DAS KAPITAL rings as true today – the death of communism be damned – as it did in 1867: “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking blood from living labor.”
Closer to the Filipino proletariat’s heart is the poignancy of the lines of poet-patriot Ka Amado Hernandez in his Bayang Malaya:
“Bisig
na nagsaka’y siyang walang palay;
Nagtayo
ng templo’y siyang walang bahay;
Dumungkal
ng mina ng bakal at ginto ay baon sa utang;
Lingkod
sa pabrika ng damit ay hubad ang mahal sa buhay.”
(The
arm that farmed is one without the crops;
The
temple builder, without a house;
The one
who mined for iron and gold, deep in debt;
The
sewer, whose loved ones are naked.)
The
plebeian’s nothingness of being finds similar manifestation in another poet of
another time and clime, closer to the very spring of its origin – the
Industrial Revolution. Thus, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Song to the Men of
England:
“Men of
England, wherefore plough
For the
lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore
weave with toil and care
The rich
robes your tyrants wear?
The seed
ye sow, another reaps;
The
wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes
ye weave, another wears;
The arms
ye forge, another bears.
Sow seed
– but let no tyrant reap;
Find
wealth – let no impostor heap;
Weave
robes – let not the idle wear;
Forge
guns – in your defense to bear;
Further
back into history, St. Ambrose, the fourth century bishop of Milan, took the
Parable of the Dives with this censorious swing at the rich: “The earth was
established to be in common for all, rich and poor; why do ye rich alone
arrogate it to yourselves as your rightful property?
“You
crave possession not so much for their utility to yourself, as because you want
to exclude others from them. You are more concerned with despoiling the poor
than with your own advantage. You think yourself injured if a poor man
possesses anything which you consider a suitable belonging for a rich man;
wherever belongs to others you look upon something of which you are deprived.”
Deprivation
is the eternal state of the worker. That is fated in capitalist societies,
engrossed as they are in “…production not merely the production of commodities
… (but) essentially the production of surplus value.”
Marx
furthered: “All surplus value, whatever particular (profits, interests, rent)
it may crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor.”
Today,
May 1, the cry for economic emancipation will ring anew. All media shall be
filled with paeans to the workingman from just about every political lip freed
for this day, and only this day, from the lock of the capitalist kiss.
Tomorrow,
May 2, it’s back to the salt mines for labor again. Until the next May Day.
Sometime, the vicious cycle had to be broken. Then it is the tale of the askal (mongrel) retold:
“Sa
bawat latay, kahit aso’y nag-iiba.
Sa una,
siya’y magtataka.
Sa
ikalawa, siya’y magtatanda.
Sa
ikatlo, siya’y mag-iisip.
Sa
ika-apat, humanda ka!
(For
every lash, even the dog will change.
At the
first, it would wonder.
At the
second, it would remember.
At the
third, it would think.
At the
fourth, prepare yourself.)
Then, as
now, the cry reverberates: The proletarians have nothing to lose but their
chains. They have a world to win.
Workingmen of all countries, unite!
Mabuhay ang uring anak-pawis!
(First published in Punto May 2-3, 2014)
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