Blindskills Inc. vs. Capitalism

Did you catch the article in the Statesman Journal today by B.T. Kimbrough writing about Blindskills Inc.? If not, read it here.

Blindskills was, or is, a kind of small capitalist success story. A small entrepreneur saw a need and built a business around helping the visually impaired. The visually-impaired community was helped, the wider community was helped and, we can assume, the organization's founder made a small profit in the process. Profit was really the smallest part of the deal, it seems. Carol M. McCarl came to the work she did with a genuine passion.

It was an uphill struggle, but the kind of struggle Carol M. McCarl relished. Then came the capitalist crisis and state budget cuts followed. A state budget was pushed through which cut most social spending and threw the Blind School under the bus. Donations to Blindskills Inc. are way down now, in part because many people wrongly assume that the closing of OSB meant the closing of Blindskills Inc. My bet is that that most working people--and the working class in the US gives proportionally more money to charities than anyone else in society--also have less to give because of layoffs, furlough days and at least relative impoverishment as jobs and home ownership disappears. The article by B.T. Kimbrough begs for support for a worthy cause. We will see much more of this as the capitalist crisis continues to deepen for working people.

Let's back up a ways here. What capitalist crisis?

The crisis we're talking about here is the one in which we have seen about 2% to 3% of all mortgage holders (10%-15% of all subprime mortgages, which make up less than 25% of all mortgages) default. The world capitalist economy showed remarkable sensitivity to an American economic problem and demonstrated that it has a fundamental weakness where profitability and accumulation of profits are concerned--such a weakness, in fact, that we say that the problems are on-going and structural and that we are now paying for them with a prolonged recession which will go well into 2010.

Remember that labor productivity and profitability began to increase in the early 1980s after rates of profit declined in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These increases were triggered by lean production internationally and by strategic shifts and diversification in productive capacity by capitalists in this period. This caused deregulation and brought with it privatization and disinflation internationally. Capitalists took the low road and continued to invest in technologies which set people in competition with one another for work and for resources. Profits continued to rise to a point, but stagnation and the risky business of investing in fictitious capital took over. The stock market crash of '87, the savings and loan crisis of the early '90s, the bursting dot.com bubble and the current mess all mark specific moments in the capitalist crisis.

There is no solution to this crisis which will benefit both workers and capitalists, or, if you prefer for now, people who pay the bulk of taxes and the wealthy who don't. It can be logically argued--and I accept this logic--that the wealthy have been all about redistributing wealth for a generation now and that the current crisis reflects their insatiable greed which now seeks to make money from public services, either through outright privatization or by changing tax codes and fee schedules for their collective benefit. There aren't funds or resources in the public domain to take care of people and restart or jump-start the economy because the public domain is being drained by the wealthy, with the right-wing as their front men telling you that government is bad. Is this class warfare talk? You betcha.

We experience this crisis, as I say, by seeing privatization and a return to the 19th century notions of charity. I remember going to rallies to keep the School for the Blind open and hearing resistance to the push backwards to old notions of charity. I mistakenly thought then that we were defending a social safety net. In fact, there is almost nothing of that net left to defend and the right-wing, allied with conservative Democrats who bought into neo-liberalism, are pushing further against the charities. An NPR story sounding the attack on charitable giving and non-profits ran today and can be read or heard here.

Even the 19th century notion of charity is now under attack, as the NPR story demonstrates. Socialists put forward a notion of social solidarity and fight for the right of every oppressed person to have a voice and be heard, for social inclusion and for social responsibility exercised through the state, or government, and through social organizations of the oppressed. We go further and say that this fight and these organizations are what prepares oppressed people to eventually govern society.

The state budget which formed out of the economic crisis saw too many Democrats cave in and the Republicans behave as crass opportunists. Sara Gelser will move on to bigger things, stepping over the school she helped, or allowed, to close. We heard some mumbling from leading Republicans about helping the School for the Blind--their idea of "help" being to privatize the school or take the needed funds out of the compensation package for state workers on a short-term basis. Such "help" is regressive and reactionary, not to say mean-spirited and grandstanding.

What would we have suggested instead? What did we suggest at the time?

Our position remains the same as it has been: make the rich pay. Use taxes, eminent domain and refusals to close or curtail social services. Expropriate social wealth.

What we are left with today is Blindskills Inc. practically begging for community support, a fractured sense of social solidarity, an empty school, kids and families in need of services which the state should be providing, Gelser moving up the ladder and Republicans plotting to take more away from society. A model capitalist company played by the rules and seems to be losing. It is, really, all a form of barbarism.