the powers that be closed off the area. But getting accountability for the eviction was like trying to nail Jell-o to a wall. Minnesota Department of Transportation (MNDot), supposedly the lead agency on the eviction, passed the buck to Minnesota Department of Public Safety, who ultimately passed it back to MNDot. This lack of accountability (or likely hostility) by the supposedly democratically-elected government is a representation of this societal alienation.
Ultimately, Ernest Mandel says in Causes of Alienation (1970), that we must create the conditions that lead to the “withering away” of commodity production, economic scarcity, social division of labor, and “the disappearance of private ownership of the means of production and the elimination of the difference between manual and intellectual labour, between producers and administrators.”
All of these are changes we must bring about. Only then, says Mandel, will we experience “the slow transformation of the very nature of labour from a coercive necessity in order to get money, income and means of consumption into a voluntary occupation that people want to do because it covers their own internal needs and expresses their talents.”
Solidarity,
Nick Shillingford - Host - Socialist News and Views
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