 |
This inequality is founded on "communicative inversions," the turning on their head of material reality to convince us that the forms of governments that give massive tax breaks to the wealthy, attack our unions, and deplete state support for those among us that are struggling with getting by are necessary to remove poverty and to create opportunity.
You see this language of "opportunity" used by the political elite across the globe.
The elite tell us that giving rich corporations tax breaks and creating policies that allow elites to make even more wealth for themselves is somehow the only way to generate employment opportunities for the rest of us.
This story of "creating opportunity" through tax breaks and state subsidies for the already rich is the fundamental "communicative inversion." Of course, as a communicative inversion, it is never borne out by evidence.
Instead, the evidence clearly points out that these policy clusters, giving tax breaks to the rich, creating government subsidies for the elite to profit, attacking unions, and depleting state welfare for those in need (also referred to as neoliberal policies) are actually, as common sense would tell you, really harmful to those at the margins of our societies. Those that are struggling are portrayed as lazy, unwilling to work, likely to lie, paradoxically through deceptive stories cultivated by a political class that thrives on carefully crafting and selling these lies.
Moreover, these neoliberal policy clusters are also really harmful for those of us in the middle classes. While we might be led to believe that in the short term, these enriching schemes for the rich might create opportunities for us, in the long run, we witness it with our daily struggles that the opportunities created primarily benefit the elite class. And no, even the crumbs don't trickle down to those at the margins of our societies. As the global financial crisis in 2008 made amply evident, the middle classes find themselves without protections, a few months away from cycles of poverty.
We are living today in the midst of the deleterious effects of these "communicative inversions."
In 2020, COVID-19 makes very evident the deeply unequal societies we are living in. The effects of these policies are felt in the struggles with livelihood among those at the margins of our societies. These effects are felt by our poor and by our migrant workers. These effects bring us face-to-face with the deeply immoral societies we inhabit.
#COVID-19 also makes visible for those of us in the middle classes the very little protections we have, that we might be a lock-down away from losing our livelihoods, our homes, our protections.
Amidst these visible and disturbing inequalities that have been carefully tucked away by the republic of "communicative inversions," the elite political class is busy concocting new "communicative inversions." They hope that these "communicative inversions" will draw our attention away from this material reality of deep inequalities and economic disenfranchisement.
The elite political class is busy concocting diversions such as projecting anti-national threats, attacking opposition politicians as anti-national, and carefully projecting external causes to draw our attention away from their complicity in the production and circulation of policies that have led to the inequalities we witness all around us and struggle with.
2020 is the year for you, for us to pay close attention to these "communicative inversions" and the work they do in misleading us.
2020 is the year we have an opportunity to turn these "communicative inversions" on their heads.
2020 is the year we take back our democracies. 2020 is the year we take back our social compact, committing to electing only those politicians that demonstrate (remember demonstrate, not rhetoric) a clear track record of addressing the deeply unequal societies we are living in.
Inequality in 2020 must not be an after-thought. It must be the front and center of conversations on electoral politics.