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Now
Are there some cows in this world that,
in some way form or shape, can freely roam the earth? Wandering
about from one scenic grazing land to another, enjoying the graze?
Without a single trace of any fear of a human individual or group,
who may decide it is their God-given right to brand those cows,
line them up and subject them to any one of a range of extremely
cruel, demeaning and, ultimately, enslaving acts?
In a world that may have existed
long before we succeeded in forcing ourselves on all and every
species on earth, free cows must have surely roamed the earth.
We can imagine and assume such a rosy, distant past to have existed.
But, even a self-evident truth
such as a past time, in some circles, may be considered a very
loaded proposition; and indeed it may be. For all I know for
certain, we cannot be sure of anything. It is very possible that
we humans actually created cows. And that is why cows
have always been slaves to us, except where they have been decreed
free; for example, in India.
Those two cases (a possibly-real-possibly-fictional
past time, and an actual current place, India) notwithstanding,
all cows are slaves. The differences among individual cows in
various locations on earth merely reflect the inner workings
of the worldwide, for profit meat industry.
Different schools of 'social
science', just as different sub-departments within business schools,
as well as assorted other not-so-reflective academic departments,
have attempted to 'explain' to a detailed degree all the differentiations
within the industry; entire oceans of discourse have been launched
regarding the degrees of freedom cows actually enjoy. The public
has been well initiated in the language to be adopted when conceptualizing
cows. Some scientists may even have announced amazing discoveries
regarding the fundamental differences between 'branded cows'
and 'not-yet-branded' ones.
The differentiations matter
only to those in the business of making money from cow-related
industrial activities, but matter not to the cows. No matter
how we differentiate the subject matter, we cannot get away from
the fact that there exist no free cows; merely not-yet-dead ones.
*
* *
As humans, we like to classify
things. We can, for example, find different uses of cattle. In
a textbook I use to teach a class on academic writing (in an
English as a second language context), in the section covering
the rhetorical form 'classification', there is an article entitled,
Uses of Cattle (shockingly, there are none entitled, Uses
of Your Grandmother). The article, very matter-of-factly
lists the following uses: milking (the most humane interaction
we have with cows), skinning (not nice) and butchering for body
parts (speaks for itself).
For understandable reasons,
both pedagogical and rhetorical, the textbook article did not
care to list yet another, very unique human interaction with
cows: the practice of burning cows alive. Of course, the topic
would not fit the theme of 'uses of cows'; nor would it fit under
'classification'. It would fit better in the chapter on 'causes
and effects' perhaps.
In any case, there are always
reasons given for such behavior as burning cows alive. For example,
we would be told that such is necessary to fight the spread of
a strange disease. Has there ever been a comprehensive study
investigating connections between the spread of this strange
disease on the one hand, and, on the other, the human's system
of 'processing cattle'? Mad Cow Disease, I believe, spreads as
a result of the presence of cow parts (particularly, the spine,
I think) in the feed that farmers give to the cows to get them
to grow bigger while they are alive.
So, we have taken very peaceful,
vegetarian, nay, vegan mammals, kept them in constant terror
and in atrociously polluted, overcrowded conditions, and fed
them their own dead! And when as a result of this sadistic treatment
they get sick, instead of finding some cure for this disease
that we have given them, what is our solution? We burn thousands
and thousands of them alive.
*
* *
Some social scientists may
conclude: as goes the inter-species relations so do the intra-species
relations.
Colonization, at its core,
is about the shrinking of the pool of free men and women. Free,
that is, from the ravages of powerful bullies eyeing our goods.
The military campaign, which,
in one form or another, always becomes necessary to wield is
merely one phase of the overall process of integrating free people
into a system that the ruling classes of metropole regions of
the capitalist world system have already set up.
It is usually the military
phase that gets most of the attention of the professional talking
head classes of the metropole areas. Most usually downplayed
and kept out of focus (and if mentioned, only in a superficial
framework) is the economic factor, which is most definitely presented
as if utterly bereft of any acquaintance with, and completely
independent of, the military-politico battles. And to a degree
it is, but only to that very degree. As they used to say, in
the final analysis, without the bullies and the organized legal
gangs (to write and enforce the laws that set the table) the
'economic' can not be independent of the 'political', in fact
it may not be; at all.
That is why, for us, it has
always been a 'political economy'.
Legal restructuring of nothing
short of the entire constitution of an invaded land, as happened
in Iraq, with direct as well as indirect economic gains almost
solely to the benefit of the invading parties' corporations and
interests is the real thing an invading party is after.
Why, to ask a naive question,
was it necessary to change the entire legal system of Iraq, almost
immediately after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government?
What did the change of Iraqi laws regulating business ownership
and taxation structures, for example, have to do with the need
to remove a mad dictator who was bent on acquiring weapons of
mass destruction?
Clearly it were not Saddam's
WMD that needed to be removed, but the property laws which needed
to be replaced with a set that sat more generously with a handful
of western-dominated cartels zeroing in on some Iraqi piece of
action.
The loot has already been removed.
All that remains is the 'stabilization' plan.
Not all stabilities need to
be as stable as the next one, though. Some, in fact, in order
to be stable for some, have to remain very unstable for others.
For a very long time.
The case of Iraq: Take the
loot, then smash up the joint so bad as to make sure they'll
never be able to take back what you took. And when the loot is
that big, you best have the resources to cover your tracks afterwards.
It seems the invaders think they have the resources and are going
to take the cake, too.
Except, of course, for the
resistance. The resistance knows what is at stake: a very long
era of enslaved existence, or a chance to set off on a freer
road; freer than the past as well as freer than the present.
*
* *
One thing is very clear: people
are still fighting back. Everywhere. In all corners of the world,
there are people fighting back. This mess cannot pretend to be
the holiest and most perfect thing that god ever created. There
are no more pretenses. There is resistance on one side, and,
on the other side, there are only denials and self-delusions.
Lucky for those who resist, denial and self-delusion are repressive
means of surviving only the short-term; not capable of fueling
anybody for long-term survival.
There is always the necessary
revolution. The possibility will always remain. Revolution does
not need to be bloody. Revolution does not have to be violent.
It can be defensive all the way, and still win. It can laugh
all the way. It does not have to be 'led' by a 'party'. But,
it does need to be led. More importantly, it must lead.
No matter what shape it takes,
a revolution is necessary if we are going to live in anything
other than, at best, some kind of chaos managed ad hoc,
or, worse, constantly ill-managed barbarity.
Except for a few places on
this earth, we know that free cows do not exist. We can safely
state that late-modern capital's insatiable thirst for more realms
to plunder has brought us to a point where we may soon have fewer
free humans than there are free cows. That, however, is yet
to be seen.
CounterPunch
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