A manifesto of sorts, admonishing us not to be happy and submissive but to be angry, queer, and insurgent.
Perils of Supervision
The other day, a supervisor gave us an after-work "briefing" in which he said he didn't "like the negativity" going around the workplace, and for us to be "more happy, more positive." He told us to be happy we had a job as there were so many out there who did not. He offered no specific cause of this negativity, as this might have elicited a rebuttal; like, he made no mention of the terminations that have been happening to our coworkers who are being sent among the unlucky people with no jobs; no mention of the "zero-tolerance" and draconian punishments resulting for what used to be minor infractions.
Like all our elites, from top to bottom, from the coarsest, foul-mouthed factory floor over-seer to the more refined, elegant and ruthless corporate Eichmann, and every follow-orders gentleman and lady in between: these sorts of briefings are as common as Bush's admonishment as the Towers fell: to keep shopping.
Ignore the man behind the Curtain: the great Oz has laid an egg.
If our supervisors and managers mean anything in these declining, austere times it is exemplified in this: they are rather impotent except where it comes to coerce our obedience. This they must do to eek out one more week of profits from disgruntled labor forces.
Gone are the golden days when they were problem solvers and trouble-shooters. With so many of our comrades unlucky to be without work, the lucky ones are easily replaceable, their chains being tightened, and yet told by these underlings not to flinch: Be happy. Otherwise, these lucky ones are guaranteed to be replaced with the growing population of Unlucky.
What the lucky ones don't seem to realize with all their good fortune is: this is really no different than chattel slavery, where the slaves were physically beaten for not complying, the wage slaves are coerced psychologically.
The employed are told so often by their managers that they are lucky, that many workers even repeat it to others, and repeat it to themselves in the mirror. To those who want to keep repeating they are lucky to have a job without examining the conditions of that job, consider this: Blacks enjoyed full employment during slavery.
This good fortune of having a job has clearly taken the place of any further advancement in the labor movement from, say, the mid-19th century. An eight-hour work day and minimum wage were barely won with blood staining the streets - the managers pulled the triggers and the workers took the bullets.
But not too much advancement, since at the same time as a giant step was made in trades-unionism, chain-gangs populated with former Black slaves continued to offer free labor to build what the West erroneously calls its "civilization;" some of the former slaves were used to break Northern unionism when Black men not in the chain-gang were lured North to places like Chicago and St Louis and Los Angeles; and later: immigrants fleeing free-enterprise miracles of the global South found themselves just one wrung above the chain-gangs doing menial, backbreaking work for pennies on the dollar. Good liberals condone this arrangement on the grounds that no one from this country would do such work for such a pittance.
A slave system has imposed itself within the freest and most prosperous country in the world, just as an apple with a rotten core is still an apple, so they might say. Workers are not supposed to note the contradictions of wealth and poverty created by the system, nor flinch when we are shown how expendable we are to them, nor question the legitimacy of a Master-Worker system. This is the "negativity" that supervisor-manager warned against. Negativity inhibits the bottom line of the stock market, the Overall Mission of profits - the rationale of a tyrannical state.
We No Longer Cure Diseases, We Manage them too
From the more militant beginnings of labor insurgency, when it was not only the worker we were concerned with but understandably the society the worker labored under, reform competed with revolution for the central modus operandi: can we tinker with the existing institutions [reformism] or must we do away with them altogether [revolution]? Regardless, the institutions have remained virtually untouched as power centers beholden to the same things a stock broker is beholden to, so meaningful reforms would always be tenuous. Revolution impossible.
It's no wonder our powerful governments go limp with helplessness to do anything jobs are transferred in whole factories from entire communities and sent like chain letters to deeper, more remote parts of the global South, out of the reach of US labor laws. It is not workers or communities, children or the health of our bodies, the very old or the newborn baby it is concerned with: stock brokers might be fine to tolerate but not in charge of the upbringing of a child.
The assault on workers and our treatments is akin to a plague being prescribed a placebo: the Haymarket militants - even the most docile of them - would look at us in the 21st century with our "lucky to have a job" excuses and the privilege of working two and three to make ends meet, no health care, education- and community-funding austerity measures, housing and food insecurity, while the logic of capitalist keeps apace to create fortunes for a few, and wonder if they had not been transported back to the the 1500's.
Our problems have worsened, and our elites predictably offer a strange array of solutions, no stranger than how they seem to address health issues: as AIDS activists have pointed out, after 30 years of that so-called viral epidemic, no cure is found, rather a host of expensive tests and treatments, which benefit pharmaceutical corporations.Similarly, our elites' prescriptions are rhetoric and more belt-tightening.
Multiply that 30 years and labor solutions function much the same way, making the poor worse off, and the rich more bloated. For example, it is considered an advance that 23 states are now right-to-work states, where unions can no longer be an obstacle to what elites like to euphemistically call improving the economy. Why we should allow the interests of health, like HIV, to be in the hands of those seeking to maximize profits is as amazing as allowing the same interests to decide what's best for workers - that is, the best decidedly being to have as little as possible.
And naturally any prescription cannot credibly come from workers or from unions, since we don't know what is good for us.
Our Best Unions No Better than Junior Members of a Corporate Board of Directors
Our unions, thanks largely to a campaign of disinformation, sabotage, extermination, and purges have nearly fossilized into relics. They may look nice from afar, but they are brittle to the touch.
If publicly traded, NYSE-type corporations are only interested in maximizing profits every quarter and controlling a larger market share, it is not unreasonable to conclude the boards of directors is interested in nothing less. Each board member plays a carefully scripted role in meeting this end: it is not in unschooled, illiterate circles that this statement is controversial. It is among the well trained and well schooled, who learn absolutely nothing of the power and role of corporate power in an average high school civics class: to them, to these matriculated, to suggest corporate power is a conspiracy is something to be filed away with our not really having landed on the moon.
But the members of the board know if they do not play their particular role to meet the only goal for the quarter, they will loose their lucky job and find themselves padding up their resume in search of a new one. Even the junior members of the board - like VP for Human Resources - knows this.
So when its has become a popular smoke screen for certain firms to stage workplace democracy, many of those well-schooled, well-greased, well-matriculated proletariat inhale the smoke screen deeply.
An Employee Council established by the boards of directors, staffed and vetted by the boards of directors [or not, since that VP of Human Resources can downsize anyone at any time] is not workplace democracy: it is an extension of the board of directors, which is interested in one thing and one thing only, and it is not the condition of the workers, their wages, their levels of satisfaction, their empowerment to make meaningful changes.
The Employee Council, like that VP for Human Resources, is a junior member of the board.
What does this have to do with unions? If there is a difference today between our better unions and these Employee Councils, it might be that one has the audacity to charge you dues for the indignity to represent the bottom-line interests of the board of directors: that is all. The hot air they expend in order to collect those dues from you does what hot air always does: rises high into the heavens where it is never to be seen or heard from again.
And if this is a sad thing to say about our better unions, the worst ones are not worth mentioning.
Funny how this works for many people: if the electric company kept making excuses why your power wasn't being turned on, even though you were current on your bill, the board of directors might be happy that their coffers continued to be filled, but this would not mitigate you not having any lights.
Unfortunately, this is not the end of it. This sham extends, as it must, to the polling place, where our elections are rigged to favor business interests over any popular control. Many examples of this exist, but a notable one is that contrary to 70% of those polled want a European, government-controlled, universal health system, 99% of the corporate interests do not: the stock broker wins again.
Capitalism basks in the glory of their exploits: the exploited bask in race pride, nationalism, culture wars, and the chivalrous defeat of Sin
But this is the nature of the conspiracy: the well-oiled, well-tooled machine that seems to make clean, sweeping movements on the outside, but underneath, gears are grinding into each other, and we are none the wiser, precisely because we have been educated.
The harassment of anarchist and communist union agitators taught us to watch what we say and around whom we say it.
The extermination anarchist and communist union agitators in the 1930's taught us to hide.
The official purging anarchist and communist union agitators in the 1940's from the union rolls taught us to stop learning their lessons.
Then their presence is not mentioned in the official history books, so your silence and obfuscation is no match for your child's ignorance to why they are sitting in classrooms laid out in rows, like a factory, with the teacher at the head of the class, like their future manager.
We are well educated.
And lacking a meaningful knowledge about how our authoritarian system functions - who holds power, who wields it, and on whose behalf, we are left to debate feminism, gays in the armed forces, race, abortion, unwed mothers, moral degeneration causing natural disasters - to name just a few absurdities: because these issues are really about who can fly closest to the Sun, the center of Power, access the wheels and levers, without the wax melting from your wings.
The debate is not about women or gays and lesbians or white purity: it is about an iron will to preserve intact a predatory, unequal, malicious system, then: to create appropriate fables to support it, like the inferiority of women, the perversion of queers, and the supremacy of whites. And these justifications can come from science, which asks us to look at the data; Bibles, which demand we emulate the morality and superstition of a persecuted ancient North African-Roman tribe; or televangelists, who really should know better.
Ceasar and Pharoah and their exploits, the blood they spill, the mass graves, the riches they inherit: they get away with murder.
Political Paradigms yoke us to complicity, Ridding Ourselves of Sexual Delusions might be our best hope
So who will rid us of this turbulent prince? Moses led his tribe to freedom; a Divorce Decree rid us of the Roman Catholics; the beheading of a few Godly kings rid us of absolute monarchism; Cromwell rid us of monarchy altogether for a time; Puritans and Calvinists rid us of Anglicanism; Magna Carta rid us of arbitrary convictions; the Viet Cong and Cuban revolutionists rid us of US military supremacy; China rid itself of British occupation in Hong Kong, and the Panamanians - despite Ronald Reagan's protestations - rid itself of the US; Russia rid itself of Czars and its global South economy ...
And what did this give us? An armed, predator nation in the Middle East; Henry became the pope of an English church; the free French not only held liberty, equality, fraternity to their hearts but they also tried to hold colonies, like Haiti, just as fervently; the Christian-fanatical Pilgrims began the holocaust of Native Americans; Victorious Vietnam has implicated itself into the global market system, along with China, as the go-to place for cheap, regulated, oppressed labor.
Plus ca change, c'est la meme chose!
Maybe it's time to put down our Bibles and our Marx, Lenin, and Henry George, and kill John Wayne. Those of us inclined to follow the supposed Word of a Jewish carpenter in the ancient desert persist in consulting those texts for answers; while those of us who have purportedly freed ourselves from such superstition dive head first into another catechism of communism. Each and all sides insist we need only perfect the Message, and we have been doing this for a few hundred to a few thousand years. In our efforts we have replaced one pope for another, then another.
John Wayne is a product of our imaginations: that is not even the actor's real name. He was not a cowboy but an actor. He is the model for our brutish behavior, machismo, the West, Civilization, the white hero come to rescue the damsels and pluck one to wed, reprimand the natives, and kill the extras as a show of bravery: in short, a thug. He has become a model for Manhood itself, in sharp contrast to a pan-sexual, empathetic, culturally embracing, humble, intellectually thoughtful human being which the world arguably needs.
What seems to really hinder our human progress into a better future is whatever our catechism, we adhere to the model of John Wayne: we probably find something as comforting in that icon as we might a military parade. I have seen the doctrinaire Christian, and he is no better than the doctrinaire Socialist. We keep cultivating the worst characteristics in our children, trying our best to model them ourselves, and the result is a kink in our moral evolution, if not our economic.
The Syndicalists can rightly advocate a worker-owned and managed factory, but watch who asserts themselves and how, and who is marginalized and with what tactics: and the meeting room will be laid out just like the classrooms of their youth, with the master at the head.
A therapist once told me we should not vilify those who seek counseling; if anyone, we should vilify those who do not. Even, the women who joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party in the 60's found they were expected to make coffee, something the Southern Baptists would have given a hearty "amen" to.
At this point any man or woman who wants to evolve needs a little queer in them; but this is a tough task until we put enough queer in society.
And if the church wardens are uneasy thinking I am referring to sex: good. I am glad to make them uneasy and knock a few pedestals over. But I am not talking about sex: that is already going on, between men and women, women and women, and men between men. Despite Dr Kinsey's findings, we persist in saying things like 7% of the population is homosexual, when sex between men, and between women, is much more frequent than that and would qualify at least 25%-40%. But this fact has never jived with the alpha-male, John Wayne frontier conqueror we aspire to be, so cognitive dissonance simply removes the facts for the fiction.
Recently, after having sex with a guy, he told me he was born-again Christian, and showed me the photos at the river and a Bible within arms reach to prove it. He then went on about the Word of God: how being gay was a sin because it was clearly stated and irrefutable in the Bible: how he could do what we just had done within spitting distance of the framed, color photo of him being dunked in a cold river is called discipline. He was the bad person, not the text, which he argued must be correct because it has endured so long [like, say, Homer's "The Odyssey"? Sappho's poetry?].
This might seem like a strange case to many, and it is strange: but it is far from unusual. Again, given what Dr. Kinsey reported in his two published studies, we seem quite comfortable with norms and directives handed down from the Master Teachers, Supervisors, and Management; and guilty and full of shame and doubt about our own natural impulses.
No change, including the most modest, significant social change, let alone radical change, can happen under such a paradigm. You can recite all the Lenin or Mao or St. Peter you want: as Bernard Shaw wrote "Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
For the sake of not only humanity but also the other species - known and unknown, the water, land, and air, we must change our ways.
The state of things as they are will lead to greater exterminations: this is not a prediction, but rather a prognosis of what is happening right now. Neither religious zealotry nor political dogma nor supplicating our masters' foolish directives to "be happy" can tip the scales in humanity's favor: this is worse than moving chairs around on the deck of the Titanic: it is akin to trying to find the most comfortable one to sit in. And the Captain is not going down with this ship. So he must be thrown overboard.
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