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By John Tully
According to Francis Fukijama, the intellectual guru of the 'free market', socialism is dead and capitalism is 'the end of history'.
If this is the case, what hope is there for the future? Eric Klinenberg, writing in in the August 1997 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, gives a disturbing insight into the working of the great city of Chicago at the climax of the system we have to have.
In a period of a fortnight or so in the (northern) summer of 1995, over 500 people died when a heatwave rolled up from the Gulf of Mexico. Mostly poor, black and elderly ghetto dwellers, they succumbed when temperatures rose to more than 44 degrees inside their shabby apartments.
The Greenhouse Effect aside, capitalism cannot be held responsible for heatwaves. However, as Klinenberg argues, these poor people were as much victims of a decaying and inhuman system as of Mother Nature.
Marginalised in the centre of a great city, they simply lacked the money and resources to be able to defend themselves against the murderous heat. It was, argues Klinenberg, a calamity more 'structural' than 'natural' and was caused by the grinding poverty rampant in America.
Two hundred years ago the founder of the 'classical' school of economics, Adam Smith, wrote that 'the invisible hand of the market' would regulate society. It would keep prices low and ensure that resources were allocated where they were most needed.
In its modern incarnation of 'economic rationalism', classical economics is now almost a religion among the captains of industry, the members of government, and the experts in university economics faculties. It firmly enshrines private profit as the supreme good. The poor will benefit via the 'trickle down effect' and if they don't, it's their fault.
Yet Chicago was unable to cope with two weeks of heat. Thousands of homeless people die each winter of cold and it is no longer really thought worthy of comment. Yet a spate of deaths from heat was a bit more unusual. Electricity and water breakdowns
The privately-owned electricity generation system (Commonwealth Edison) broke down, with people left for many hours without air-conditioning in buildings poorly equipped to insulate their occupants. Old people suffocated in their airless rooms: many without air-conditioning in any case. Babies died in an under-staffed creche when the temperature rose to 73 degrees inside their room.
Then the water supply failed as youths turned on the fire hydrants for relief and millions sought relief in cold showers. Dehydration stepped in to claim more victims.
Ironically, as the city sweltered and the death toll mounted, the US Congress voted to cut US$319m from the LIHEAP scheme which subsidises energy efficient heating and cooling systems for the poor.
The city's health services - devastated by the massive cuts of the Reagan/Bush years, could not cope. Ambulances were often forced to travel more than 20 kilometres across the city to find a bed for a patient. (That was if people were able to telephone for one of the scarce ambulances in the first place: around 48% of the city's elderly poor live alone and 77% were without 'phones.)
The city morgue in downtown Chicago could not handle the flood of bodies. Normally conducting 17 autopsies per day, the staff were confronted with 90 or 100 bodies daily.
Here at least there was a flash of inspiration. Chicago is the great meat-packing centre of North America. Huge refrigerated trucks normally used to tranport meat from the abattoirs were pressed into service as temporary mortuaries and became a daily spectacle for gawping crowds. The bodies were cool in death if not in life.
Two hundred or so years ago, the French philosopher Voltaire satirised the reactionaries of the day who consoled their bad social consciences behind the claim that 'All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'. Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley expressed this point of view when he said that the deaths were the fault of the poor because they could not look after themselves as they ought. It's the old crap about the 'undeserving poor' yet again.
When the heat wave receded, the great abattoir wagons rolled out onto the prairie to where an enormous ditch had been excavated. The bodies were tossed in an the earth bulldozed over them. There they lie, without marking stone or epitaph. What price the life of a poor, Black, elderly person at 'the end of history'?