Virulent capitalists

“TAYO, WE can afford to work from home. But the daily wage earners, wala namang online. In the meantime, wala silang kita. Hindi sila kakain. ‘Yong ibinibigay ng gobyerno ay hindi enough.”

So, the Honorable Cynthia Villar implored the government on Tuesday over DZMM – before it shut down – to allow daily wage earners to return to work as soon as possible amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Proffering statistics only she knew from where, Villar said the crisis affected most adversely 59 percent of the population, she further segmented as 22 percent “poor” and 37 percent “near-poor.”

Villar, kauring anak-pawis! I was all too ready to take back everything unsavory I wrote about the senator, which is just about everything I wrote about her, and hail her for taking up the cudgels for the working man – and to be gender sensitive, working woman and working etcetera – but for the next things that came out of her mouth.  

“May findings kasi na at 27 degree Celsius, namamatay ang virus. So ‘yong mga constructions workers, agricultural workers na nasa labas, mahirap na rin sila magkaroon ng contamination kasi hindi nage-e-stay ang virus sa mainit na lugar,” Villar averred. Indeed, where are her data coming from? She who eschewed, aye, chewed out the DA for its propensity for research in one Senate hearing.

Wow! The World Health Organization itself has said there is not, as yet, any evidence that sunlight kills the coronavirus. That the virus continues to spike in hot Philippines – heat index at 46 degrees the past days, is still prevalent in hotter Malaysia, and spreading in hottest Africa is an affirmation of WHO’s word. And therefore, a negation of Villar’s.

Come to think of it now, Villar was but a second coming – I did not have enough gall to call her second-rate, trying hard copycat – of Joey Concepcion in the allow-daily-wage-earners-to-work-because-they-have-some-sort-of-immunity thesis.

At the close of April, in an online forum of the Shareholders Association of the Philippines, the presidential adviser on entrepreneurship proposed the resumption of construction work amid the pandemic in order to help revive the economy.

The construction workers out in the open, Concepcion pointed out, may have “better immunity” than “sheltered people.”   

Concepcion thus: “Maybe because they are so used to so much exposure that they have a better immunity than us, who are sheltered in a well-protected environment.”

Absent any scientific evidence, Concepcion took the slippery ground of  argumentum ad verecundiam – appeal to false authority: “When we talked to the proponents of Caritas project, which involved about 30 business organizations led by the Zobel brothers, the same thing was relayed to them, that many of the poor are somehow resilient to the virus.”

Caritas in charity, yes. Zobel in business, indubitably. But both in virology, in immunology? That’s no leap of faith. That’s an absolute suspension of disbelief.

This, though, I believe:

Villar and Concepcion – capitalists of the highest order all too suddenly seeming to champion the cause of the working class. Some red flags immediately raised there.

Comes to mind this nugget of wisdom from celebrated American lawyer Clarence Darrow: “I am a friend of the working man. I would rather be his friend than be one.”

There is your social distancing, sympathy – feigned or genuine – notwithstanding, the twain between the haves and the have-nothing not even narrowing.  

It cannot get any redder than looking at it through the prism of contradiction, dialectical or otherwise. Of an instant go-back to the “history of all hitherto existing society” summed up in the class divide of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

So Villar invoked the continuing sustenance of the out-of-work amid the ECQ with government subsidies falling short, and Concepcion the revival of the economy. Both, concededly, valid, even noble causes, taken solely on their own merits.

But at what cost? The working class, as though immunized, aye, armored by their own sun-burnt skin, let loose like some beast of burden to produce, not so much for their daily need as for the ruling class’ insatiable greed.

Verily, the immunity Villar and Concepcion conveyed upon the workingman no different from the amulets old man Valentin de los Santos bestowed upon his bolo-wielding Lapiang Malaya cultists with which they stormed the phalanx of M-16-firing Constabulary troopers in that infamous Maytime massacre of 1967.

Indeed, replete is history with stories of the bourgeoisie, even under the best intentions, pushing the proletariat to the slaughter.   

Even for a minute forgetting the capitalists’ vested interests, not even the ends of national wealth are ever justified by the sacrifice of the nation’s health.