Freedom, Equality and Solidarity by Lucy Parsons

Author:Lucy Parsons [Parsons, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory
ISBN: 9780882863009
Google: eoQVAQAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 701216
Publisher: Charles Kerr
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Agenda 2010: Spawn of Leviathan?

The perversity of the situation was brought to its culmination in the fraudulent sale of millions of bad financial products, destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people and their families. To return to Hannah Arendt, who predicted all this in her comments on the property-owning classes (where today we would refer to capitalism), the current economic system corresponds in type to the monster Leviathan.

This was the name Thomas Hobbes gave to a state that placed the common interest – or, as we would now say, coexisting in solidarity – completely at the service of the interests of private citizens – that is, the interests of capitalism (Hannah Arendt says that bourgeois society was aimed at Leviathan from the very beginning). In Germany, the latest monstrosity to spawn from Leviathan was the Agenda 2010 program and the Hartz I – IV reforms.

The old social question, the labor question, is back. Opel workers who lost their jobs due to mismanagement by General Motors in Detroit will, if they’re lucky, be restructured into a one-person company. Unavoidably, they will also be handed over to the job agencies, human resources service centers, case managers and the social police. During spot checks, job center agents specify the square footage that the former workers can live in, confiscate the money they stashed away under the mattress for a rainy day and the jewelry they inherited from grandma, and subtract the value of the soup from the soup kitchen from their standard allowance.

The politicians and civil servants responsible for these measures have grown hard-hearted, making them immune to the hardship suffered by others, demanding – and this is a true indicator of brute force – nothing but submissive obedience from people who are essentially defenseless.

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