Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

When the smoke from the trains no longer drifted above the savanna, they realized that an age had ended – an age their elders had told them about, when all of Africa was just a garden for food. Now the machine ruled over their lands, and when they forced every machine within a thousand miles to halt they became conscious of their strength, but conscious also of their dependence. They began to understand that the machine was making of them a whole new breed of men. It did not belong to them; it was they who belonged to it. When it stopped, it taught them that lesson. (Ousmane Sembene, God’s Bits of Wood, p. 74)

I felt conflicted, the whole time I worked in the trades, about my participation in the trashing of the planet.

“Development,” capitalist-style, translates into great gaping holes in the earth, the production of noxious chemicals, the poisoning of our soil, the pollution of our air and bodies with all the toxic fumes and dust, the dumping of voluminous quantities of residual construction materials into landfills.

But the experience also allowed me to see – first-hand – how the distribution systems we depend on get installed, and the powerful people who install them.

It certainly demonstrated to me conclusively, when before I couldn’t know this, that folks like you and me will easily take over the managing of these systems when the time comes, at least the ones that it still makes sense to maintain.

And I also know that it will be a blast, once all the cons stand bare and exposed and we decide we’re done with them, to disappear the bizarre notion ‘work’ into the body-friendly feeling ‘fun.’

Some of the most fun I had, during my brief run as a journeyman electrician, was the two months I worked in the auto plant, NUMMI. I wrote about it in my journal.

Me and a robot faced off yesterday. I got all up in its face.
“Back off! Yeah, yeah, that’s what I thought. You best to back off!”
Coward.
It was one of those little choo-choos transporting car.parts.
Ghoulish little monster, singing happily to itself while it takes our jobs!
Well, faced with a challenge it backed off – quick, let me tell you.
Soulless.
Spineless.
No wonder they work so cheap.
Zero self-esteem, if you ask me…
Yesterday morning before they unlocked the gang-box I walked over to the sheeted-off area where the robots rule and, my goddess, it’s a fucking awesome sight!
The ceiling-to-floor transparent plastic wall protects on-lookers from the fireworks display and the smoke of the robots at work: huge steel arms with vise-grip appendages, lunging, grabbing, sealing, pivoting, rising, falling, withdrawing, surging, sealing, grabbing, dominating – at frightening speed.
There’s a conveyor the skeletal cars must walk, with a long line of robot pairs straddling it, waiting for them. I’m sure the helpless vehicles tremble at the sight.
The first robot works alone. Its single appendage a huge fork which it pivots to seize a hapless car-shell on an elevated conveyor, spinning it over to the line where the robot pairs do their work. Down it goes, and then on down the line, each robot pair moving in as it arrives, grabbing it, working on it, having its way with it, more fierce than a tom seizing a female in heat. I can’t tell what they’re doing there in the bowels of the naked, shivering Vibes. It could be anything. Who knows what goes on in the depraved minds of these metal monsters.
The smoke, the flying sparks, and the surreal monster-robots compose a vision of Hell – disturbing because it inspires such awe. After this, my own work seems sluggish and mundane.
I’m not sure what I think about this.
At break we trek up the long flight of stairs next to the inoperative escalator. They’ve posted a big sign explaining that to fix the escalator would cost $120,000 and I’m sure we agree that their money would be better spent elsewhere.
It bugs me, the disrespect implied, – I mean, the fucking Christmas lights display on the front of the building costs more than that – but not P. P bounds up the stairs two at a time, claiming that if you have trouble running up these three flights, you shouldn’t be working at NUMMI.
He adds that, “the escalator’s never worked, not even fifteen years ago, the first time I was out here.”

Now, obviously, if you’re an appendage of the line, working at NUMMI is not “fun.” Being forced to serve a machine completely inverts truth, totally negates what we are as human beings.

But look around and tell me that machines don’t rule us…everywhere.
Sure pedestrians have the right of way – but we don’t bet our lives on that do we?

And don’t you feel an ever so slight sense of power and superiority, because of that shell of metal surrounding you, as you zip past the immobiles waiting at the bus stop?

And if the number of machines you’re an adjunct to didn’t carry its own cachet, how could they keep selling them to us? Why would we keep buying them?

The large quantity of machines and devices in our lives may, along with wage work, be the chief means of keeping us docile. It certainly institutes, with each new generation, with each new day, structural disempowerment.

Do we know how they work? Most of us don’t have a clue. But aren’t they marvelous? And aren’t we just so amusingly ignorant of how just about everything in our lives is constructed?

Haven’t we become structurally dependent beings? Like our pets?

Perhaps we’re pets ourselves?

There’s certainly no ice pick in my bosom.

So are those robots, and like ‘stuff,’ the fulfillment of Hegel’s Idea? The productive forces unleashed, expanding exponentially, over-running the globe, to free us all from the dread manual labor?

Yet, if we are, structurally – i.e., built into our built environments – made to feel stupid, this system, for as long as it lasts, will continue to render us thus.
That’s what it’s for.

It’s not the machines themselves, it’s how we’re forced to relate to them that hobbles us.

If you work in construction at NUMMI, the machines wait on you. Believe me, that’s as it should be. The machine is nothing but human invention made manifest. But the podrunks quite consciously chose to alienate us from our own human invention, from our earth, and from our fellows. These relationships that formerly defined us were taken away from us.

So, while the machine has become the metaphor for our reduction in scope, it was never meant to tame us, to be our master – quite the contrary. Most innovators in ‘science’ did their work as an act of solidarity, faith and love, i.e. giving without expecting anything in return. It was capital that alienated us from our inventions, named our alienated inventiveness ‘Science,’ and then used it to purchase our complicity. Perhaps this con is the taproot of all the others, a deep and invasive one that produces the weeds Division, Diminishment, Disempowerment and Demoralization, which invade our psyches, our peace, misdirecting our gratitude away from our ancestors – all those who gave their lives – to capital.

But our ace in the hole, the one thing the podrunks can never dangle in front of us like a carrot to a workhorse, is our wholeness.

Seeking wholeness, consciously or not, is built into the package called ‘human’ – and our wholeness – priceless beyond measure – only nature – or nature in us – can give.

Rest assured, the power of nature released in us dwarfs the grandest scheme of avarice run amok. “The narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.”

We can reclaim what’s ours – and have fun doing it – that’s the point. Not only are fun and ‘work’ not mutually exclusive, but fun is what realizes the potential of whatever we do, it’s the quickening of life, the sperm fertilizing the egg.

So, it’s not – “‘the Idea’ realizing itself.” In our ‘system,’ the point of ‘History,’ if it must have a point, is Fun realizing itself. Fun is what makes every fucking thing worth doing. That is what will seal the deal, one day – once we’ve congealed (again).

Continue to "Progress" - Part 4

Nascence to End Work

Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter III: Progress (Part 3)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work