Communications & Survival Sects
Esteban Diaz
It’s been around three years since I’ve been back to Argentina, owing to money factors and certain personal priorities. This long stretch has made my mother want to me to return home, as is logical.
In her attempts to communicate with me, the notes and conversations that we’ve managed to exchange have been few. First, because of the high cost of a phone call, but also because the Internet or just e-mail, is quite limited here on the island. I won’t even mention letters – they take weeks or even months to arrive.
Although communication should be fundamental between a family, this is limited by the few opportunities. This distancing has produced a form of academic “exile” for many families in Latin America and around the world.
How is it possible that after spending 30 straight years of working -twelve hours a day or more- it’s not possible to pay for the studies of one’s children and maintain them in descent living conditions?
Capital has done nothing but aggravate social disintegration, Ah-ha!!! and they try to accuse communism of seeking to destroy the family. Aren’t people aware that families today are like survival sects?
Men, women, children continue being treated like beasts – working only to subsist. Trying to obtain the basic means of subsistence is not an easy task. Some people aren’t going to agree, but those who are able to find work are chained to it like a slave to their master, like a dog forced to scarf up the leftovers from its master’s plate.
This is humanity to capital. “Free enterprise,” greater social fragmentation, misery on a global scale: What a prodigious future for capitalism!
In this way, it is presumed that we will “get used” to shuffling along in line, and waiting. If we’re lucky, well get the meatless bone the boss throws us. Everything becomes so natural; “What’s there to complain about? This is how life is.”
What you have to do is study to become a pedigreed dog, maybe a Cocker Spaniel…or a Dalmatian – reproducing life with no logic from generation to generation.
By accepting reality in this fatalistic sense that nothing can be changed and that one must adapt to these conditions, we become the equivalent of any beast living in its natural state. And if this is the case, we would stop distinguishing ourselves from any common animal devoid of understanding.
Human development has now produced our ability to transform reality, and with this the transformation of ourselves. Today we must produce change. We must stop being beasts in order to achieve our humanity.
Today, for any Latin American, returning to their land also represents strengthening their family’s economy in this bare-bones survival struggle that takes place among workers. Can we trust that after 30 brutal years of working we will be paid a retirement that allows us to live in conditions that near human dignity?
Let’s stop trusting everything our “owners” tell us. Under these conditions, the response will always be “No!”
Change is in the “beast,” not in its “owner.”