waking up - freeing ourselves from work

If we did have our own language, what is called “capital” in podrunk would be given a name in our language that meant: “our collective knowledge-base” – a meaning that merged “the ancestors” with living creativity.

The point is that knowledge belongs to us all indiscriminately – in reality – however conditioned we are to believe otherwise.

In this podrunk fantasy they hope we’ll stay stuck in forever, “…the production costs of a commodity consist of three elements: the rent for the piece of land required to produce the raw material; the capital with its profit, and the wages for the labour required for production and manufacture.”

But it becomes immediately evident that capital and labour are identical, since the economists themselves confess that capital is “stored-up labour”. We are therefore left with only two sides – the natural, objective side, land; and the human, subjective side, labour, which includes capital and, besides capital, a third factor which the economist does not think about – I mean the mental element of invention, of thought, alongside the physical element of sheer labour.
What has the economist to do with inventiveness? Have not all inventions fallen into his lap without any effort on his part? Has one of them cost him anything? Why then should he bother about them in the calculation of production costs?… Science is no concern of his. What does it matter to him that he has received its gifts through Berthollet, Davy, Liebig, Watt, Cartwright, etc. – gifts which have benefited him and his production immeasurably? (Frederick Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy)

What does it matter to the podrunk that he’s received its gifts through the immeasurable generosity of the earth, the sun, the oceans, and all the living things?

It matters not at all.

But it matters to us, we who do the work.

In one chapter in Faludi’s Stiffed she describes the closure of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. The love the 'workers' had for each other – across race, language and all other phony divisions – was epic.

She tells one story about its tallest crane, the Titan, “known affectionately to the men laboring in its shadow as Herman the German,” because it was captured from the Germans in 1945.

In 1993, a Los Angeles television personality, Huell Howser, toured the Titan for a show on California history. He was baffled to find on the crane, untouched, its fifty-year-old German insignia. “So this was just like it was?” Howser asked his guides, two retired shipyard workers, and he sounded amazed. Why hadn’t they expunged all signs of its previous operators, now that it was “ours”? The former workers just shrugged. (Susan Faludi, Stiffed, p. 55)

Faludi concluded that what mattered to the 'workers' “was not that they had conquered it, but that they knew how to make it work.” I believe the reason goes well beyond that… to solidarity. They knew the work that went to make it, knew it was not “theirs” to take, the honor of having made it. Those who work with their hands know, as all of us will eventually, that 'workers' have no nation. *

“Capital and labour are identical, since…capital is ‘stored-up labour.’”

And invention is a free gift of labor from those communing with the universe, like Nikola Tesla, moved by the earth and naught else.

When the wind from below has its own language the laughable categories podrunks have created to carve out a place for themselves, and to defend the indefensible, will fall apart like the dead husks they are.

As I write, with the “global financial system” in crisis, it’s a constant irritant listening to the analysis in podrunk, quite crazy-making to be told it’s the only game in town; and that to understand what’s going on we must wrap our minds around the convolutions in reasoning that force us to treat insanity as valid, concede the implied ‘truth’ that it’s quite a reasonable thing to transfer the blood, sweat, tears, and love of working people from the public coffers over to the thin diseased hands of these vampires in order to sustain them in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed.

Why?

Well, because…“Main Street” and “Wall Street” need each other.

How you figure that? What is it that podrunks do that we cannot do for ourselves?

At which point the apologists for the capitalist system dredge up state power and talk about “political realities,” say that the “political will” does not exist to expand the commons, to cut out the moneymen, the buyers and sellers of illusion, the traders in trash.

Consider, for example, the following from The End of Work:

The business community has long operated under the assumption that gains in productivity brought on by the introduction of new technologies rightfully belong to the stockholders and corporate management in the form of increased dividends and larger salaries and other benefits. Workers’ claims on productivity advances, in the form of higher wages and reduced hours of work, have generally been regarded as illegitimate and even parasitic. Their contribution to the production process and the success of the company has always been viewed as of a lesser nature than those who provide the capital and take the risk of investing in new machinery. For that reason, any benefits that accrue to the workers from productivity advances are viewed not as a right, but rather as a gift bestowed by management… Put simply, does every member of society, even the poorest among us, have a right to participate in and benefit from increases in productivity brought on by the information and communication technology revolutions? If the answer is yes, then some form of compensation will have to be made to the increasing number of unemployed whose labor will no longer be needed in the new high-tech automated world of the twenty-first century. Since the advances in technology are going to mean fewer and fewer jobs in the market economy, the only effective way to ensure those permanently displaced by machinery the benefits of increased productivity is to provide some kind of government-guaranteed income. (Jeremy Rifkin, p. 227, 267)

This parroting of ‘common sense,’ this robotic repetition of received ‘wisdom,’ makes my stomach clench, my blood pressure rise, my head start to pounding and my words tongue-tie. Not out of shyness but fuckin’ flabbergastedness. How to begin translating this out of podrunk into people? (Remember the brave soldiers of Iraq Veterans Against the War? “I don’t speak Arabic, I speak Human.” Totally.)

Pardon the excess – and a slight digress. Let’s agree with Biden and not question motives.

Jeremy Rifkin wrote The End of Work out of a concern I share: that coming (manufactured) resource shortages could result in our turning against each other. He recommends advance planning to avert coming chaos, and who could argue with that?

Residents of inner-city cores in industrial nations now have more in common with the slum dwellers of the developing countries that they do with the new cosmopolitan workers who live in suburbs and exurbs just a few miles away… "From the standpoint of the market,” says Gardels, “the ever swelling ranks of the [unemployed] face a fate worse that colonialism: economic irrelevance.” The bottom line, argues Gardels, is that “we don’t need what they have and they can’t buy what we sell.” Gardels foresees an increasingly lawless and foreboding future – a world populated by “patches of order and swaths of pandemonium.”… [T]he distinctions between war and crime are going to blur and even break down as marauding bands of outlaws [the outcasts of the global village], some with vague political goals, menace the global village… Shunned by the powers that be, and forced to languish at the periphery of earthly existence, they are the hordes whose collective temper is as unpredictable as the changing political winds – a mass of humanity whose fortunes and destiny increasingly tend toward social upheaval and rebellion against a system that has made them all but invisible.
On the eve of the third millennium, civilization finds itself precariously straddling two very different worlds, one utopian and full of promise, the other dystopian and rife with peril. At issue is the very concept of work itself. (p. 215-6)

But as he cannot even begin to imagine us as “historical subjects,” * freedom from work to him only means that we’ve slipped our leashes and we’re on the loose.

Look out, ya’ll! Here they come! There be wolves in the woods, ya’ll, and they growing teeth! Hurry up! Get the rope ready. Get ‘em back on the leash!
Trapped in podrunk categories, in his analysis, we, the vitality and force from which all invention comes, have been transmuted into ‘economic irrelevants.’ As if we exist for “the economy” and not the other way around.
Karl Polanyi warned about this:

To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. (The Great Transformation, p. 73)

Obviously I couldn’t agree more with Jeremy Rifkin that “the very concept of work itself” is at issue, though from below the perspective on the problem is quite different.

Noting our common concern about the possibility of coming chaos here is an aside, just to acknowledge that we do share a similar motive. In the chapter “The Plan” we’ll return to it. But I can’t bring up this issue without an accompanying caution. In Naomi Klein’s warning about the podrunks’ “shock doctrine” there is this: some of these crazies want chaos. Never forget that. Never forget what they’re capable of, or what’s at stake. In “The Plan” we’ll look at the peculiar logic of Reagan, Bush and McCain that terminates with this: “chaos will make totalitarianism attractive.” They think; and that’s the point, this is how they think.

Hopefully this digression has given us time to recover from the shock of Rifkin’s doctrine and face it, translate it, explicate it, maybe annihilate it. “Productivity,” this magic we make when we transform the earth’s bounty into baggage and backrubs, the podrunks believe is their gift to us because they purchase the stuff we work on. The counterfeit again – always, always, the false face. “Disconnect them from their pasts, disconnect them from each other, keep shuffling the shells, don’t let them look under.” But we know what’s under – us, always us. Just as water is continuous, indivisible, so are we, so are we. We flow through the streets of Cavite and the backrooms of cheats. We are everywhere. We do the work.

Remember Paris ’68 when the owners asked the factory workers “what do you want?” and they replied: “we want the fucking factory, dude. That’s what we want.” That’s what we want, because that’s what we are. Every product, every physical and cultural creation we all use or consume every day is our blood, sweat and love made manifest – and the earth’s.

They are shadows, these podrunks, and they know it. They know that they contribute absolutely nothing but theft to the whole dynamic of reproducing our world, day after day, year after piled-on year.

Or they don’t know it, and they’ve bought their own myth and are as duped by the false face of the commodity as anyone else, simply not caring how the thing they require to streamline their production process came to be available on that shelf for purchase.

Disney spokesman Ken Green’s response when “taken to task for the desperate conditions in a Haitian factory that produces Disney clothes” was:

“We don’t employ anyone in Haiti,” he said, referring to the fact that the factory is owned by a contractor. “With the newsprint you use, do you have any idea of the labour conditions involved to produce it?” Green demanded of Cathy Majtenyi of the Catholic Register.
From El Paso to Beijing, San Francisco to Jakarta, Munich to Tijuana, the global brands are sloughing the responsibility of production onto their contractors; they just tell them to make the damn thing, and make it cheap, so there’s lots of money left over for branding [and stockholders, and buying politicians]. Make it really cheap. (Naomi Klein, No Logo, p. 198)

When “compassion was removed from the hearts” and human solidarity renounced, when we all stopped caring what was under the shell, we fell asleep and started to dream – and in the dream things got shifted around, shady deals faded to black, false heroism got grafted onto guilt and fear, unbearable bits were sweetened, made less heinous.

The podrunks like to hide behind the gloss of “information technology,” and promote the lie that it’s their wizardry with gadgetry that gives us our products at such a “low cost,” and makes for them their “profits.” But there’s nothing marvelous or new about any of it – it’s just the same old bullying and violence and theft they’ve used from day one, from the first podrunk bellow, “More!”

Every time we plug something into an outlet we should murmur a hymn of thanks to Nikola Tesla, but we don’t. We don’t even know his name. Why? Corporations want us to thank them.

The podrunks, with their bought-and-paid-for state, steal our common legacies, our common knowledge-base, and present them back to us as their property, telling us we must work for a tiny share of it. They pick gems from our pockets and toss us a penny tip; no – they steal our common treasures and then infect us with their virus as compensation, much as the European colonizers infected the indigenous peoples of “America” with smallpox. Narcissists that they are, podrunks even imagine they’re doing us a favor by turning us into them.

But we are not them.

Continue to "The Two Winds" - Part 4

* Of course podrunks (“capitalists”) never feel allegiance to their countries of nominal origin (continuously expanding “wealth” and ‘Power’ is their only concern) – states exist in their minds but to contol the populace and facilitate the transfer of wealth from our pockets to theirs as speedily as possible.

* The racial sub-text is obvious. I wondered, reading it, who he was talking to – certainly not me. Here, as seemingly everywhere, the on-going problem: we have no voice.

Nascence to End Work

waking up - freeing ourselves from work

Chapter II: The Two Winds (Part 3)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work