Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 530531

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cpa

Blood accounting
Pala Molisa

Everything you account for is covered in blood Paper comes with the death of whole forests Their communities of plenitude gone forever into the Void Tuna comes with the presents of mercury and lead Unintended gifts for malformed babies Cans come crying, their metal discordant with screams of decapitated mountains Their tops demolished for the sake of soft drink convenience T-shirts come dripping with the sweat of forced enslavement Its cotton imprinted with disgured ngers of grinding repetitive strain Bags come with the burden of backs bent in bondage Their leather the ayed skin of infantilized animals The computers smell of cyanide and cancer clusters The fringe benets of sweatshop soldering Books evince the horror of living esh mulched, pulped, stained and bleached The only way we enjoy the intrinsic value of a tree Once it has been transmogried to the ubiquitous banality of a dollar gure The barrels of oil are not thick enough to cover the sound Of our Mothers screams as her guts are ripped open, and her entrails fed To frenzied, half-crazed addicts Call it what you will Progress Development Modernization But you cannot drown out the screams You cannot deodorize the smells The stench of the cadavers belying corporate suits Overpower your odes to production The conversion of living to dead The reek of the excrescences you call externalities Tell the lie that makes prots possible Ignore it how you will It will be to no avail For the stench the stink the smells the screams Starkly show and strikingly so How your accounts come dripping in blood You attempt to anaesthetize yourself to the violence By re-naming the blood on your books But it seeps out everywhere

1045-2354/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2010.01.006

P. Molisa / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 530531

531

And the stains soak through the sheets The signs you say in your statements still show barely suppressed slavery The Thou you call Land You attempt to enslave and encage to a Thing Capital The Living Dead you worship The vampire who lives on the blood of slaves Unable to consume enough of the instrumental emptiness it needs as food The wage slaves you call Labour Free at last to be bonded to the Machine Your shit you euphemistically call Externalities Is the excrescence you dump on Nature The society you call Democratic All free people recognize as the most egalitarian of domesticated and despotic forms of rule The market society you call Free Is anked by the State; Monopolizer of Violence And Corporations; Subordinator of Slaves Ignore these how you will It will be to no avail For the stench the stink the smells the screams Starkly show and strikingly so How your accounts come dripping in blood