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CAPITALISM DESTROYS INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING AND LIBERTY
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- LANI GUINIER
CAPITALISM DESTROYS INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING AND LIBERTY1. CAPITALISM DESTROYS INDIVIDUALISM Che Guevara, revolutionary economist. “Socialism and Man in Cuba.” A NEW SOCIETY, 1991, p. 215. In capitalist society man is controlled by a pitiless law usually beyond his comprehension. The alienated human specimen is tied to society as a whole by an invisible umbilical cord: the law of value. This law acts upon all aspects of his life, shaping his course and destiny. 2. CAPITALISM REQUIRES THAT MANY SUFFER FOR THE BENEFIT OF ONE Che Guevara, revolutionary economist. “Socialism and Man in Cuba.” A NEW SOCIETY, 1991, p. 215. The laws of capitalism, which are blind and invisible to ordinary people, act upon the individual without his being aware of it. He sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon before him. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller--whether or not it is true--about the possibilities of success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for a Rockefeller to emerge, and the amount of depravity entailed in the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible for the popular forces to make these concepts clear. 3. EQUALITY IS MEANINGLESS UNDER CAPITALIST RELATIONS Che Guevara, revolutionary economist. TO SPEAK THE TRUTH, 1992, p. 115. This definition must provide for the elimination of all forms of discrimination and all differences, even those arising from so-called equal treatment. Treatment must be fair, and fairness, in this context, is not equality; fairness is the inequality needed to enable the exploited peoples to attain an acceptable standard of living.
Che Guevara, revolutionary economist. TO SPEAK THE TRUTH, 1992, p. 97. Because so long as this situation persists and justice remains the tool of a few powerful interests, legal interpretations will continue to be tailored to the convenience of the oppressor powers and it will be difficult to ease the prevailing tension: a situation that entails real dangers for humanity.
Che Guevara, revolutionary economist. TO SPEAK THE TRUTH, 1992, p. 99. If all the peoples who live under precarious economic conditions and who depend on foreign powers for some vital aspects of their economy and for their economic and social structure are capable of resisting--coolly, although in the heat of the moment--the temptations offered them and imposing a new type of relationship here, then humanity will have taken a step forward. If, on the other hand, the groups of underdeveloped countries, lured by the siren song of the interests of the developed powers who profit from their backwardness, compete futility among themselves for crumbs from the tables of the world’s mighty, and break the unity of numerically superior forces; or if they are not capable of insisting on clear agreements, without escape clauses open to capricious misinterpretations; or if they rest content with agreements that can simply be violated at will by the powerful, then our efforts will have been to no avail and the lengthy deliberations of this conference will result in nothing more than innocuous documents and files for the international bureaucracy to guard zealously: tons of printed paper and kilometers of magnetic tape recording the opinions expressed by the participants. And the world will stay as it is.
Lani Guinier was unjustly passed over in one of the most highly publicized confirmation hearings ever. That’s not just me being partisan. Guinier was unjustly denied her rightful post as Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Civil Rights because, the right wing said, she believed in quotas for minority hiring in order to make up for the problems caused by systematic racism for the past 200 years in this country, including slavery. She was, they claimed, a “quota queen.” Just one problem: Guinier had never advocated quota-based hiring. In fact, she OPPOSED quotas – they went contrary to her notion of “confirmative action,” Guinier’s version of affirmative action. That didn’t stop the hounds once they had been released, though. As the woman herself said in a subsequent interview on the topic: “Because we are in a sound-bite culture, we define you by no more than three or four words-in my case, two: Quota Queen. It had nothing to do with what I had written, but it was a very useful, alliterated metaphor that served partisan purposes at the time.” What do we learn from reading the work of Lani Guinier? What do we learn from the fact that her nomination was torpedoed? To answer the first question, we get to inspect the ideas of one of the most forward-looking thinkers on race in America. We get to watch as one of the best legal minds in America grapples with issues to which there are no easy solution: to what extent does the pact inform today? What kind of remedies are effective for centuries-long discrimination? How can we ensure those remedies don’t inflame the problem, or create new forms of discrimination? These are questions without easy answers. As for the second proposition -- What do we learn from the fact that her nomination was torpedoed? – we learn that being an insightful critical thinker instead of a partisan demagogue is a sure way to avoid public service at a high level. As Mark Tushnet has written: “Guinier's nomination to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division foundered because she understood those tensions and her work makes them apparent. For understandable political reasons, the politicians who control the nomination process preferred to keep the tensions under wraps. For them, Guinier's intellectual honesty made her politically unacceptable.” Guinier continues to teach law at Harvard Law School, write manifold articles on the subject of race in the United States, and publish books. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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