Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

But rather than ‘fun,’ what we’re taught to covet is ‘intelligence,’ as if it were some very pricey gewgaw in the window, which we espy with nose pressed, fearing we can never claim its possession, knowing that it’s bestowed by the system upon only a select few, the ‘successful’ – accepting the propaganda that the ‘wealthy’ got that way because they’re ‘smart.’

And don’t we all (we’re so well trained) hunger to be given both appellations – “smart” and “successful” – applied with the stroke of a palm, received with bent heads.

There’s a demon to be exorcised.

Which is why the ‘pragmatic view’ won’t do.

To those who say: “Leave the past to the past. It doesn’t matter what stories we tell ourselves to explain the violence and the theft, the expropriation and the exploitation, the division;” who say: “however we got this mess, it’s here now and the important thing is to just deal with it;” who say: “Well, that’s just what happened then, isn’t it?” – I would argue, again, that this ‘past’ is not ‘past.’

Moving along prolongs the wrong. It just doesn’t serve.

I’m a practical person myself so I’m not insensible to the appeal of the pragmatic view.

But there’s a problem with it: the nasty psychic residue that oozes out of the wrong story, that continues to undermine, damage and diminish, on multiple dimensions. Daily it keeps us separated from our sources of power and prevents us from giving our ancestors, our earth, and each other, their due.

The Triumph of Reason global nightmare is very much alive, well, and shitting on everybody. It’s the macro version of the same story told when General Electric interposes its face between us and Nikola Tesla.

The capitalist system, armed with the most powerful weaponry in its arsenal, which is also its prettiest false face, its most fanciful facade – ‘Philosophy,’ ‘Science,’ ‘Rationality,’ ‘Thought’ – with our help and complicity, sweeps the suffering, sacrifice, brilliance and goodness of our ancestors into a box called ‘the Unhistorical,’ which we all bury in some place of ignominy in the backyard of our story, and forthwith show it our backs.

As a child, Stanley Tookie Williams recalls:

My cultural awareness was zero. I needed a complete black history course and a thorough deprogramming. I had been duped into believing that all black people were inhuman and inferior, that we had made no contribution to the forward thrust of civilization. Negative black stereotypes were broadcast or implied by the news media, magazines, institutions, television, newspapers, books, and every other medium you can think of. Not to mention the countless delusional blacks I met who believed the myth of black inferiority. Their contempt for their own blackness was so dynamic, they had subconsciously stepped outside themselves to assimilate with any cultural group other than their own. Their dys-education was complete. The more I was indoctrinated by lies about my blackness, the more I grew to detest myself. (Blue Rage, Black Redemption, p. 39)

Studying slave routes in Africa, Saidiya Hartman searched for some residue of the kidnapped and stolen – the disappeared – among the descendants of the survivors in contemporary Ghana. She learned that it was considered shameful to be the descendant of a ‘slave,’ and that urban, coastal Ghanaians viewed their northern, rural kin as ‘backward:’

The land of barbarians was what southerners called it. Most of them had never been north of Kumasi, so a full day’s journey from Accra to Salaga was unthinkable, but this didn’t prevent them from sharing fanciful tales about air so thick with dust you could hardly breathe, or describing bare-breasted women with the kind of revulsion and fascination you would expect from an American provincial opening the pages of National.Geographic for the first time, or mapping the north-south divide along the lines of brawn versus intelligence, or bemoaning a world without indoor toilets or electricity, or complaining of lazy and untrustworthy servants. Listening to them you would have imagined that northerners had stumbled out of their caves just yesterday and had yet to lose their scraggy feral manner. My landlady in Accra swore you could smell the stench of the untamed at the edge of the forest. Her daughter openly mocked primitives who had never set eyes on the sea, as if this alone were enough to damn them for eternity. The crudeness and poverty of northerners would send me running back to Accra, they warned. It was an inhospitable country. The north was the heartland of slavery. (Lose Your Mother, p. 178)

The story that human slavery, in any of its forms (including the one that tells us we’re ‘workers’), is justified by its service to Reason, or Progress, or the Productive Forces, or any other ‘idea’ you want to name, continues to harm, continues to damage psyches, continues to make people fear they’re ‘backward,’ not smart enough – continues to diminish the suffering of our ancestors and our sense of ourselves.

We’re all afraid that we’re not ‘smart enough.’

This is, of course, as already stated, a con, one that enropes us in a perfect circle of control – we that the podrunks fear almost as much as obscurity. It nullifies the moral argument, ripping from our hands our most potent weapon against them; it fosters division, disempowerment and demoralization; and it sows confusion and self-hate, as we endorse and then mimic their ruthlessness and greed.

Jim Weaknecht’s sporting.goods store in Hamburg, Pennsylvania (population 4,100) had provided him and his family with a good life:

His best year, the register rang up a mere $1.3 million in sales. He kept enough as profit, however, that his wife, Julie, could stay home taking care of their three children, which to Weaknecht meant he enjoyed a very good life. (David Cay Johnston, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill), p. 95)

Until Cabela’s, a corporate sporting.goods behemoth, came to town, lobbied the town fathers to subsidize its mega-store to the tune of over $30 million, and drove Weaknecht’s out of business.

Since he closed his store, Weaknecht has worked as an assistant manager for a regional grocery store chain. Cabela’s actually offered him a job – $13.50 an hour to be a department manager, supervising people who make $8 or $9 an hour. Weaknecht holds a second job, too, working on his days off for his cousin’s landscaping business. His wife, Julie, works, too, instead of devoting herself full time to their children. She holds down two jobs, as a teacher’s aide and at a local department store…Weaknecht has a sort of grudging admiration for the Cabela family’s Paris Hilton-level shamelessness in manipulating local governments for handouts instead of competing fair and square in the market. Weaknecht wants to believe any sensible citizen would reject welfare for the rich as both senseless and immoral. He believes that if he had sought a subsidy, the Hamburg town fathers would have laughed at his audacity. Yet his own experience tells him that the reality of business and politics has morphed into something else, something beyond the pale and yet very real. So long as he can earn his own way he will, even if that means four jobs for one family and paying off the creditors of his business so everyone he deals with is made whole. But being rich and collecting welfare, hundreds of millions of dollars of welfare? “I tell everybody the Cabelas are the smartest business people in the world,” Weaknecht said, “because they pulled it off.” (Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill), p. 108-9)

“A grudging admiration”?
…“because they pulled it off”?
…because they ‘won’?
…because they successfully beat down other human beings?
Which makes them “the smartest business people in the world”?

When Congressman Jay Inslee, as part of a bipartisan group meeting with then * Vice-President Dick Cheney to discuss the disastrous results of Enron’s rapaciousness, pleaded with Cheney on behalf of his constituents for “relief from Enron’s gouging,”

He looked straight at me, and his reply had all the subtlety of being slapped in the face with a flounder. He said, with a voice dripping with arrogance, “You know what your trouble is? You just don’t understand economics.” (Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks, Apollo’s Fire, p. 90)

For podrunks everywhere, across time, in every nation, beating people into submission is its own justification.

Their definition of ‘economics’ is simply “survival of the fittest,” which, according to their practice, means: “survival of the most vicious, the most heartless, the most selfish and self-centered, the most single-mindedly focused on greed.”

‘Reason’ didn’t triumph. ‘Greed,’ wearing a mask it called ‘Reason,’ triumphed.

And when we decide to face the fear that we’re not smart enough, to accept the truth that we’re more than capable of making and managing our own systems of production and distribution, when we shake off the meritocracy-con, and embrace our brilliance, that mask will go the way of all things insubstantial – to the four winds, and away.

Human solidarity will easily trump the politics of ‘divide and conquer’ when we decide to look at our ancestors’ stories unvarnished, and with the love and solidarity we continue to harbor for each other, preserved for the day when they can once again be put to some use.

Continue to "Progress" - Part 5

* He’s gone! He’s gone! He’s gone! …I know, I know, not really – he and his kind are ever hovering in the background, waiting for their chance to do their next hideous thing. It’s critical we deny them that opportunity.

Nascence to End Work

Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter III: Progress (Part 4)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work