The prescriptions suggested
simply will not work because they focus naturally on inequality. What is so hard to believe and understand is
that all that does not really matter at all.
Such concentration merely allows bigger decisions to be made that can be
self-sustaining.
What does matter is
capitalizing the natural community of one hundred and fifty individuals
consistently and fairly in such a way that it is naturally self-governing and
prospering. This becomes impossible if
the management of such capital is never internalized. A distant King cannot know how to optimize
the wealth of the thousands of villages.
My principle thesis is that
the tools exist to do just that because of modernity itself. For that reason the future is on the way
although not in the way imagined. Once
the base is perfected and operational the rest is easy and again irrelevant.
Another World Is Not Only
Possible, She Is on Her Way
Friday, 18 April 2014 09:55
Arundhati Roy's trenchant
analysis of the destructive impact of global neoliberalism on India is
available directly from Truthout by clicking here. Capitalism: A Ghost Story is
a passionate, detailed journey through the injustices of systemic
inequality.
As an epilogue for Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Roy
offers an eloquent tribute to the Occupy movement after it was evicted from
Zucotti Park. Despite Roy's scathing analysis of the injustices and ravages of
capitalism and its political puppets, she is filled with hope that
"another world is not only possible, she's on her way."
Speech to the People's
University of the Occupy Movement
Yesterday morning the
police cleared Zuccotti Park, but today the people are back. The police should
know that this protest is not a battle for territory. We're not fighting for
the right to occupy a park here or there. We are fighting for Justice. Justice,
not just for the people of the United States, but for everybody. What you have
achieved since September 17, when the Occupy Movement began in the United
States, is to introduce a new imagination, a new political language, into the
heart of Empire. You have reintroduced the right to dream into a system that
tried to turn everybody into zombies mesmerized into equating mindless
consumerism with happiness and fulfillment. As a writer, let me tell you,
this is an immense achievement. I cannot thank you enough.
We were talking about
justice. Today, as we speak, the army of the United States is waging a war of
occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. US drones are killing civilians in Pakistan
and beyond. Tens of thousands of US troops and death squads are moving into
Africa. If spending trillions of dollars of your money to administer
occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not enough, a war against Iran is being
talked up. Ever since the Great Depression, the manufacture of weapons and
the export of war have been key ways in which the United States has stimulated
its economy.
Just recently, under
President Obama, the United States made a sixty-billion-dollar arms deal with
Saudi Arabia. It hopes to sell thousands of bunker busters to the United Arab
Emirates. It has sold five billion dollars' worth of military aircraft to my
country, India - my country, which has more poor people than all the poorest
countries of Africa put together. All these wars, from the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki to Vietnam, Korea, Latin America, have claimed millions of lives -
all of them fought to secure "the American way of life."
Today we know that
"the American way of life" - the model that the rest of the world is
meant to aspire toward - has resulted in four hundred people owning the wealth
of half of the population of the United States. It has meant thousands of
people being turned out of their homes and jobs while the US government bailed
out banks and corporations - American International Group (AIG) alone was
given 182 billion dollars.
The Indian government
worships US economic policy. As a result of twenty years of the Free Market
economy, today one hundred of India's richest people own assets worth
one-fourth of the country's GDP while more than 80 percent of the people live
on less than fifty cents a day. Two hundred fifty thousand farmers driven into
a spiral of death have committed suicide. We call this progress and now think
of ourselves as a superpower. Like you, we are well qualified, we have
nuclear bombs and obscene inequality.
The good news is that
people have had enough and are not going to take it anymore. The Occupy
Movement has joined thousands of other resistance movements all over the world
in which the poorest of people are standing up and stopping the richest
corporations in their tracks. Few of us dreamed that we would see you, the
people of the United States, on our side, trying to do this in the heart of
Empire. I don't know how to communicate the enormity of what this means.
They (the 1%) say that we
don't have demands ... they don't know, perhaps, that our anger alone would be
enough to destroy them. But here are some things - a few
"pre-revolutionary" thoughts I had - for us to think about together.
We want to put a lid on
this system that manufactures inequality.
We want to put a cap on the
unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as
corporations.
As cap-ists and lid-ites, we
demand:
One: An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example:
weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations, mining corporations cannot run
newspapers, business houses cannot fund universities, drug companies cannot
control public health funds.
Two: Natural resources and essential infrastructure - water
supply, electricity, health, and education - cannot be privatized.
Three: Everybody must have the right to shelter, education, and
health care.
Four: The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents'
wealth.
This struggle has
reawakened our imagination. Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the
idea of justice to mean just "human rights," and the idea of dreaming
of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a
system that needs to be replaced.
As a cap-ist and a lid-ite,
I salute your struggle.
Salaam and Zindabad
Copyright (2014) by Arundhati
Roy. Not to be republished without permission of Haymarket Books.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the
source.
Arundhati Roy is an Indian
novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for
her first novel The God of Small
Things.
Since winning the Booker
Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the
Narmada Dam project, India's Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron's
activities in India. She is a figure-head of the
anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of
neo-imperialism.
In response to India's
testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a
critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her
collectionThe Cost of Living, in which she
also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central
and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.
Roy was awarded the Sydney
Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of
non-violence.
In June 2005 she took part
in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya
Akademi award for her collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice',
but declined to accept it.
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