by Compassion
Most individuals entangled in the horror of corporate downsizing and restructuring respond with moral outrage. There is a general consensus among the victims and potential victims that mechanisms should be employed to minimize the personal impact of such processes. Usually, the general perception is that the corporation instigating the action or the government should take action to assist the newly unemployed. The impulse behind this perception is based upon beliefs concerning power relations and perceived wealth combined with the belief that the stronger, by ethical reasoning, should help the weaker.
While the rational anarchist can agree that it would be ethically positive for the stronger to help the weaker, the rational anarchist cannot endorse the belief that the stronger must help the weaker. The forced assistance of the weaker by the stronger would reduce the stronger to a means to the ends of the weaker. This arrangement is classical exploitation. Whenever one set of individuals is reduced to a mere means to the ends of another set of individuals exploitation is attained.
Victims of downsizing and restructuring should reject the notion that the ethical onus to help in times of need falls only upon the shoulders of the stronger. Instead, such victims should place this onus upon their own shoulders.
Individuals who wait for the grace of others to relieve their disenfranchisement foolishly surrender their freedom and agency to those with a demonstrable disregard for the interests of the former. The only noble and dignified response to disenfranchisement is self organization. The victims and potential victims of downsizing and restructuring, collectively, have it within their potential to become their own means to mutual support. Political philosophies that place the disenfranchised into the role of noble beggar fail to acknowledge the potential for mutual support within the ranks of the disenfranchised themselves. The implementation of a gift economy is the logical first step in the elimination of dependency. Through the elimination of dependency, the disenfranchised can create their own structures of mutual support.