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Full Circle [1]
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Date: 2022-09-21
“Be a loyal, plastic robot for a world that doesn’t care.” Frank Zappa, “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” 1967
“Is there perhaps another way to earn an income that better aligns with our overall goals? Couldn’t we create a future of no longer using a career as the primary or sole basis of our identity and self-satisfaction? Shouldn’t this be a moment to consider how to work to live instead of live to work?” Erin Lowery, BLOOMBERG OPINION, in THE SACRAMENTO BEE, 11/2/21
Fears of inflation and recession are obscuring the real controversy about the economy: young workers, who will inherit the workplace along with everything else, have recently been “lying flat”—refusing to return to their appointed pre-pandemic jobs—and unionizing, in numbers not seen in decades. Some boomers, (the freewheeling, “do your thing”, Woodstock generation) are siding with the bosses because they feel these impetuous youngsters might cause them a bit of inconvenience. This boomer supports the “Great Resignation”—one more episode in humanity’s struggle to assert our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. People have surrendered too many of our human rights recently, and a revolution is at hand to get them back. Hopefully, the revolution will be peaceful, but once people become aware of their rights, they will demand them. At the same time those in control will never voluntarily yield. Where do we go from here?
I have written several blogs about this fast-brewing struggle, which involves us all—not just the young workers who want respect, and the bosses who want them back at work under the same previously assigned conditions. I have no personal stake in this battle. I’m old enough to get paid for doing nothing at all, which is good because I’ve gotten too slow to get paid for doing anything. I have long sided with laborers in our never ending struggle against the body-and-soul killing workplace. In the fifties and sixties, my generation’s childhood and early teens, we were promised better working conditions than before, and some of us had a tough time adjusting to the fact that the promisers (working class adults) and those who could make good on the promises (owners of the economy) were not the same folks. We came of age when workplace burnout went along with a senseless war based on lies, the realization that the planet was being poisoned, and a renewed awareness of inequality for millions of Americans. Average people were beginning to connect the dots between society’s problems and society’s prevalent, top-down, management structure. But the ruling oligarchs fended off the call for “power to the people.” Now, the people are again calling for power.
Inhumane working conditions, along with war, inequality, and the general debasement of our environment and our health, are symptoms of our culture’s deadly illness: devotion to the belief that increasing profits for a few individuals is mankind’s single worthwhile goal. These individuals, who only desire more, have neither the intention nor the ability to rebuild a desperately ravaged world in ways that would respond to humanity’s needs. And whether working, unemployed, lying flat, or retired, we all inhabit the same world, which serves only the elites. Young members of the working class, knowing they have nothing to lose, are leading the revolution—not the so-called “revolution” that seeks to overturn a fair election, but a meaningful one, to liberate the vast majority of mankind from wage slavery. As we learned in the sixties and seventies, windows of opportunity to bring about real change are narrow, so now is of uttermost importance. The owners of the society are mobilized to fight back, and they will, as always, fight dirty. Plutocrats control the media, money, and politics, and will use every trick to make the young workers who struggle for workplace dignity look ungrateful, lazy, and unpatriotic—as they successfully poisoned the public’s view of us rebellious boomers in the sixties and seventies, while they arrogantly locked the workplace down once more. Greed ruled.
The four-decades long bacchanal celebrating the transcendental (for some) glory of greed is over. The goal of this blowout in praise of “the magic of the marketplace” has always been to stop and reverse the New Deal, which threatened the plutocrats with moderate economic equality. By “moderate,” I mean adjusting the economy to where most Americans could live above the privation level. Plutocrats will never accept such conditions, because the “pluto” (wealth) is apparently no good without the “cracy” (rule); they need people below them desperate enough to grovel. Franklin Roosevelt was labeled a “traitor to his class” by other rich Americans, even though he saved the country (and his class with it) from communism or fascism of a uniquely American brand, which would dominate rich and poor alike. But since greed, like all addictions, has no logical base, America’s upper crust remains determined to end FDR’s experiment in real democracy. Over time, the elites relentlessly returned America to those halcyon days when robber barons reigned supreme. The elites exploited racism with myriad dog-whistles, especially against Barack Obama, culminating in State laws to reduce minority voting. They exploited religion with anti-abortion rhetoric, then, anti-abortion laws. They exploited patriotism with endless foreign wars, and ultimately a war on our Capitol. Cleverly, the elites convinced many commoners to support and join their orgy of greed.
The current mess the world is in shows us the hangover has arrived. Younger workers, ready to clean up the mess, have begun by saying “enough.” They are refusing to take part in their own economic demise—resisting a life of drudgery, as workers did behind Roosevelt in the thirties, as boomers did in the seventies. From the first Iraq War to the COVID-19 disaster, events show how tightly plutocrats now control our society. Workers, who historically have been contented with half a loaf, are now left with crumbs, and young workers are fighting back intelligently and effectively, by lying flat until they get better jobs, by unionizing. But if they want to keep what they have won, young people need to vote, and support their unions, because capitalistic overlords do not believe in a fair fight. We oldsters owe it to future generations to recognize the similarities between our time and theirs, to set examples by participating in the messy social process. We need to remember that the chance for better work, better lives, and an improved world will be short-lived.
We boomers were not raised in the hardship of the Depression or the desperate threat of WWII. School bomb drills aside, some of us remember that peace and mutual respect are within reach, though we never attained them. Some of us have learned that the celebration of greed has led to wage slavery for the majority, and that if we curb greed we can secure the blessings of liberty for posterity. At the least, we can put a halt to that greed-fueled debauch, in order to clear the way for young people to work in decent conditions. A world where people matter is possible, if we work for it. Youngsters are working for that world with or without our help, but they will have a better chance if we do help. Focusing on inflation is one more way for plutocrats to hide the pea. Essentially, we need to bequeath to new generations what we could glimpse but not quite reach: a people-friendly workplace.
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