The Stirrings in the workforce our Masters don't want us to talk about

Since Reagan's Revolutionary "recovery" after he and Congress drove the economy into the free market ground worker satisfaction with our "jobs" has diminished across the economy.

No wonder why. The jobs this country has created in every recovery are lower waged, less skilled, and, far worse, without benefits of pension, retirement, or the ability to save for that future when Wall Street dreams of grasping its evil hands on that leaden lock box called Social Security.

The shrinking of union work is suggestive too, but since our unions are increasingly reformist - accommodating corporate structures in exchange for a "cut" in union dues and prestige - unions are a far cry from their militant origins, when its goal was worker control of production, not high wages, no management except self-management.

So late 20th century and 21st century workers find themselves in a predicament. They were driven into the strategic hamlets we call cities over a century ago in the wake of the Industrial Revolution; they were trained to work on a treadmill [viz., factory floor, pushing paper in a cubicle]; and they can now can do little more than survive by keeping the wheel of their own destruction spinning ... spinning the twine to make the noose that hangs them.

When ends don't meet, they spin faster, and have even a generation ago begun to send their teen-aged children to work the treadmill. Because, to blow the mill out of the universe - to destroy it - would leave too many workers with a skill-set barely enabling them to tie a shoe but little else.

We can't farm. We can't build. Many can't even pull apart their car engines and rebuild them. The urbane existence we are supposed to consider a pinnacle of civilization has in reality done what the antebellum slave master could not do: many of those African slaves risked life and limb to read and write and to escape. We are grown, illiterate children.

My Tennessee grandparents talked a lot about this in my youth, when they rued the next Depression. The one they survived in the 1930's they survived because while they were dirt poor, they had food from their land and practical skills to sustain themselves.

We deeply loathe our employment, but the Stockholm Syndrome says we are one with it too. Our jobs do less and less for us, except eek out the barest minimum existence, but this basic we've turned into ..."I am lucky to have a job" and bow and curtsey, tug-at-your-locks obedience.

So we are caught between the proverbial rock of joblessness and no means to feed/house ourselves and the hard place of work.

Two reasons employers are not fretting about this.

One must be their deep-seeded faith that we workers will not seek alternatives beyond what the master provides. Thanks to lessons learned in the factory system of education, we've learned to shut up. Otherwise, I should think an employer who has even 50% of his workforce actively seeking work elsewhere would be alarmed.

Two that where the employer may lose a portion of that job-dependent 50% to another job, there's another job-dependent 70% waiting to step in - if only for a moment.

The wasted costs of training and the signal that your workers' minds are elsewhere is no concern, possibly because the training is so minimal, the work not critical. Ask yourself in whatever job you labor if you'd trust a surgeon or even an dentist to operate on you with the level of training you and your colleagues got. If the answer is No, your training is probably over-blown and over-hyped.

Make no mistake. This is a powder-keg. What will ultimately ignite it is hard to pinpoint; and how that coming disaster will destruct is hard to predict. Because when workers take a page from the stockbroker and stop looking at the picture but at the broader canvass - even into the next economic quarter - all Hell will break loose.

Tottenham

There's a specter haunting the West. It is the specter of the colonials over-running the White Race and its 1,000-year old faux civilization. In the 60's the West was haunted by the specter of the Blacks over-running their cities, so it mobilized the White Race and extended Slave Codes - Jim Crow, Counter-Reconstruction, Red-lining, etc - over the mostly urban population, criminalized a host of behaviors, and put that population through the meat grinder of the criminal-"justice" system.

By West, I do not mean the populations but rather the governments, who are empowered to maximize any thing that brings profits to corporations. In fact, it's difficult to distinguish the government from the corporations. Just look at the current US president's Cabinet.

By White Race, I cannot mean White people, most of whom are working class and victims of this economic system. White Race is a clever guise by which corporations can justify its existence, can pit one set of workers against another.

But the West's actions to mitigate the threat of the colonials - a pre-cursor to the war on "Terror," in fact - could never come to a conclusion. History is literally against the West, and deep in the bowels of its banks, it knows this.

More and more of the US states are passing or contemplating racist laws purportedly to "control" colonials from the global South. This of course pre-supposes the White Race in the Americas is not illegal and is not the creature that should be controlled. Despite such maneuvers as NAFTA and the utter decimation of Mexico's rural life, the theft of water from Peru and India, etc., the criminal behavior of the West's governments is an exoticism left to college seminars and rogue radicals in black masks throwing bottles filled with inflammables. It is not to be discussed among serious people.

So the Tottenhams - site of the recent London "riots" - always, always come as a surprise to the gullible. But the serious people with any sense are scared. Good.

In the UK right now, signs that its government have never really assimilated its former colonials - West Indian and African Blacks and East Asians - are literally burning the streets down in London and reaching up to Liverpool.

While the US has made some pedestrian, window-dressed steps to assimilating its former slaves [see Richard Rodriguez' "Hunger for Memory"], the UK has maintained essentially a 50-year guest-worker program and kept its imports in Old World ghettos.

It isolated these "Black Britons" to bantustans in perpetuity, thrown in some vocational training for jobs that didn't exist, accessorized it with a royal charity [The Prince's Trust], and otherwise ignored these non-people while the "country" pretended it relived some medieval tribal fantasy.

So when the colonials get restless at a lack of a means to support themselves, the weight of the foot of royal police on their necks, or shooting of their children like they were foxes in the pastoral hunt, the hierarchy's press people pretend to wonder why, official community leaders condemn the violence, and the government threatens to bring out the water canons, etc., etc.

These governments - all over Europe - are scared shitless that this series of events might mark their inevitable twilight.

What began in Tottenham did not really begin there, but must be seen as a continuum that stretches to one side in Cairo, to Yemen, to Tunisia, to India. It also extends back to the burning cities of the 60's, Mexico and Paris in 1968, the Pink Tide spreading across Latin America, the riots after the Simi Valley verdict acquitting the LAPD of gross misconduct, the riots after the Oscar Grant slaughter in Oakland, which saw that young man's murderer walk free, and countless other agitations that keep getting explained away as peripheral.

These are not only riots. They are uprisings. The compromised Western media and the bought Western politician will of course condemn the burning, the looting, the trashing because in Britain they must really believe that ancient legal convention that "the Queen can do no wrong."

But whether they believe in Queen and Country or not, they know the score. These governments and their other halves, the corporations, are in a tough spot. Their very existence, their successes, their wealth, have been built directly on the backs of the colonials' labors and the colonials homelands. But the score card pretty clearly shows sooner or later, this specter will in fact overwhelm them.

They know they are a chilled shriveling corpse that must live on the blood, sweat, gold, oil, etc., etc., of persons that must - legally speaking - be deemed as their inferiors, which takes us back to those Slave Codes.

This legal convention can be seen in the racist nature of every single institution on both sides of the swamp.

There is nothing about the modern age that alters basic biology. Although we are in the the 21st century, this has not changed the need of the parasite for its host, any more than modernity makes tiny, inhospitable Europe a terrain fit for human life. It is not. It is cold, damp, and barren, and to sustain any vibrancy it must suck the life-force from the global South.

This is why - at bottom - these degenerate governments have swarmed like locusts into the Arab world, why it begs China, loots Libya, menaces Cuba, and, why, at any cost - believe me - they will put down these colonial upstarts wherever they raise their defiance: in London, in Cairo, in Caracas, in Oakland or in Bensonhurst.

It will not be enough for these uprisings to bring down the Coalition government between the Conservative and Liberal-Democrat Parties. Although that would be a small gain indeed.

Our systems of government, on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout the Western world are less an expression of popular voice and more like the crude, barbarism of the management class. We know our managers at our work places: part drones, part pre-historics, all brute force to keep the rabble in line. They are not coaches; they are coercive.

Coercion is the only way to keep humans from being human and to make them into machines to toil for one purpose and not agitate.

This is the essence of our Western democracies, and this is why we seemingly have no control over our public policies, foreign or domestic, why war crimes we are against continue to be perpetrated in our name, why we cannot get a decent community need met.

But bombs can be dropped on soft targets in the global South. Rogue leaders who do not follow the management directives can be run out or assassinated. And guest workers in the metropolises - London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris - can be set upon like sport.

This is why we must throw the managers to the dogs and burn not only the institutions to the ground but also our addled dependence on them.

The existence of this system obviously makes problematic any "justice" for the colonials from these governments - the Blacks, the Browns, the working-class Whites, the Southasians and East Asians, the Indigenous are not likely to find any reparation or revolution from this system.

Che Guevara's famous admonition was to give birth to 100's more Vietnams, 100's more "slave" rebellions against the global North. Who knows what will finally spark this mass uprising to burn the dead brush from the landscape: will we look back at Tottenham like we who know better look back at the Haymarket riots in Chicago?

Following Orders

Among anarchist circles exists the primitivist contention that civilization is bad and needs dismantling and the anti-primitivist response that were the primitivist reality come to pass, "people will die" without the many benefits modern society has given humanity. I've hear this so many times it's become a TV jingle in my head.

But I don't hear a similar response from aspects of the broader left when it comes to neoliberal policies attacking social programs, and I wish I did. The anarchists debates are real debates between dismantling management structures and replacing them with worker-owned, worker-run job sites or doing away with the agricultural-industrial model altogether to free us.

Liberals don't have real debates, particularly when it comes to neoliberalism. These policies did not begin in the 80's but gained an intensity under Reagan and Thatcher with a selling off of public goods, attacks on the poor, women, minorities; continued under Clinton with Welfare Reform; and just now driven further into the heart of the New Deal under the hammer of Pres. Barack Obama, Wall Street's Boy Toy and menace to society.

The debt-ceiling deal just signed is catastrophic. And while I am more sympathetic than not with the primitivist, anti-civilization arguments, I find myself employing its opposition's "people will die" refrain when it comes to policies clearly being passed.

People will die.

Because, unlike the primitivist arguments, which has little consensus and no legislative support, the neoliberal program is real and in the here and now ... and aside from attacking Head Start, education funding, community health centers, Medicare, health programs for women, like breast cancer screening, food programs it will also eliminate federal jobs and employment programs.

This time, for real, people will die. What do we think happens to a woman who cannot get early breast cancer screening except that she will likely die? What do we think happens to the poor who cannot access food programs except they will get sick and die?

I'm often asked about people's lack of response. Why in the face not only of the mass extermination of Nature, the salmon, the wetlands, the rain forests, 100's of species per hour but also the incremental extermination of human beings, politically driven famines in the global South, like in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Haiti, austerity measures in the North and South cutting off food supports, access to health care, and selling off natural reserves do we not counter-attack?

Why don't the collective masses rise up and cut off the heads of these degenerates and obliterate the system which clearly and empirically oppresses us? All kinds responses - form the so-called passive to the so-called violent - would seem to be on the table, but few are.

Why do we follow orders?

The Factory System imposed on our public education system of model of obedience onto students being prepped to be industrial workers. Indeed, much of public education was motivated to assimilate former rural farm workers and immigrants into the industrial system.

As at your workplace, rewards came by sitting in your chair, not challenging the teacher or the system. Disruption was met with various kinds of progressive discipline up to and including expulsion [firing]. It was a weeding out process of good workers from bad. And the better workers learned the degenerate lessons that you keep your head down, your thoughts to yourself, and obey the manager/master/teacher.

The obvious problem is besides creating a nation of slaves to whatever system is in place is that system can evolve into a NAZI Germany or a 21st century global North [e.g., USA, UK, France, Spain, et al] so dependent on the resources of the global South - this dependence proof of the primitivist argument, by the way - the global North has broken every domestic or international law or human rights convention or basic human civility and commit crimes against humanity, war crimes, and savage act.

And the docile, well-trained, well-schooled "workers" - those who learned the lessons best - will keep their heads down, run the mill, the factory, the workplace, or even drop bombs on innocents and just keep following orders.

So our only hope is from those who refuse to follow orders.