Examining the historical changes in capitalism, both in productivity
of labour and social struggle, can be viewed (at least in part), within the
broad lens of social transparency vs social
occlusion of capital. The idea here is that as capital overcomes more of
its boundaries in production, and accumulating gargantuan levels of profits, it
becomes a greater priority for capital to hide its footprint in relation to disposing
the working class. As capital finds myriad new ways of squeezing profit and
expanding its deleterious reach in society, it also wants to keep its inner
workings behind closed doors and occluded to the public. Transoceanic trade
deals, tax evasions, executive bonuses, and trades in fictitious markets, are
some of the insidious and draconian ways that capital is dispossessing the
working class. In order to protect its coffers of large sums of capital from being
remunerated back to the working people, capitalism has created a number of ways
to occlude the working class consciousness of it. However, despite the methods
of political suppression at capital’s behest, capital continues to produce the technological
means for political transparency in society for the working class: this is
ultimately congealed within the larger class struggle between the haves and the
have-nots. The occlusion and the distancing of the working people from the
levers of real political and economic power is the ongoing aim of capitalism.
The danger for the bourgeois state is the exposure to the reality of an entire
economic and political world built on the dispossession of 99% by the hands of
the 1%. It is in this context that the words transparency and openness fulcrum
towards a more revolutionary definition.
One type of technology that has burgeoned and heightened levels
of transparency in our world today is communication and information technology.
By the word “transparency” I am loosely referring to the ability of the public
to have access to the knowledge and information about the inner workings of the
bourgeois state (such as the legislature, armed forces and the police),
bourgeois institutions (such as the IMF, Financial Reserve, European
Commission) and corporations in general. This access and exposure to
information about the operations of the bourgeois and the notorious 1%, is not
the result of the bourgeois becoming honest and open to the public about its
dealings, but rather because the very technology that was invented to remove
one of the main barriers to capital accumulation (space and time) is now being
effectively used against the political interests of the bourgeois. For example,
business machines, such as computers, were advanced for the purpose of trade and
commerce, are now ubiquitous instrument in class struggle. The same can be said
about the use of internet, social media technology, and mobile phones which are
also central to networking, organizing and mobilizing the working class. Tools
capital originally created to increase surplus value and profits during
production, are now being used as tools in class struggle.
What we see today is the use of communication technology by
the public to expose the inner workings of the bourgeois state. Video clips of
the government debates and legislature are uploaded onto social media for the
public to view and discuss. Government top secret documents are released on the
internet to expose state corruption and corporate fraud and legal theft of the
working class tax revenues and pension funds. This was the case with the
documents released on WikiLeaks, and the release of the “Panama papers” by the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists. It was also the case with the
thousands of documents that were released by Edward Snowden to expose the US
government spying on its own citizens. Mobile phone cameras are used across the
world to capture the actions of the police and security forces, to record
incidents of prejudice, racism and blatant brutality. Social media, such as
YouTube, is used to capture important events in social movements and as a form
of grass roots news media. YouTube channels are also used to stream political
debates and TV channels to places with closed media freedom.
It is also important to note that moments of transparency in
to the inner workings of capitalism also occur during a financial crisis. A
crisis is the result of the foundational contradictions of capital accumulation
surfacing. During a financial crisis the
central nervous system of capitalism that both regulates and promotes capital
becomes exposed and transparent to all. These inner financial institutions of capitalism
often operate similarly to the inner workings of the Vatican than a transparent
institution. Only on the wake of the 2008 financial crash, just as in 1929 when
capitalism was facing imminent collapse, did the human face of capital greet
the pubic on television. Both Ben Bernanke (chair of the Federal Reserve) and
Hank Paulson (Secretary of the Treasury) jointly dictated the new national
financial policy when the US bourgeois state (the senate and congress) was left
in a catatonic state.
Economic negotiations behind closed doors (at state and international
trade level), the creation of large gated communities for the 1%, occlusion,
and the use of its monopoly on violence, are the only instruments left in the
hands of the bourgeois. It is only through such insidious and draconian
instruments of suppression that the bourgeois continues its immoral dispossession
of the working class, which today is facing a fierce and organized street by
street struggle by the working class, in order to maintain its illegitimate
class rule of society.
By Chia Barsen
WWW.CHIABARSEN.COM
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