Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 530–531

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting

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Blood accounting

Pala Molisa

Everything you account for is covered in bloodPaper comes with the death of whole forestsTheir communities of plenitude gone forever into the VoidTuna comes with the presents of mercury and leadUnintended gifts for malformed babiesCans come crying, their metal discordant with screams of decapitated mountainsTheir tops demolished for the sake of soft drink convenienceT-shirts come dripping with the sweat of forced enslavementIts cotton imprinted with disfigured fingers of grinding repetitive strainBags come with the burden of backs bent in bondageTheir leather the flayed skin of infantilized animalsThe computers smell of cyanide and cancer clustersThe fringe benefits of sweatshop solderingBooks evince the horror of living flesh mulched, pulped, stained and bleachedThe only way we enjoy the intrinsic value of a treeOnce it has been transmogrified to the ubiquitous banality of a dollar figureThe barrels of oil are not thick enough to cover the soundOf our Mother’s screams as her guts are ripped open, and her entrails fedTo frenzied, half-crazed addictsCall it what you will“Progress”“Development”“Modernization”But you cannot drown out the screamsYou cannot deodorize the smellsThe stench of the cadavers belying corporate suitsOverpower your odes to “production”The conversion of living to deadThe reek of the excrescences you call “externalities”Tell the lie that makes “profits” possibleIgnore it how you willIt will be to no availFor the stench the stink the smells the screamsStarkly show and strikingly soHow your accounts come dripping in blood

You attempt to anaesthetize yourself to the violenceBy re-naming the blood on your booksBut 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) 530–531 531

And the stains soak through the sheetsThe signs you say in your statements still show barely suppressed slaveryThe Thou you call “Land”You attempt to enslave and encage to a Thing“Capital”The Living Dead you worshipThe vampire who lives on the blood of slavesUnable to consume enough of the instrumental emptiness it needs as foodThe wage slaves you call “Labour”Free at last to be bonded to the MachineYour shit you euphemistically call “Externalities”Is the excrescence you dump on NatureThe society you call “Democratic”All free people recognize as the most egalitarian of domesticated and despotic forms of ruleThe market society you call “Free”Is flanked by the State; Monopolizer of ViolenceAnd Corporations; Subordinator of SlavesIgnore these how you willIt will be to no availFor the stench the stink the smells the screamsStarkly show and strikingly soHow your accounts come dripping in blood