Economic Enslavement (Free Video With Your Purchase!)

Let me begin by stating that I am a history major with one class left for that major and, although I would like to say my focus is in Latin America, I have also taken classes on 20th century China, Russia (USSR), and Cuba. So clearly, Marx is nothing new to me. On the contrary, I took an interest in him starting in high school.

When reading Marx's works, it is PIVOTAL to keep in mind that when he was writing, things were not as they are now. We mentioned in class that "We've never had unregulated capitalism," but let me tell you in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, business was something vicious. I mean, we can thank Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and other administrations for anti-trust laws and social benefits like health insurance, welfare, unemployment. These things obviously didn't exist back then. Like he says in his manifesto, 90% OF THE POPULATION HAD NOTHING. Children lost limbs in machines and employers did nothing. Heads of households died in factories and mines and families were left to starve while fat bosses just hung around and eventually replaced the workers with no responsibility to the families. Workers were expendable. End of story.

As Angeline pointed out in class, many people still live in economic enslavement; that is, people are working horrible jobs for minimal subsistence, and the minimum wage is hardly even enough to provide decent living conditions. And worse, consider the living conditions for the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants living in this country who are forbidden to even drive, let alone work. They are working long hard days in construction or on the fields picking fruit for wages far below the minimum, and they are not protected by law. There is no way for these people to "pull themselves up by their boot straps" as the Horatio Algers myth would claim.

Where exactly am I going with this? I guess I just wanted to point out that even though Marx lived in a different world, a lot of what he said is still relevant. While some things may seem too radical, or too different, remember that he lived in a completely different time, and in the same way that Marxists believe that literature must be considered in historical context, I think it's important to keep in mind that Marx's work was itself a direct response to the living conditions of his own time. If he could have foreseen the regulations on big business that would come hundreds of years later, he may not have been so radical. Then again, it's quite likely that these regulations only came to exist because of his radical ideas.

On that note, I think this song by Immortal Technique is a blatant example of a way that literature (in this case, intentionally) "undermines or subverts the dominant ideologies of a culture" (645). The song "Peruvian Cocaine" underscores the negative effects of globalization through the marginalized industry of the cocaine trade. Ironically, while the United States is the greatest purchaser of drugs from third world countries, it is also the country pushing the most legislation against it, and even has agreements with other governments to extradite drug lords so that the U.S. can persecute them. Please note that the different verses demonstrate the different levels of labor power beginning with the powerless and oppressed coca leaf picker to his field boss on up through a U.S. undercover cop and so on. Enjoy!