Corporate Boundaries

While the headlines reveal that Pfizer recalls over 1 million packets of birth control pills due to a packaging error and dosage strength, McDonald’s publically tries to eliminate a pink slime in its hamburger meat known as Ammonium Hydroxide, and Pepsi disputes a lawsuit over a mouse found in its products with a reply that their products are too acidic that a mouse would have dissolved before reaching the shelves; corporate business continues with limited sweat and limited outcry. When will the majority of the public get active enough to stand up? At this rate, most likely never, because the public has been passive for so long they would not know what to do.

Back in October 2011, Pfizer had briefly made the news with their taxpayer USAID funded Depo-Provera vaccine for HIV used in mostly African nations, where studies reflected that the drug actually may have increased the risk of women and their male partners becoming infected.  Now with the massive recall of birth control pills in the US, one has to wonder, where will the line of negligence stop?  

C.L.R. James questions in his Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, how does a society of free individualism give birth to corporate totalitarianism and be unable to defend against it? Why is there a ‘modern inability to judge’? (James).  I ask myself those same questions today. When reading Ralph Nader’s newest book Getting Steamed to Over Come Corporatism, he reflects with factual evidence how reckless and corrupt our capitalist elites have gotten. His suggestion is that in order to overcome this we must build together to win. 

Herbert Marcuse in an essay entitled Struggle Against Liberalism in Totalitarianism states: “A total activation, concretization, and politicization of all dimensions of existence is demanded. The autonomy of thought and the objectivity and neutrality of science are repudiated as heresy or even political falsification on the part of liberalism. ‘We are active, enterprising beings and incur guilt if we deny this essence: guilt by neutrality and tolerance” of the negligence is our crime, whether we are oblivious or apathetic (Marcuse).

Myles Horton and Paulo Freire state jointly in their conversations between one another: “We Make the Road by Walking!” We don’t build anything if we remain tolerant of repression and oppression. We create history through participatory education.