The Work a Day World

Men Working

For some reason which has continued to elude me for much of my life, people think capitalism is just great and that it is somehow holy. That is about the biggest bunch of crap you ever want to hear. Most people say and believe that because that’s what they’ve been brainwashed and taught to believe since their Dad helped them to build their first lemonade stand. You always hear about the work ethic and how wonderful, wonderful it all is – people are continually being praised by others just as duped as they are about how having a good work ethic is why America grew up to be great. One thing to think about is why the Nazis, during the Second World War, put up signs at their concentration camps that said things like: “Work makes you free,” or “Work makes life sweet.” Just how many sweet and free lives do you suppose the Jews got to live while working in those camps?

No one, it seems, ever bothers to ask what the puck is so great about America? There are a lot of rich people, I’ll grant you, and yes, we are amazingly well fed and housed by most third-world standards, but by the standards of most industrialized Nations, American workers get the shit end of the stick. We have no single-payer health care system; our unions are not only shrinking but are being continually bombasted by those in public office; you are made to feel like a criminal asking for a wage hike or bad mouthing the management, that in turn spends as much time trying to figure out how to screw the worker, as they do planning how to run a successful business; rules that apply to you, like having to invest in the corporation, do not apply to the management; if you’re fired you’ll be lucky to get two-weeks’ notice and maybe a token amount of severance pay; if the CEO gets fired, or leaves, he or she will be set for life, at your personal expense by the way; they can sell or trade or bargain the business right out from under you, but you have no say whatsoever in what the business is likely to do; businesses are increasingly attempting to dictate to employees how there are supposed to run their lives; they subject you, willy-nilly to drug tests and polygraph tests and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventories; they rate you in some cases by a system of time and motion studies known as Taylorism; they insists you dress, act and look as they want you to; you are forced, when looking for a job or a promotion, to actually market and sell yourself as if you were a product – anyway, and as you probably well know, the list goes on almost for ever. In short, being an American worker is the pits, and comes with no guarantees whatsoever (witness, for instance, United Airlines reneging on its promises of retirement pensions). According to some recent reports by the Associated Press there are unscrupulous labor contractors out there who actually hold otherwise hapless and homeless people in monetary slavery through the use of debt and “company stores.” There is virtually no level to which a capitalist won’t sink in order to bring home the profit.

And it is not only the almost absolute control over your life that the corporations insist upon, and increasingly so, but also how working for a corporation steals from you your humanity and real, not ersatz, freedoms to be who and what you want. There is no joy in toiling at specialized labor, or in manufacturing only a small part of a completed product, or in working at McDonalds or any other assembly line like occupation. The spiritual and psychological satisfaction a worker once received for visualizing and bringing into being a completed product of their own design and invention has long since become a thing of the past, and nowadays you are expected to toil at bringing to market someone else’s conception. Whatever humanity a worker was once allowed to exhibit, has pretty much gone the way of the hula-hoop, and now sheer drudgery prevails. Drudgery that wears out the human components of the system, primarily to some one else’s benefit.

More recently, with the oligarchy firmly established in Washington, the only ones benefiting are the capitalist class. Profits for the corporations continue to escalate while the working poor, and even the solid middle class, are taking it in the rear – and have been ever since Ronald Reagan. With George Dubya, it has gotten much worse.

Worse, even than all of that, is that the capitalists expect you to kiss their rosy red asses for providing the shit jobs that they do. Somehow, you are supposed to be thankful to them for their benevolent acts of exploitation! At one Wal-Mart store in Canada, they recently voted to go union, and so Wal-Mart shut the store down right there, right then. It’s a message that Wal-Mart refuses, and shall continue to refuse, to treat employees like human beings. Otherwise, if forced, they will simply shut it down – even though union organizing is perfectly legal, and was once even encouraged, so as to give the little guy a decent and fair shot at social justice. Not anymore, the bastards are moving their operations overseas (where they can pay 10 cents on the dollar for labor, and treat employees even worse than they do here). They don’t give a damn about America, or about anything it stands for. In fact, they hate democracy most of all.

So why anyone becomes all defensive about protecting capitalism as practiced in this country is certainly way beyond my poor powers to add and subtract. As far as I can see, it exists simply to exploit people and give them the shaft.