BUILDING A PEOPLE-FIRST ECONOMY: Canada under the occupation of an army of marketeers By Dr. Ursula Franklin Life means people, and people mean friendship, support, sustenance and love. Life is justice--the striving for justice. For some in Canada, however, life means profits, and profits mean pitting people against one another. They suffer from what I can only call moral dyslexia. Unfortunately, unlike children with learning disabilities, those afflicted with moral dyslexia don't come to us for help, don't seek a clearer vision. They are morally disabled by their own choice. I find the current situation bearable with the help of two things. One is a concept of the reality in which we live, and the second is a look back at history. I picture the reality in which we live in terms of military occupation. We are occupied the way the French and Norwegians were occupied by the Nazis during World War II, but this time by an army of marketeers. We have, as the occupied nations of Europe had, puppet governments who run the country for the benefit of the occupier. We have, as they did, collaborators. We, like the French and Norwegians at the time, have to protect our families and so are forced on occasion to work with the occupiers to survive. Like the citizens of Nazi-occupied Europe, however, we must also develop strategies for building a resistance movement. We have to reclaim our country from those who occupy it on behalf of their global masters, who have only contempt for those whose territory they now rule. The goal of the occupiers is privatization, which, in its most brutal terms, means to provide investment and profit opportunities in all those areas that people previously had set aside as common holdings--culture, health care, education, publishing, housing, nature, sports, prisons. Once dismantled, the "public sphere" can be more easily "occupied"--turned over to what I call the Empire of the Marketeers. These warlords will convert the ill-health and misery and basic needs of our neighbours into investment opportunities for the next round of global capitalism. Regrettably, our occupiers, unlike their German military predecessors, do not wear uniforms, and so we can't identify them as easily as military occupiers could be in the past. But this in fact is more of a technicality than a matter of substance. There are other and equally effective ways of identifying our corporate overseers and their agents. Take language, for example. One of the things that anyone who has lived under occupation will tell you is that they refused to speak the language of the occupier. That is a good lesson to remember. We, too, should refuse to speak the language of the occupier, which is now the language of the market. It's a language that reflects, as all languages do, the moral values (or lack of such values) of those who speak them. We should shun such market euphemisms as "the users and providers of health care," or "the consumers of education." These are doctors and nurses and patients; they are teachers and students. They are friends, families and communities. This option of resistance is open to all of us and we should use it. We must analyze the language of public discourse and point out what words like "globalization," "competitiveness," "downsizing" and "labour-saving technology" really mean. It is amazing how much clarification can help to build a resisting community. We can also look at how in the past resistance was organized so as to slow down the process and progress of occupation. In the French film Les Enfants du Paradise, for instance, we are shown beautiful crowd scenes, but also realize that, through the director's artistry, French youths were kept away from the clutches of the occupiers and saved from being conscripted into the German army or into work gangs. We need to develop our own tactics for protecting people--especially the most vulnerable--from the modern army of marketeers. We have to devise ways in which we can slow down and frustrate the occupation. In our case, such means can take the form of court challenges, but also well-researched critiques as well as the creative use of the electronic media to bypass the occupation force's control of information. When the task of building a resistance seems especially difficult, it helps to look back into history, to see the many efforts made in the past to reform "the system," both from the top and from the bottom. In the period before the Reformation, for example, people lived under the rule of a universal church--an authority that regulated all aspects of their lives. They knew this church had become corrupt--that it wasn't bringing God to them, but using that pretext to consolidate and perpetuate its power. How did they get out from under that kind of absolute rule? None of the individual efforts to effect change made over many years was able to topple the ecclesiastical structure; but each one shook it a little, and in the process of constant struggle and critique created a climate in which a particular incident or excess could trigger a collapse of the whole ruling order. The Reformation in the end was triggered by what was historically a very silly incident--the selling of indulgences to reduce the time spent in Purgatory after death. These were clever fund-raising schemes to pay for mega-projects like St. Peter's Cathedral. Somebody who was really smart in the hierarchy thought: we've milked the living for all we can, why not use the dead? People could be made to feel guilty if they didn't buy indulgences to lessen the time their Aunt Agatha or Uncle Horace had to suffer in Purgatory. It was a scheme that worked for a while, but eventually its legitimacy was widely questioned. Out of this long and broadly-based questioning of authority came the moment when Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the cathedral door. In his treatise on the freedom of Christians, Luther publicly denied the absolute authority of the Pope, thereby starting the process that eventually broke his universal authority. What I derive from such events in history is that no authoritarian structure, no matter how powerful it may seem, is really impregnable--that it can in fact be brought down. Every opposing action, every skirmish, every critique helps to bring closer the time when the occupying army will be thrown out. Exactly when that time will come, when the trigger will come and what form it will take, no one can predict. What we do know for certain is that social justice does not come from passivity or non-caring. Justice must be struggled for. That is what life is, or should be all about--striving for justice. Not only or primarily as individuals, but as members of larger communities. Our acts of defiance, of resistance, are the building blocks of solidarity. We still have lots of work to do and strong coalitions to build and join if the struggle for a profound "reformation" of our economy and community is to succeed. - ---- (Dr. Ursula Franklin is a retired university professor, feminist, Quaker, peace activist, and member of the Voice of Women. This article was adapted from a speech she delivered at the Ten Days for Global Justice seminar in Toronto earlier this year.)
