“People before profit”, was one of many chants at the
anti-capitalism demonstration taking place in major cities around the world
during Black Friday.
Black Friday is one of the most profitable days for major
retailers such as Wal-Mart. It is also a day that displays the desperation of
working people who have lost all their disposable income to the continuing assault
on their wages by the large retailers themselves. These workers storm the
marketplace to purchase the product of their own exploited labour.
Moreover, the price tags placed on products also reveal the
level of exploitation of the workers. Prices are dropped at times to the tenth
of what they normally were and the corporation are still able to generate a
profit. However, this is easy to understand when considering the low wages paid
to over sea sweatshop workers (places such as China, Cambodia, and Thailand) in
addition to the raw materials bought in countries that have zero regard for the
human beings living there or the environment.
Further, the price tags on objects also hide one of the most
systemic contradictions within the capitalist system: the contradiction between
use-value, the social labour embodied in products, and the exchange-value. In short, we live in an exchange-value driven
system that has lost sight of the social labour that is embodied within the
products being sold, and are sold at arbitrary prices that are mostly
influenced by the supply and the demand of the market rather than their
use-value.
The United States as well as most modern Western Economies,
after years of increasing technological growth has effectively pushed millions
of industrial workers into the low-paying, no job security, service sector
employment. Workers living in the West today have been effectively cornered and
are being forced to pay with their wages for the nonsensical compound growth of
capitalism.
“Putting people profit” is the call for the liquidation of
the entire system, for capitalism cannot and will never be able to produce a
human face due to its own internal contradictions. Facing immense despotic
exploitation and forgoing the ability to buy products at a lower price: the
workers protesting during Black Friday demonstrate a worker consciousness never
witnessed before. The connection between poverty and corporate profit has now
been cemented in the minds of the people! The most profitable day of the year
for corporations has now been turned into the day of protest against the
totality of the system! Corporations call out to the people to come out to buy
their products and the people answer with chants against corporate profiteering
and the systemic misery inherent in capitalism!
www.chiabarsen.com
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