Acts of Resistance and The Bin-Tax

national | bin tax / household tax / water tax | opinion/analysis

Wednesday October 08, 2003 21:59

by Lars Rúbenco - (non-affiliated)

-A brief analysis

Ireland, where the public good is increasingly becoming the private good, where the citizen has become the consumer, is a country that has been, and is, witness to an act of resistance, where people are defining their role in society and carving their mark in the chronicles of the State.

What has become known as the Bin-Tax, a regressive tax that has not been demonstrated to accrue benefits to Irish society yet is being imposed on that society, has had the effect of forging a mobilisation that seeks to challenge the legitimacy of the discursive and applied practice of ‘economic authority’, a scientific reasoning/ideology that has become common-sense in many minds to the point of rationalising and legitimising the destructive pattern globally evident from the trail left after the new Leviathan that presents itself as a self-evident process of inevitable market liberalisation, defined by the financial ‘experts’ who, through their expert advice, have only ever brought positive results for a minority of human beings.

On one level the jailing and institutional intimidation of those expressing their democratic rights as citizens, rights that apparently are not available to the newly defined ‘consumer’ identity, proclaims a contempt for civil liberties by a few governing technocrats, within councils, courts and the Dáil, where their actions betray their words, where such actions express a lack of understanding for the motivation of resistance, while stating in all but words an acute sense of intolerance to those ungratefuls that dare to go out into the streets and demonstrate against them, they who claim to know where the people’s happiness lies, even where that ‘happiness’ goes against the interests of those they claim to be looking out for.

On another more interesting level, symbolically and motivationally, this event has contributed to an awareness of what is, how it has come to be, and what it might become, whereby people can then make and remake their lives, a contribution that inevitably seeks that which is more respectful of the realities that confront them.

Whether we agree or disagree with the methods employed, this single act of resistance can not be taken as an isolated incident as it is but one manifestation of the increasing sense of departure from the present dominant system of unrepresentative, unaccountable and untrustworthy governance practised by a minority of actors, nationally, regionally and internationally. This departure has brought with it a desire for a democratic system that actively works towards equality and justice (which includes freedom of expression) while seeking to challenge the self-interested minority of governing technocrats who repeatedly demonstrate their contempt for the pursuit of democracy.

(moral rights, no ©)