Freedom = Money
Posted on February 24, 2009
The late and unlamented Milton Friedman, high priest of neo-liberalism, famously regarded Hong Kong as a model state, the exemplar of the ‘productivity of freedom’. Friedman’s ‘freedom’ is nothing more than the freedom of the capitalist class to exploit working people. Beneath Friedman’s glitzy chrome and glass shopping malls and towers of money, lies a nightmare of degradation and poverty, unsanitary slums, sweatshops, shoebox flats and much, much worse, where people have little more than a ricebowl and a beach towel for a blanket. The wealthy have their own vocabulary of exclusion: ‘coolie’ and ‘country bumpkin’ for manual and rural labourers; ‘Punnies’, ‘Punjabis’ or ‘chao‘ (stink) while waving a hand in front of the nose, for the descendants of Indian indentured labourers; and an array of epithets and insults impugning the Pinay domestic servants every tai-tai worthy of her status employs as a mark of her status. Before Freidman’s ‘economic miracle’, Hong Kong was a precursor to the Medellin Cartel, a narcostate which formed the distribution point for the export of Indian-produced British opium to China, in support of which illegal trade the British Empire fought two wars, bringing misery and degradation to millions of Chinese.
The IUF reports on the ‘productivity of freedom’ and Nestlé union-busting in Hong Kong in 2009:
Just two weeks after the IUF-affiliated Hong Kong Nestlé Workers Union called off industrial action as a sign of good will and to pave the way for negotiations on granting permanent employment to temporary workers and establishing formal union recognition, the company launched an aggressive assault on the union by suspending the union president, Chan Pong Yin, indefinitely. In doing so the message from management is clear: Nestlé wants to return to the 17-hour workdays, wage increases of one percent in 12 years, and a system of insecurity maintained by having a third of the workforce on revolving casual contracts.
[...] The extreme hypocrisy of Nestlé management was soon revealed when it followed up on the promise to grant permanent employment to casual workers (many of whom had worked there for 10 years) by firing them one by one before their contracts expired.
On the Mainland, the Chinese government is reportedly preparing the military to suppress riots by unemployed migrant workers, who are denied city passes and are ineligible for benefits.
To be a peasant is a blood-related social destiny and there is nothing the individual can do to change it.
