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Inside Labour: The choice - hope or ‘wrenching pain’

“HISTORY, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

This statement by writer Maya Angelou has become almost a cliché, which is perhaps why its substance tends to be so widely ignored.

So many of us seem not only unable or unwilling to learn from the more distant past, but even from occurrences of months or a year ago. And this failure of memory seems to be born of a desperate need for change, coupled with a lack of clarity about what change is needed.

It is a view summed up last week by Zwelinizima Vavi, general secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu), when he noted: "People can have short memories when they are desperate.”

He was referring to 2007, when he led what became known as the “Zuma tsunami” to unseat president Thabo Mbeki and which, he said, resulted in “ten years of hell”.

Aids denialism fuelled the desperation to be rid of Mbeki, so “we chose the most compromised person [only] because he was brave enough to take on Thabo Mbeki". Vavi used these comments as an illustration of what he categorised as the “hero worship” of Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.

“People are so desperate for something different from Zuma that they now call themselves buffalo soldiers,” he said, referring to Ramaphosa as “McBuffalo”. The nickname relates to Ramaphosa’s ownership of the McDonald's fast food chain, and his R18m bid for a buffalo for his game farm.

Sections of the labour movement are certainly concerned about Ramaphosa’s elite position within the capitalist system, and some hold against him his involvement as a director of Lonmin at the time of the Marikana massacre. Others, like Vavi, also feel that no individual messiah can possibly cure the leprous economy nor put the poor and downtrodden on the road to collective salvation.

However, as the billionaire philanthropist George Soros highlighted at the latest gathering in Davos sponsored by that international rich bosses club, the World Economic Forum, the search for solutions tends increasingly to be focused on state capture, corruption and the rise of populist leaders. Yet these are, once again, only symptoms of a deeper malaise; they arise because of the state of the global economy and the uncertainty, pain and suffering this is causing.

Kinder, gentler capitalism

For Soros, much like that great reformist economist, John Maynard Keynes, believes in a kinder, gentler capitalism. Yet, increasingly, this can be seen as impossible. Given, especially, the quite phenomenal development of technology in recent decades, the existing system of profit-driven competition has clearly reached its sell-by date.

Soros did, of course, mention what is now generally referred to as the fourth industrial revolution and the rapid introduction of artificial intelligence with algorithms replacing human labour and producing much more at ever lesser cost. And the labour movement around the world has - at least rhetorically - taken this on board.

This realisation has also prompted the likes of Bill Gates of Microsoft to propose a financial tax on automated processes or robots, based on the value they produce; proposing that such taxes could go towards a basic income grant to every individual. And this idea of a basic grant to guarantee an at least survivable income for everyone has also been taken up by trade unions around the world.

But, by and large, the dots are seldom joined. Yet the facts are there: even in developed economies such as Britain and the United States, it is estimated that at least 30% of existing jobs will be lost by 2030.

Among these, it seems, will be those of economists, those supposed technicians of capitalism who analyse and forecast economic trends, a job sophisticated algorithms are much more capable of handling with accuracy. But then, much of journalism is likely to go the same way.

Yet these are the technologies that could free all sellers of labour, employed and unemployed and which would allow everyone to develop to their fullest potential, to pursue dreams in a safer and environmentally friendly earth. Who knows what great inventiveness, what art, literature and music would emerge from realising the potential of humanity as a whole?

That is the dream - and it is one that is possible to realise, based on the very technology that, used within the present system, is crippling and destroying human potential, along with the finite resources of the planet.

We all have a choice: fight to have humanity’s great technological advances used for the benefit of all rather than the profit of the few, or accept the horrendous and wrenching pain the future will almost certainly bring.

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