Sexual abuse, exploitation and capitalism

Many liberals in Pakistan believes that feudalism, cultural backwardness, lack of education and awareness are the main reasons of the increased crimes and sexual abuse of women and young children. If those are the reasons then why the child abuse and sexual exploitation is taking place in advance industrialised countries of west where feudalism was abolished couple of centuries ago. The western societies are not culturally backward and ignorant. These are well educated and aware societies. Sex education and awareness is part of the curriculum. The women are much more socially and financially independent. But still both the women and children face abuse and exploitation.   

 On the other hand, the people with strong religious beliefs and thoughts accuse western culture, values and liberal thoughts responsible for such horrific crimes. If those are the reasons then why sexual abuse and exploitation of children and women are taking place in religious and conservative societies. India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran are conservative and religious societies. These patriarchal societies consider women and children weak and lesser children of God. It becomes easier for the men to abuse and exploit children and women for misusing their powerful position in the society.

Class system develops class exploitation, repression, and discrimination on the basis of class, religion, gender, ethnicity and nationality to divide the masses. Capitalism is a class based system as was feudalism and slavery.  Capitalism flourishes on the basis of exploitation of the humans and natural resources, repression and profits.   

The matter of fact is that capitalist system creates conditions in which sexual abuse, exploitation and inhumane attitudes and behaviours flourish. The sex crimes against children and women are common in all countries and societies. The powerful exploit and abuse the weaker. The powerful capitalist class repress and exploit the working class and other weaker sections of the society. The powerful abuse, exploit and repress the weaker.       

The moral offenses are in essence economic and social crimes. Sexual abuse is only one aspect of the social dynamics facilitating the increase in inequality and concentration of wealth, which define the practices and values of the capitalist political and economic system.

Billionaires and mega-millionaires are themselves the products of intense exploitation of tens of millions of isolated and unorganized wage and salaried workers. Capitalist exploitation is based on a rigid hierarchy with its private prerogatives, which enables the oligarchs to demand their feudal privileges, their seigniorial sexual predations.

Capitalism as a social, political and economic system thrives on and requires unlimited power and the capacity to have the public treasury pay for its untrammelled pillage of land, labour, transport systems and technological development.

Today, 93% of US private sector workers have no organized representation. Moreover, many of the 7% who are in unions are controlled and exploited by their corrupt union officials – in league with the bosses. The conditions are even worst in Pakistan where only 2% workers are unionised and 98% have no voice and representation. This concentration of power produces the ever deepening inequalities between the world of the billionaires and the millions of low-wage workers.

The much-celebrated technological innovations have been subsidized by the state and its educational and research institutions. Although these are financed by the tax-payers, the ordinary people and workers are marginalized by the technological changes, like robotics, that they originally funded. High tech innovations flourish because they concentrate power, profits and private privilege.

The hierarchical matrix of power and exploitation has led to the polarization of mortality rates and moral codes. For the upper class, it has led to the flagrant physical and psychological abuse of vulnerable employees, especially, but not exclusively young working women. The prestigious bourgeois media blur the class polarization by constant reference to what they term ‘our shared traditional democratic values.’

The pervasive and growing vulnerability of workers of both sexes coincides with the incorporation of the latest technological innovations in production, distribution and promotion. This includes electronic and digital advances, artificial intelligence, robotics and extensive surveillance on workers, which incorporate high profits for the investors and long hours of demeaning monotonous work for those who manufacture and transport the ‘products’.

The proliferation of new technology has grown in direct relation with the abject debasement of labour and the marginalization and trivialization of workers. Amazon and Wal-Mart approach trillions of dollars in revenue from mass consumption. The entertainment industry amuses the population across class lines with increasingly vulgar and violent offerings, while the moguls of film entertain themselves with their young workers – who are depersonalized and even raped.

The more egregious immorality exposes itself one time too often and is condemned, while the victims are temporality lionized for their courage to protest. The worst predators apologize, resign to their yachts and mansions and are replaced by new avatars with the same power and structures in place which had facilitated the abuse. Politicians rush to embrace the victims in a kind of political and media stunt to show that their system has nothing to do with this all.  Their system played the role to create such inhuman conditions in the society. The problem is not merely corrupt and perverted individual miscreants: It is the hierarchy of inequality which produces and reproduces an endless supply of vulnerable workers to exploit and abuse.

The most advanced forms of entertainment thrive in an environment of absolute impunity in which the occasional exposure of abuse or corruption is hidden behind a monetary settlement. The courage of an individual victim able to secure public attention is a step forward, but will have greater significance if it is organized and linked to a massive challenging of the power of the bourgeois entertainment industry and the system of high tech exploitation. Sexual abuse of an individual in the workplace is just part of a chain that begins with exploitation of workers in general and can only be stopped through collective worker organization.

Exploitation, abuse, repression and discrimination against women and children will end when the exploitation, abuse, repression and discrimination in general will end in the society. Social, economic and political equality will end class exploitation and repression.