DIALOGUES WITH ROBERT ESTRADA
Reactions to a post by Naomi Klein on Common Dreams “The Best has yet to come“, June 14, 2016.
Genetics and The Rentier Class
Reactions to a post by Naomi Klein on Common Dreams “The Best has yet to come”.
Robert Estrada:
It was a good and hopeful piece, though her reference to “reparations” based on genetics leaves me cold
James Babij:
I disagree on reparations. Historically the economic war waged against indigenous populations around the globe, especially in Africa and here in the US, has resulted not only in mass genocide, but both a diaspora of monumental proportions and a transfer of arable land and the control of natural resources from the public commons into private hands along with enormous wealth that has been vacuumed up by the rentier class that literally owns the world. Reparations are way past due from this feudal system. In my mind that not only means income re-distribution but Capital re-distribution as well. I’ve just posted a blog on this subject on our Ruthenians.net site titled: The Neoliberal Book of The Dead: Chapter III – Zombie Economics.
Robert Estrada:
If we can reward based on genetics rather than the case of an individual’s situation and merit, then all argument is lost against blame being apportioned based on genetics as well. Find a group with higher crime rates, expressly enshrine harsher penalties into the law for them. Native Americans smoke and drink more? Higher life insurance and medical costs based on genetics. A person of a particular race robs your grandmother? You gain mitigation points if you attack someone else of the same race as a result.
Who gets the reparations? Who pays them? If I am 1/32 African in my genome do I contribute 1/32 the amount that a wholly European blooded person might?
As a European Mexican, do I have to pay myself for having stolen my own land? What about the discrimination endured by the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians? Is there money in it for them?
What of the living descendants of the 1.5 million “white” Americans and Europeans who were taken as slaves to North Africa? Do Americans with North African genes have a debt to pay there?
Be it Biblical or be it rooted in regressive leftism, I’m against the concept of original sin. There is no manner of logic which says Bill Cosby should get a check from the government paid for by impoverished middle American German-gened strugglers simply by basis of shared skin tone with long dead participants of a struggle not their own.
James Babij:
Genetics? I guess I missed something in Naomi Klein’s post or the construct blew past me while I was sipping my tea (that happens much more frequently nowadays), I never want to put words in a woman’s mouth – or anyone else’s for that matter — but especially in Ms. Klein’s.
I assumed she was referring reparations she feels are due to the aboriginal inhabitants of the North American continent whom have had their culture destroyed first by the genocidal practices of the European colonists who literally exterminated tens of millions of aboriginal natives then subsequently stole their lands and have exploited the natural resources that were a part of those lands ever since; but more recently because of the complete ruination of the environment from hydraulic fracturing and tar sands mining operations conducted by extractive capitalism.
Not wanting to wax biblical – since I was on the receiving end of a lot of that shit as an adolescent courtesy of the Soldiers of Christ – yeah that’s one enormous Original Sin extrapolated and compounded over time.
So should we as putative beneficiaries of this cultural sin forgive it – meaning forgive ourselves? Or should the blame (if any) be laid at the foot of a system that has perpetuated this abomination (called so because it has shortened the life span of the human race by millennia) and demand that the rentier class that profited from these neoliberal and neocolonial economic class wars (all wars are at their core about economics), pony the fuck up and make things right?
I vote for the latter because nothing will happen to alleviate wealth disparity and poverty or to engender peace and justice or extend the survival of the race unless the rentier class has its ass nailed to the wall and has its capital taxed and re-distributed to the commons. The entire 19th Century was one long war of attrition conducted by the lumpen against the monarchies and feudal forces of the rentier class. It was lost when Germany lost World War I. The 21st Century will be another such war. Hopefully it will not take as long and have a better outcome.
