Republished by rabble.ca. #TFWP #cdnpoli #cdnimm Though the labour and racial apartheid that marks the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is unique, the disposability that underscores the program is central to capitalism. Those who do not participate by selling their labour as a commodity – by will or coercion – or are no longer needed are expendable. Indigenous communities, homeless people, precarious workers, single mothers, seniors, and people with disabilities are all systematically targeted as disposable within capitalism. Capitalist accumulation explicitly requires dispossession of communities from the lands on which they subsist. In settler-colonial Canada, colonialism and capitalism have been mutually reinforcing. The myth of terra nullius, for example, operates in two ways. First, Indigenous territories are alleged to be barren — what capitalists prefer referring to today as ‘dead capital’— because collective subsistence economies are deemed ‘unproductive’. Second, Indigenous people are themselves constructed as unproductive, and hence disposable, for refusing to be disciplined into the waged labour-force. The colonial state’s genocidal attempts to expropriate Indigenous lands and assimilate Indigenous nations are linked to capitalism’s attempt to drive out Indigenous modes of cooperative production and stewardship that are a direct threat to its expansion.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 18:49:29 +0000
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