12 June 2008

You should shut up now and read everything I am about to say.

No, seriously shut up... And now, please read all of this, please:

Let’s start with an elemental idea in economics. I swear I am not patronizing you, and you will see–we’re going somewhere interesting with this:

Surplus value is simply the exchange value of the work you do (what it’s worth to some corporation or other) minus the wages they pay you. (And now, we’re off into something more interesting...)

Here is the truth, as sure as arithmetic, and very brutal: a capitalist will always take as much as he can get away with from you, because he must, because competition demands it categorically, and if he neglects this immoral responsibility, competition (it’s always there, in capitalism) will outperform him, and soon he is no longer a capitalist. Then the competition will perhaps hire him, and take from his as much as they can get away with... They always will, in capitalism.

The interesting thing about this is what it suggests for the history of American socialism, in particular. Whatever you say about the adulteration of socialism (which should be global, human) with nationalism, or national definitions, or national politics, it is undeniable that once, about 75 years ago, it clearly scared the wits out of the corporate class, and motivated some bitter consolations, and more than a tweaking of a whole titanic capitalist economy. The American working class that finally organized itself into something faintly like coordinated (though still awfully spastic and jerky) action had the American corporate class sweating. That, of course, is unthinkable, in the American way of thinking about history and political reality, i.e., the capitalist way of thinking, i.e., the way you’re supposed to be thinking, i.e., the only way you’re supposed to think about thinking, if you’re minding the rules. (The rules, by the way, are as swift and insidiously slippery as, more stupefying and mind-warping than the mercury out of old thermometers, which, you know, you must never drink. Well, what do you know? I’m patronizing my readers after all. Please now forget everything you have found between these particular parentheses.) It’s unthinkable because the capitalists are in control, and they don’t want us thinking we ever made them flinch.

But we did make them flinch, or our grandparents did, when they got out and organized unions, and started talking about One Big Union. They whimpered in fright, when we started acting like one, and threatening to simply shut down the whole apparatus of American capitalist production, if they didn’t stop brutalizing union members, and working little kids to death, and trying earlier on than Mussolini to pull that kind of corporatist shit he later specialized in (under a conveniently different, demonized and exoticizing name: "fascism," which sounds a heck of a lot less disturbingly like something our own bosses would surely like to set in place than the original term "corporatism.")

We worked together, and by we I mean our grandparents, who learned to be far smarter than we have forgotten how to be, we talked about what we wanted, and then we shouted our demands right in the face of the corporate class. And they flinched, which is why, today, the economic arrangement of life in America is a little bit less fucked up, for Americans.
They didn’t have a choice: it was all boiling over, and threatening to shut down. We can always be proud of that, our one brief moment so far in history where we showed true audacity, made possible by organizing, and inspired mostly by hungry children. If you want to make anybody really interested in politics and unions, really fast, show them their children crying because they’re hungry. A hungry mob is an angry mob, for sure.
If it has gotten to such a point, and you are a capitalist, you want things to simmer down, and so you had better give those kids something to eat, and quick. If you’re lucky, you can reverse the damage done, even dimantle the unions, if they’re not yet ironclad, formed from pure outrage and sheer necessity. You’d better feed those kids, and play down the flagrant hand up the government’s ass you’ve been working to your own selfish ends, and the ends of capital. And stop beating and killing union organizers. And slowly, really slowly, people should start losing interest in unions and politics again.

That, then, pretty much accounts for current the state of things: we did just what they predicted we’d do, and, today, people are proud to announce that they don’t see how socialism is relevant to their lives, or their interests. Today, the working class thinks socialists are the people Chuck Norris had to kill so many of to free those American prisoners of war, and the people who fight climactic fights against Rock Balboa, even though they are obviously taking steroids, and the officials should totally step in and disqualify the cheating commies (but they don’t, so the myth goes, because of some unaccountably believed-in left-leaning bias of those in power, like international boxing officials, and the media–by the way, that myth was brought to you by the media, so go figure... ).

The American working class is not in itself stupid, just like we are not by nature racists. We have to be taught those things, and many of us are, to ensure we don't act up again, don't organize, don't realize our own best interests, as a class. We have been taught, and so often in painfully dumbed-down, degrading form, absurd lies about who and what socialism is. Next time somebody tells you that education is the answer to racism or mindless-culture-addiction, remind them to be careful they're not suggesting that the poor are somehow naturally racist and mindless, and, if only they weren't so filthy and poor, they might be lifted out of their natural ignorance into the light. Children, before they are taught differently, don't care any more about the color of somebody's skin than the color of their shirt or shoelaces. The disadvantaged must be taught their ignorance. Remember that, and stop touting education for backwoods yokels in that particular way we tout.

In short, we are still being milked for all they can steal. Surplus value is always pushed to the brink. That’s just an immutable fact of life under capitalism: they never take less than the most they can get away with. But these days, that’s less, a lot less, than what they could get away with in 1910. So, if by some odd stroke of luck (or lucky lack of a stroke, I suppose) one of your grandparents is still alive, say thank you for the food that sustained you, and the fact that the considerable periods when they do not inflict nightmarish world wars on us... and send us in armies out to kill armies of other working class people, who have done nothing to hurt us, and even though we have nothing to gain from fighting, except probably a tighter stranglehold for capital, around our own necks. Say "thank you" to your grandparent. Before them, children didn’t really experience puberty, did not become full fleshed-out men and women until they were about twenty-two years old. Even then, they straggled into maturity. All because they didn’t have enough food to eat, because "grocery money" was still part of that huge swath of surplus value that the corporate class was gobbling up and reinvesting in our own exploitation. There was so little food that their bodies simply didn’t have the energy to orchestrate such a huge change, and so they dragged along into unhappy adulthood, which was long, long after they had started working like adults, and being worked to death, or very nearly so. Always, always, always: as much as they can get away with. Our grandparents simply told them they weren’t going to get away with so much anymore. Or else, that was it, capitalism shuts down. The economy is nothing more than the sum of our work (dynamically restructured, turned against our own best interests). And for once we, the working class, said that we would stop the whole big machine, unless things changed. So things changed. So thank your grandparents. Even if they’re dead.

What’s a corporate class to do after that big flinch and frustration at home? Expand exploitation, the real, ruthless kind Americans have long forgotten is real, and at the heart of this economy, expand that exploitation beyond national borders, and start taking it out of an international working class, a "third world." That will pay for the concessions to the American working class, with a whole lot left over...

So, while you’re thanking people for dinner and a checking account and a handful of paid holidays, you should say "thank you" to the third world. But they probably seem less real to you than your dead grandparents... Say thank you anyway.

3 June 2008

Though I could never study something as methodologically disciplined and potentially practical as psychology, general education requirements have left me with a knowledge of its key points, and the ability to make from them uninsightful extrapolations, none of this really worth mentioning except: it’s interesting that I still don’t really get any of these points, and that I have to relearn them all, for myself. Take, for instance, the famous self-destructive side of the personality. It’s real, just as I’d figured, but never felt for myself. (In fact, I acknowledged many just such profoundly disturbing things about myself, and while these thoughts were still fresh and abstract, I pinned them down in my psychology textbooks, and tried to shelve them away, forever unseen again.) My self-destructive side: my, is he ever bent on ruining me!

He’s stupid as all hell, and his calling card is the irrational thought. I think that’s why Albert Ellis uses "self-destructive" and "irrational" to mean the same thing. The self-destructive side is just that predicatably and without fail, stupid.

He made me think maybe I got Albert Ellis mixed up with another guy, so that I had to double-check for just long enough to forget what I was about to say, because it actually seemed worth saying...

He's too stupid to hate, like a swarm of bees, or a bigoted grandparent.

He'll try anything, anything to screw with me, barring a well-formed and well-premissed argument. He's so very unclever. And yet he often gets away with it. He comes up with the most brazenly stupid ideas when I'm groggy or distracted by far more important things. Somehow, he thought it sounded like a good idea to divide up the things I have to do into three very poorly defined classes, and to buy a different planner for each. And over the course of late 2006, I fell for it I bought three different 2007 planners.

He's why I haven't written here in so long: he remembered me thinking how shamefully neglectful so many people were, starting blogs and keeping them for a few weeks, leaving a clear record of their inability to stick with stuff.

You've got one, too, in case you didn't know. He seems like he’s not there. He vanishes before you can find him, but deep down, I think you know him as well as he knows you, which is very well: his favorite food is stuff you've recently heard is especially bad for you. His favorite music is catchy, his favorite songs include anything you hate, and anything that will keep you from your work. Most of all, he prefers anything he can pare down to a mocking fragment of a melody, and sing to you over and over and over. His turn-ons include anybody you cannot have sex with, because you cannot have sex with them.