Many people say that the cornerstone of capitalist imperialism is profit. I would argue that it is not profit but alienation. By alienation, I mean the separation of who people are from their reality and their work.

Power and profit depend on that separation.

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Capitalism has then reduced education to training bureaucrats to facilitate that separation. That is why, if you notice, being in school is an experience of constant violence to prevent you from being in touch with your relatives, your humanity and reality.

The simplest example: remember what happened when you got sick in boarding school? The brutality that followed? The point is to teach you to ignore your personhood and your needs, to always worship and follow instructions even if it kills you doing it. https://twitter.com/scheafferoo/status/905369457341718530

Before the pandemic, I saw this alienation live. I had an exciting class with my students discussing issues they had noticed in reality. But when they handed in their assignments, they give me distanced, bureaucratic class notes, not the exciting things we talked about in class.

The role of education system is to teach people to ignore themselves and reality. That's why kids who ask questions or read outside the curriculum are punished. One student told me that she was punished in school for reading novels, yet isn't that what we want kids to do?

Bureaucrats are those who separate people from reality. Remember during the CBC conversation, the one thing I kept pointing @KICDKenya was to the reality of the economy, inequality, and the classroom. And they had no answer because they make curriculum for abstract kids.

Come to the work place. Do you see why doctors and nurses are being mistreated? Because profit depends on alienating medics from making decisions about treatment. The rich in Kenya want to oppress and downgrade medics until medics are willing to work on Nairobi Women's terms.

A normal human being is naturally empathetic with another. So the natural order of medicine is that medics care for patients. But bureaucrats need to crush the possibility of care, because care will make medics ask questions in the interests of the patient, not the business.

As we saw from Nairobi Women's, bureaucrats can't have that. They force medics to look at people as numbers, not patients. That's alienation between medics and the sick. They are no longer one person helping one another, but two people distanced by profit.

Let's use an extreme example: slavery. The brutality of enslavement was beating someone until their humanity is seperate from who their bodies. The enslaved were not supposed to love a child, a lover or a relative because that would humanize them and interfere with profit.

Meanwhile, the role of the mnyapara was to be a bureaucrat who separates the enslaved from those who profit from the enslavement. Again, the mnyapara used numbers, counting. Hence "accounting," which to this day, is an abusive system for so many workers. https://hbr.org/podcast/2018/11/why-management-history-needs-to-reckon-with-slavery

The plantation owers were in England drinking bourbon while the wanyapara (bureaucrat) beat the crap out of Africans and sent money back to England. Owners liked the distance because they could pretend not to know and say the mnyapara was simply a bad apple when questions arise.

Another example: who are middlemen in agriculture? The people who put distance between Nairobi folks who sell produce abroad and farmers mashinani. The job of middle men is to protect the golfplayers and masseuse customers from knowing the suffering of farmers who make them rich.

The end of corruption and exploitation is the end of work distance created by bureaucrats. Whoever does the work in the farm and in the hospital MUST participate in the decisions. The right to decide what happens to our work must be declared a human right.

You know you're being exploited and oppressed, when the work place demands not thinking about people and ignoring reality of how you feel or what is human. That's what we call #toxicworkspaces

Freedom of work is the last frontier that we need to now reach. END
#maishakazini