The first installment (“I’m just a consumer”) closed with two admonitions. One said we should value people instead of tossing them aside as “mere hands,” and the other is confident we can cast aside propaganda that justifies inequity by the age old trick of blaming the victim. This installment scrutinizes a couple of those victim-blaming urban legends that twist our outlook to see our colleagues as disposable implements.
Like that previous piece, this one springs from reflections on chapters 15 and 16 of Beyond Capital by István Mészáros. I encourage you to read them for yourself to make up your own mind.
There’s Something Special about this Place
All my adult life, across two countries, employees look for a better place to work. Often it isn’t that they’re unhappy with the low pay, in fact many people I’ve met attest they’d even work for less — if they could be sure it were for a good cause. (I admit I mostly mix with noble-hearted souls.)
When I ask why they can’t improve their workplace where they already are, a frequent response is “…but, there’s something special about this place.” They condemn the company they work for not making products that have anything good or useful, but only to sell, careless about what the customer might do with it. In restaurants, for instance, they don’t care whether the customer eats it, nor even whether the food is edible. Factories aren’t concerned if their mass-produced items are useful — so long as they’re sold, the bosses are happy.
In the same vein, socially aware people say they’re activists building solidarity in the most diverse projects out to the furthest corners of the globe. Yet when a dispute occurs in their own factory, office, or eatery, they won’t help those over there in the other department or in another annex. When it hits close to home, they describe their own workplace with disparaging phrases along those same lines of, “but, there’s something special about this place.”
When pressed, these coworkers go on to detail the lack of consciousness among their fellow employees. “I saw when so-and-so took vacation leave when others had more seniority!” “I was there when that department in the other building kept quiet when we needed backing up!” “I’ll never forget how she stole her spouse!” These commonplace, trifling rivalries are what cut off solidarity with our coworkers.
Something Odd
It seems so odd that it’s easier to make a collection or put out a solidarity statement with those far away, but damn near impossible for those who are close by, even in the same workplace. What we need to recognize is that this is yet another example of the bosses doing their job: using petty jealousies to prevent camaraderie among coworkers — especially when they know each other.
Common sense tells us, “If they would only sit down at the same table and talk, they’d find some common ground,” and is the lament we’re inculcated with for conflicts large and small. Yet real life rarely works that way.
Real life, unfortunately, is closer to that imaginary babelfish in Adams’s farce The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That surreal beastie had evolved to facilitate people reading each other’s thoughts, and so “caused more and bloodier wars than anything else.”
A real world perversion is in advertising — especially electoral ads — which are obviously designed to make each of us think everyone else falls for mindless drivel. We watch them and say, “people fall for the dumbest stuff!” Yet just think about how your neighbors and coworkers are assuming the same thing — about you. If we push aside that malicious propaganda when it comes at us, then we can put ourselves into other people’s shoes.
The bottom line is that rebels have to find a way to inspire solidarity among coworkers and neighbors, despite knowing each other. We have to push aside what we know about what they did to get by, which isn’t so hard if we think about how anyone and everyone has had to do something they’re not proud of to get around needlessly restrictive limitations and obstacles. That’s why they’re there: so that we look like we’re receiving some sort of favoritism, when we’re just overcoming hurdles put up to strangle a bit too tightly.
Our coworkers are not more waste! Freedom isn’t turning your back on others in a laissez faire you-go-your-way-and-I’ll-go-mine. Rather, liberty is that ability to choose as wisely and responsibly as one can among the options available at any given moment. And taking responsibility in spite of those flaws we’re all too aware of is one of the keys.
For instance, I was a college teacher in my last job before retirement. The professor’s trade union I was a member of to some degree followed this practice. Most secretaries, maintenance, groundskeepers, nurses, and so many others looked on us as equal oppressors as our mutual employer, the Rectorate. So much so that the administrative staff’s union local never once came next door to inform our local of workplace actions they planned. Nonetheless, each and every time they “hit the bricks” we would quickly put out a solidarity statement and prohibit our members from crossing their picket lines. And most times we organized material solidarity, which is to say blankets, a resistance fund, outreach to the press, and so on. And most years they went out on strike two or three times, generally resisting for several days to get any response at all from the Rector’s office.
Turning Back Sociopathy
The fact that the bosses at your workplace or mine don’t care whether the products or service from your sweat are in the least bit useful — or worse are actually harmful — isn’t anything peculiar or strange in your factory or office. That’s the way capitalism works! Remember the age-old adage: products aren’t made for human need, they’re only reason to be is to increase profit for the owners.
That’s the customary critique of capital and its system, capitalism.
What’s worse, wealth drives everyone — including you and I when we’re not careful — into a sociopathic view of others as mere tools to exploit. Socially conscious people, like Freep readers, have to look askance at the propaganda that’s foisted upon us every moment of the day from that convenient little gadget we carry in our hands.
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This series of three articles fleshes out the theory presented in The Columbus Worker:
What Impels Modern Society Toward Ever More Massive Waste
(April 13, 2024 https://cbus.work/home/theory/what-impels-modern-society)
Chapters 15 and 16 in a tome by István Mészáros called Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (1995, Monthly Review Press) are the background to that theoretical essay. I encourage you to read them for yourself!