What has Government ever done for you? – The Bloody Sunday scandal; the Windrush scandal; the Hillsborough scandal; the Infected Blood scandal: the Iraq War scandal; the Grenfell Scandal; the Covid disaster scandal… Liz Truss!
And now the Post Office Scandal.
Tragically it took a representation of real life through TV drama to bring a longstanding injustice to public awareness. But it did, and its power is both intrinsic and resonant. We have seen it all before.
The current focus and justified anger in the UK over the scandalous prosecution by the Post Office of over 700 sub-postmasters over a 20 year period reveals an inconvenient truth. That the modern State in all its forms is a bastard of capitalism!
Perverting the course of justice; bullying and abuse of workers; implications of perjury; the alleged lying to the accused; the relentlessness of pursuit, the suppression of evidence and silencing of those who raised their voices was done by a nationally owned institution that once rivalled the NHS in prestige and affection. In “Mafia” style.
The public ownership of the nationalised Postal Service has not prevented It from acting as a persecuting agent of state and government interests with the tenacity of an East European secret police. A business like any other.
The experiences of corporate bullying and injustice will be very familiar to those working in much of the private sector, assumed to be the poorer employer in terms of quality of work experience than the nationalised sector. What shocks many is the exposure of the myth of the state as a benign controller of capital.
The reality is that nothing about capitalism is benign. Wage labour always exploits as it never pays us for the true value of the product of our labour. Every employer (bar perhaps the smallest inspirational charitable enterprises) has a boss or hierarchical management that mimics the state without its democratic pretensions.
Even Local Authorities, and the worthiest of charitable Human Rights enterprises see themselves as businesses, with what used to be collaborative personnel sections reconfigured as ‘HR Business Partners’. Standing not for Human Rights but an Orwellian dehumanising concept of ‘Human Resources’ – serving the corporate structure not the individual or collective.
Millions of us workers, at home and abroad, witnessed the tooth and claw nature of employment in its totally holy alliance with state and capital as we recently struggled, or continue to, against war driven austerity.
(Never austere for war though, there’s always enough money for that as they bomb Yemen and hand another £2.5 billion pounds for Ukraine to buy British weapons.)
Whoever controls capital, individual rich exploiters, carpet bagging hedge funders or the powermongers behind state nationalisation, it remains what it is – Capitalism!
State Capitalism and Private Capitalism are two cheeks of the same oppressive arse that needs a damn good kicking! The whole rotten collaborative structure of government, exploiters, their lackeys and minions needs tearing down. That will end their austerity and their wars.
We know and feel we have to fight back. Our lives depend on it. Millions of us want to, and the workers at the Post Office might not even be at the front or the queue!
AnarCom Network 