Freedom

I talked about North Korea a little bit recently, an American in North Korea is in a very precarious situation, as we have seen we can be imprisoned for little to no cause, sentenced to hard labor, and tortured and killed at the whim of the government with no legal recourse whatsoever.

In Afghanistan, Malala Yousafzai, and countless other women, where shot in the head for the crime of going to school by people who considered an entire gender as less than human, Those same beliefs ran the country for a long time and still have an inordinate amount of influence today.

In Chechnya there are literal gay concentration camps, settings that evoke the most infamous atrocities in the history of the world, dehumanizing, torturing, and killing people for the crime of being who they are.

Imagine living in a country like that, that was built on principles that say entire vast segments of the population aren't quite human and deserve no more rights than a rabid dog or a horse with a broken leg. Imagine being a person with an unwanted quality in one of those nations, how terrifying it must be, what an act of bravery it is to simply be yourself.

Imagine a country founded on those principles, that for at least half of it's existence enshrined into law the idea that some people aren't actually people, even though they walk, talk, love and live just like everyone else, they aren't people, not because a paranoid state thinks they might be agents of a foreign power, nor because an incredibly oppressive interpretation of religion demands it, nor even because they are "morally disgusting" or whatever the popular term is in those places. No the justification was and is much simpler than that: They aren't people because it isn't economical for them to be people.

That is the foundation of economic and racial relations in the United States today, our official documents no longer enshrine slavery and racism, but unofficially, well, let's just say the plucky gang of freedom fighters who fought for individual rights against a giant and distant empire never specifically said anything about slavery.

We have progressed a great deal in many ways, no longer are slave markets accepted in major cities, we usually agree that people should be paid something for their labor now, and at least technically, minorities aren't allowed to be killed on sight. Frederick Douglas said he was grateful that America was a young country, because he hoped we could grow out of the evils of our founding before they became set in stone, and in many ways he was proven right, but in others, well, I think that he would recognize the injustices of the day without needing a great deal of explanations.

I think perhaps the revolutionaries of the day, those truly interested in equality and progressive cause, might be a bit disappointed in us today, progress, such as it is, is slow at best and the inequalities of the past have gone from being law to something that approximates tradition, and tradition is hard to change.

Our traditions are based on exploitation of people for profit, it started with slavery, and in many ways it never stopped, people point out prison labor as the obvious comparison, and it's true, when combined with a tradition of criminal justice that basically enshrines inequality it certainly looks like it, but they are missing the point. It isn't about money, or rather money is just an expression of power, and a comparatively minor one at that.

Minimum wage laws are pretty nice, and I believe that within my lifetime the national minimum wage will reach something near fifteen dollars an hour, it is cheaper to pay people to work than it is to admit that they shouldn't have to work in the first place. Money being a minor expression of power makes it a great tool to prevent people from gaining other power, if you have to work forty or more hours a week, then you have less energy and time(another expression of power) to gain more power, you can't organize, you can't complain, you can't gain influence or acquire other resources, the danger comes when people realize that no matter how much they work, they won't be able to survive. If there is no incentive to spend their time working in the system, they will go outside of it, and that cannot be countenanced by the system.

So the fight for fifteen in many ways plays right into their hands, forcing the worker to rely on the paymaster more and more. If they strike the right balance they can pay barely enough to get by and we will be grateful for it.

How does that relate to racism? The intersection of racial and economic inequality is something that Bernie Sanders didn't do a good enough job talking about during his run for president last year. Capitalism in America, like everything else in the country, had it's roots in the exploitation of slave labor, and even though there is no more slavery as such, the tactics haven't changed as much as you might think, it is still based on getting as much out of people in return for the smallest investment possible. Since black people in America are perceived as less worthy than white people, thanks again to those roots, they receive an even smaller investment, and when our society sees a part of it being marginalized, well, it's reaction tends to have a lot more to do with race than whether or not that part is deserving of help. Thanks again to our roots.

Institutional racism doesn't survive without unfettered capitalism, unfettered capitalism doesn't survive without a government that supports it, a government that supports it is in turn supported right back and doesn't have an incentive to do anything about institutional racism. Both the government and the economic ideology rely explicitly on ideas formed during the slavery era of our country, that of  minimum investment for maximum return, and treating people as not people.

We aren't free, none of us, but some are less free than others.