By Jean Peeters, cicm
In our modern world, we must be competitive, efficient, best suited. The very controversial 4th year primary school manual that Belgium had decided to impose in Congo by parachuting 5 million copies is a perfect example. Its title “Champion” is reminiscent of the kind of society that the West wants to impose in these countries: life is a competition we must win, even by crushing d own others.
Brainwashing
The above mentioned ideology has insidiously developed in every area of our society, from the handyman dad in his house to the worker or employee in the company, and has extended to the whole economic system with all the damages the weakest ones have to suffer.
Without realizing it for forty years, we have been undergoing a real brainwashing on the part of those who dominate: they alter the meaning of certain words and concepts to justify this ideology, divide the population, and make us swallow the pill:
- Our social benefits are the highest in Europe:
However, it strange to note that, about 270 countries say the same thing like us: France, Holland, Italy, etc. It all depends on the parameters different Governments consider! The objective of this deception is to justify the austerity measures as well as the hefty gifts granted to large businesses to remain in Belgium.
- The solidarity tax or social contributions have become social charges, a term whose negative meaning must be minimized by reducing all social benefits, and by convincing the workers that they give their money to lazy people, who do not want to work. They forget that they too benefit from this money: cooperatives, hospitals, public services, unemployment benefits, and pensions! It is therefore a strategy that will shortly and insidiously lead to modernization of insurances by reducing health insurance and privatizing several public service sectors.
- Modernizing social security means to reduce health care and unemployment benefits, and to organize a manhunt for fraudsters and evaders. To modernize means therefore to cut budgets.
- Corruption of European Union officials has become synonymous with doing legal lobbying.
- We must be active citizens, which means we must work to get a pay, and nothing more. Therefore, the work of a mother at home is simply ignored, as well as the work of volunteers, of active committees in our neighborhoods, in solidarity restaurants, in community gardens, etc. While the open-ended unemployment decreases from year to year, this is used to justify the pressure exerted on wages.
- To provide employment to workers actually means to use their labor force to increase the capital of big businesses. Therefore, creating jobs is not a gift to workers, because it is the workers who enable companies and their shareholders to enrich themselves.
- Flexibility of work: in fact, it is the opposite that happens; for it is the workers who must be flexible. By manipulating this term, the employers can manipulate workers like marionettes.
- To “remove the grease” and modernize the company hides the reality: that actually means to lay off workers at the request of shareholders in view of increasing their dividends.
- The capital sustains and pays workers: that is untrue! It is actually through the work of employees that employers make their capital grow. It is the workers who pay their bosses.
- To privatize natural resources (water, arable land, underground resources). In reality, this amounts to monopolizing public goods.
- To develop the Third World means, too often, to develop the companies of donor countries and hide their true operations: exploitation of diamond and cobalt; deforestation; grabbing of farmland; and maintaining the debt.
Blessed crises
Moreover, thanks to economic and financial crises, the number of billionaires has kept on increasing. This is largely due to multiple privatizations or the entry of private companies in State services in Africa, in Asia; in the port of Piraeus in Greece; and in telecommunications, energy, banks, postal services, etc., here at home. But it is also due to the pressure that is being put on Governments to put in place drastic budget cuts in public services: fire brigade, postal services, railways, Ministries of Justice and Finance. These restrictions allow, among others, the creation of many subcontracting companies that foster the exploitation of the masses like: foreign workers, immigrants, etc.
The figures are stunning: in Belgium, between 2000 and 2009, dividends paid to shareholders have been multiplied by three, which explains the increase in the number of Belgian millionaires and their total assets (www.de rijkste belgen.be/de-lijst/). In Brussels, we know the street of billionaires in Avenue Louise, which has been privatized a long time ago.
Class struggle?
Would this mean that, despite what we may think, the class struggle is still a reality in our society, but has taken a different form? In fact, 200 years ago, the difference between social classes was very visible: the miners, steelworkers and artisans, and those who were around them like small traders or farmers. These were slave laborers and were exploited by the bourgeoisie and the bosses, who lived in the same community. It is actually through this system that some fortunes (very respected today) were created in Belgium, helped by the exploitation of miners, steelworkers and the masses of small farmers in Flanders and Wallonia.
But today, we see workers relax in the sun in Spain. There are only three classes today: the rich, the poor and middle classes. Whoever would dare to speak today of the masses and class struggle would be considered as a ghost coming from the 1900s.
Yet, taking the old definition of the term “class”, we can easily notice that our world and Belgium are still divided today between the rich and those who promote the efficiency of their businesses.
On the one hand, we have those who own the means of production (factories, large companies, shareholders, mining wealth, agriculture, etc.): those who dominate (individuals and shareholders). On the other hand, there are those who make these means of production efficient: the workers, but also lower and middle managers, like engineers: those who are dominated (among these, some have suffered brainwashing, in such a way that, ideologically, they have passed to the other side).
As concerns us CICM
Most of us have returned home from the missions after living for many years close to the poor. As such, we are used to reading the events of the world through the lenses of the poorest, the glasses of Third World populations, who would be entitled to a much better life if there was not this exploitation. And here, we are used to reading the events through the lenses of little Europeans squeezed like lemons to fill in the crate of those who dominate.
Let us not forget that, if the United Kingdom has decided to leave the European Union, it is largely because the European Council and European Parliament are dominated by a right wing sold out to those who dominate. Some hot issues like Monsanto, Atlantic Treaty, etc., are an illustration of this fact. And this is the case because, when voting in European elections, we usually chose to be under the thumb of those who dominate.
