The End of Work

 

 

I remember as a teenager when the “I have to go to work” schema first invaded my mind. There was something exciting about it, then, since "going to work" meant becoming an adult and becoming an adult meant that one had some control over one's life. I never took it very seriously. Indeed, it felt like I was “playing work”:  ironing my uniform and heading off at a brisk speed to avoid the stigma of being “late”. Going off again to the nice clean plastic place to perform some mindless task. While there, I’d always do a little extra just for a “thank you” from my coworkers or a riveting pat on the back from my grumpy boss. Of course, at the time I had such a good attitude because I harbored the naïve notion that the slog was “temporary”: since it was so overtly demeaning and unsatisfying that surely no serious person would think someone could stay at it for a lifetime.

I’m now forty-eight and I’m still just “going to work”. I still iron my uniform, though not quite so meticulously.  I run off at a less brisk pace, sometimes I'm late. When I am there, I don't really do anything extra. When the phone rings and the caller ID reads "work", I ignore it and don't bother calling back. The biggest difference between then and now is that I am no longer fooling myself. I know that I will be doing this forever. I know that I will not ever have agency in my life. I go to work with a lump of resentment in my throat. 

The resentment has been building steadily over time as I gradually recognized that it doesn't matter what job one is performing: the “forty hour” work week is a great big lie. First, assuming one job is enough for a person to stay afloat in this economy, one is almost always required to work more than that just in the regular day to day operations. Second, even if one is not physically working, one is usually preparing for work, recovering from work, commuting to work, making arrangements around work, complaining about work, receiving calls from work to work “extra”; All of this adds up. Work consumes a person’s life. Work makes a big assumption: that it is the priority in your life when it most definitely is not. It forces itself upon you. When a person is at work, she gives herself up to be entirely at somebody else’s mercy. A working person is trapped in someone else’s version of how things should be, and that version is usually inhumane, inefficient or both.

 

The “job creators” are often presented as so generously providing us helpless cogs with our livelihoods that we should be on our knees thanking them that we are not starving. Forget the fact that we spend most of our precious time making them rich, surrendering our own dreams in the process.   

Don’t get me wrong: there are ways out for the lucky few, and if a working person is doing something that he loves than none of this matters. However, I argue that these options are far from ubiquitous.  There is only so much of this to go around. Most of us, out of necessity to avoid starvation, find ourselves doing  something that is at best  inconsistent with our natural talents and at worst something we utterly dread. We usually have unreasonable expectations thrust upon us in the interest of productivity, making us sacrifice quality and whatever internal reward we may get from doing a “good job”. So, derived from this is a heaping helping of stress and anxiety and the health outcomes that follow.  

Yeah, thanks for the “retirement” fantasy. Never mind the fact that I can’t save any money; I’m not going to make it out alive. 

After over thirty years of being a working class person in America I have finally arrived at a rather radical conclusion of what is required to change the system. Surprisingly, it isn’t fighting for better wages, benefits and working conditions in the traditional sense. I’m not talking about strengthening unions. Unions were born in a different time and a different economic climate. Unions, my working class friends, are as obsolete as retirement. This was when automation was not the threat that it is today and workers had some leverage. Though I am grateful that the issue of economic inequality is solidly upfront in the 2016 election, what working class people need to do to foster real change in the condition of their labor is divorce themselves completely from the “job creators”. Enter the “worker-owner”. Enter the “cooperative”.  

A working person in my generation is so used to the autocratic hierarchy that it just seems natural: the “way it is”. The assumption that the “doers” have to be dependent on the “deciders” throughout the entire process is a given. The fact that we have to “look for a job”, show up when we are told, work within the system that has been set up whether it is sensible and humane or not, and not have any real say in the very environment in which we must spend such a large chunk of our time are all artifacts of dependency.

I’m talking “Atlas Shrugged” folks, except those that are shrugging are the “doers”.  In the words of Todd Snider: hang your own dry wall. The “deciders” have set up these hierarchies for their own benefit.  We need to stop playing by their rules. It is, in fact, a matter of survival. We are entering a new era of automation and the “deciders” won’t need us anymore. Workers must take control of their own lives. We must become worker-owners: the cooperative is the only model that is going to save us.

The Art Center

Dear Screams:

It has been a while since I have written engaged as I have been in the crisis that has gripped me over the last several months. I know, you snicker, "when have you not been in crisis?" and I cannot deny that this is so. It is difficult to say when it began, or why it even started, but I think it was early, perhaps in the second grade, when I began to feel this need to punish myself. I distinctly remember an episode on the playground when my classmates and I were playing "castle" or some such fantasy game and nearly everyone wanted to be royalty and I wanted to be the "slave". Needless to say my desire to play this role was granted without protest and I went on  being a very idle slave while everyone else argued over who would be Queen right up until the bell rang. Then, of course, the long quest for love that started when I was fifteen or so and ended when I was forty five and for most of that time was in the form of giving myself sexually to people who did not love me.

Only recently, as the crisis was overshadowed by the long quest for love driven by some amorphous fantasy of starting a hippie family, a hobby farm, lots of bare feet and dreadlocks and an earthy, carefree approach to living and parenting, have I recognized that the desire to punish myself was also true in my career life. That also started early with my self-loathing so powerful that anything that I was interested in or "cut out" for must itself be shameful. I thought: "I'm much more interested in art so I think I'll go into science. "I'm very bad at public speaking so I think I'll go into teaching".  "I cannot stand up for myself at all so I think I'll go teach adolescents". "I have no ability to think clearly and practically so I think I'll go into nursing."

Of course I did not immediately recognize this trend as "punishment". I had convinced myself, Screams, that my resolute desire to perform jobs entirely inconsistent with my nature was a noble quest to challenge myself and improve  Though it did, in fact, end up doing just that, in the mean time the self loathing, the punishment, the escape fantasy that would never occur, pursuing careers I wasn't cut out for, formed a very tight, very secure cage: a self imposed cage that I have been simultaneously forming and trying to escape from for as long as I can remember. It is the root of my ever present anxiety.

Now, I have finally emerged from this long period of thumb sucking punishment. Though I'm not sure when, maybe slowly over the last few years, I finally woke up to realize that only I was going to break myself out of the cage. This move was not, in fact, ever going to be facilitated by some super man whisking me away from my hum drum working class struggle to the freedom of the hobby farm. It is painful, of course, that it took me this long to realize this very basic truth but I've always been a late bloomer and my mind is so convoluted and chaotic that finding the clarity of the obvious is usually a major achievement for me.

Ironically, however, what I have also realized is that my self imposed prison created by performing jobs that as a shy, bumbling, confused, self conscious wreck of a human being, were completely inimical to my nature has not, in fact, been a complete waste of time but has actually provided me with the very skills necessary to make the great escape from the prison possible. In other words, if I hadn't built the prison in the first place, I never would have been able to escape from it. Besides gaining very practical talents such as maintaining good posture, public speaking and eye contact, as well as honing the more logical side of my mind, the journey through teaching and nursing and science has taught me that the world is not against me, it is there for the taking. More importantly, it has taught me that there is no reason at all to be afraid of people, since most are just as bumbling a confused as I am. Lastly, of course, as a hospice nurse the grim icing on the cake that is shoved down my thoughts on a daily basis is that death and disease are a-coming sooner than I think.

This very basic shift in my fundamental world view has opened a whole new treasure chest of possibilities.

So, why then, you ask, the crisis? The phrase "A whole new treasure chest of possibilities" sounds very positive. I'll tell you why: even though the long emergence from the dark cell of insecurity into the confident human being that stands before you was not a waste of time for the reasons I have mentioned, when I look around at the world that I've emerged into I've discovered that I am surrounded by yet another cage. Of course, I've known it was there all along, but finally shedding my personal prison has rendered the walls of the larger external prison more visible.

Have I always bitched as nauseum about the frustrations of being a cog in the capitalist machine? Of course I have. One need to only look at, well, all of my blog posts and poems to find some reference to this. But now that the walls of my personal cage have been busted through, I find myself not just annoyed by it, but genuinely angry and entirely incapable of playing the role anymore. It is far too unjust to subject myself to this humiliation. Of course, I don't think I am special somehow. I don't think anyone should have to be subjected to it which is why I'm a socialist, but in this post I'm focusing on my personal journey not the transformation of society which I advocate and embrace.

And so, Screams, I'm getting out, and I'm not doing it slowly. The long slog out of my personal prison has left me with very little patience to embark on another long slog out of the societal prison. My friend, who has abandoned me, The Blasphemer from the Hinterland, told me how much he loved the phrase I wrote once: "my skin has formed around the straps" in reference to how I felt about my relationship to the trap of capitalist America, but, fuck it, I'm going to allow myself to bleed. I can and will have agency in my life. That's what being alive about: molding the minutes one has on this planet into a form that is consistent with one's values: not merely existing within a system that is pathologically unjust, agreeing to exist only because if one doesn't agree than one faces starvation. What a pathetic way to be forced to live.

I will not be Tantalus: standing in one place forever struggling for food and water that the capitalists keep just slightly out of reach. What the capitalists don't want a working person to know is that she doesn't have to stand there. There are more humane places to go just over the hill.

 

 

Christmas 2015

It is warm as May
The squirrels and I fight for the empty road and
Tease the holiday
Convenient treats and yesterday's news
Expectations drained from the commons
and safely sequestered in living rooms
I escaped from their high chairs 
And the pity on their spoons
Free from their cheer
as that faded ribbon with polka dots
Tumbling along the edges of the asphalt lot
Little lost orphan and the longer sun
Waiting for the rituals
Of the grown ups to be done

The day noone died

It was a day that no one died

The roads scrubbed clean of carcasses

Crews of muscled men descended

laughing through their coffee breath

upon their splintered handles leant

engaged in smoky argument

Their children's minds on wicked play

Engines revved at rabbits

Instead they passed the time away

with less lethal teenage habits.

The nurses at the hospital

Bantered in the break room

They patched skinned knees and moved with ease as

technicians hosed their stretchers

Frantic counts along his beads

The funeral home attendant paced

He plucked his pristine suit of lint

And grumbled for the lack of rent.

The gasping grey in rattling rooms

Over them their loved ones wept

their cheeks flushed full blown rosy red

sat up and asked for lively tunes

Each snake basked quiet fat with food

since yesterday

All predators had found their prey

In hiccoughed sleep with kin they curled

beneath the trees with chalk marked bark

Breathed a sigh their leaves unfurled

The loggers had begun their strike

They rubbed the resin from their blades

And lunched on cabbage in sunny glades

Production on the killing floor

Had halted for demand was poor

Weapons had malfunctioned

Piled high in dusty shops

with pastel tickets round their stocks

A loner woke with pernicious plans

his gun slipped from his sweaty hand

feverish he called a friend

who brought him bullion and sent

him up the stairs straight back to bed

When darkness dared the museum clock

that tracked the doomed still stayed stopped

Insects gathered round the lights

Then soared in swarms to safer heights

Clear windowpanes bared each abode

Through tenements and corner pubs

Friends gathered raising frosty mugs

Enemies conspired

and to these ends retired

Knowing what to do

But somehow still unable to.

Grape

Vines crouch stealthy, wide leaves like watchful ears,

Tender tendrils sparring with spears

Gentle caress of the aggressive greens,

They rush the road with speed unseen

And offer their blue bounty

All over the county.

 

In her yard with a bunch in her hand

She’s popping jelly bellies,

Squeezing sweet amniotes from velvet coats

She whispers, admires each

Then mashes them with mercurial feet

 

They are a secret she will never share

Since she knows they only grow there.

 

 

From the Messiness Desk

The disheveled gene, one of my favorite discoveries from the decades of genetic studies performed on fruit flies, is found in individuals that keep messy test tubes and have disorganized thorax hairs. If this variant exists in the human genome, I most certainly possess it, since like my dipteran counterparts, I am a terrible housekeeper with a rumpled head of hair.  When I first read about the disheveled gene, I felt better to know that my sloppiness might just be out of my hands since I am often overtly hostile towards it: sometimes feeling so defeated and despicable that I malign myself with long strings of abusive language emanating from my very cruel superego.

I do try preventative measures, but no matter what interventions I attempt, they only work for so long. Despite double checking the lid of my coffee cup to make sure it is tight, I always end up with a stain on my shirt at the end of the day. No matter how many times I tell myself that the pants go in this pile and the shirts go in that one, by the end of a week they are mashed together, or strewn all over the room, I put them back, they do it again. I have to keep recopying my “to do” lists, just one of the common tools I use to reduce the stress I feel from being so disorganized, because they very rapidly become tattered, stained, illegible, and festooned in hideous doodles. The words “just put the keys in the same place every time” sound so simple, but for some reason impossible to implement. Interestingly, this persistent feeling that my world is going to chaos any moment and it is my job to be constantly vigilant in order to prevent this from happening is probably the primary source of my unending anxiety as reflected in the dreams I have: thousands of fast slick, wriggly creatures in my custody escaping from their cages, mountainous piles of things collapsing despite my efforts to keep them contained, impossible numbers of customers pouring into my section, a panorama of evil bearded men huffing kittens, and me trying to stop it all from happening. These are all symbols of chaos in my dreams, and the messiness is the symbol of chaos in my reality.

The desk I am writing on right now is empty. It has to be in order for me to think.

 In contrast, another messy person I know, my good friend The Blasphemer from the Hinterland, appears to very comfortable existing in his filth and, if he even has a desk, which I am not sure about, it was rendered unusable by being buried under stuff back sometime around the Nixon administration. The Blasphemer isn’t a hoarder, though my favorite item in his house is a cabinet full of a dozen cans of expired evaporated milk, he’s just a slob. He spilled a bag of dried macaroni on his kitchen floor and left it there for two months. He has bookshelves and dressers but I don’t think he knows what they are for, preferring to use other storage surfaces, usually the floor or his bed, since the space on his tables is already cluttered with electronics, tools and parts of musical instruments. It is unclear where his trash ends and his living space begins. Maybe he’ll clean it, maybe he won’t. If he does it’s just because he’s afraid it might offend one of his infrequent guests, like a mouse. His family did an “intervention” several years ago. He still resents it and the only evidence that it ever happened is a hanging pair of perfectly matched towels, aligned on his towel rack, never used and covered with dust. For some reason, I yanked them down one day and tossed them into the slurry of clothes spilling out of his hamper and flowing through the doorway, crashing like grungy waves into the tattered guitar cases stacked up in the hall.

We are two messy people, one constantly trying to extinguish this aspect of her nature, the other fully embracing it.

This is why when The Blasphemer sent me a recent University of Minnesota study linking messiness to creativity, something that both of us value, I was initially grateful that some kindly neat people gave us the gift of scientific data to defend ourselves with. However, after reading the article more closely, I became aware that helping those of us in possession of the disheveled gene did not appear to be the main motivation for this project. The main motivation, I realized, as always, was to assist rich capitalists.

It wasn’t enough to just say “this is what we found” and “this is how we did it”, the researchers felt the need to justify their research by explaining how the data might be utilized by the higher ups at the “company” to manipulate the minds of the working class stooges in their employ, since scientific research into human behavior only matters if it can be used to enhance productivity. Though this effort did give this creative person the million dollar idea of becoming a “messiness consultant”, it also made her very unsettled by what seems to be consistently at the heart of human behavioral research: reducing working humans to programmable machines in order to aid the capitalists in their efforts to generate personal wealth.

There are a few things wrong with this picture. First, we are not machines, we are individuals. We are not reproducible, interchangeable, expendable, unquestioning, and completely susceptible to conditioning; there are just too many variables at work in the human mind to impose generalizations. Give us a messy environment and we’ll suddenly start creating? Then, if our creativity gets too wild and we start thinking too much, possibly even coming the conclusion that forty hours a week working for “the company” is taking up way too much of our precious time and besides, it’s shortening our lives and we’re not getting paid enough to do it, all the smart bosses have to do is switch over the neatness model and suddenly we’ll start obeying the rules? What?

Not only are we not machines, we are not even fruit flies. It is probable that the fly with the disheveled gene is not even thinking about trying a relaxer on her thorax hairs, or organizing her pupae more efficiently. The genetic governors of her central ganglia are not mitigated by varied and complicated cognitive factors: assimilated cultural expectations, emotions tamed by the ego, psychological damage from parents that abandoned her, guilt from not being able to attend her sister’s graduation ceremony.

You see, an empty desk is not always the sign of an empty mind, sometimes it is the sign of a messy person who equates messiness with impending disaster and therefore tries to prevent it, or a person that needs a “blank slate” in order to get started. If my boss tried to influence my creativity by insisting that I had a messy desk I would spend the day panicking, distracted, paralyzed, and unable to think. The Blasphemer, on the other hand, would not start suddenly obeying the rules if his boss insisted on neatness. He’d just quit without telling anyone, get his next few meals out of a dumpster and compose a heavy metal song to redirect his anger in positive ways.

It seems to me that the purpose of neuroscience is not to reduce people to tools to be swung this way and that by the foremen of the capitalist hierarchy, but to learn about all the factors that come together and produce an aware person, to carefully tease away and examine each piece. Equally important is to explore the manifestations of these interacting pieces, the infinite combinations mitigated by experience and time that produce somebody totally unique. Fine, science does not have to consider the whole, maybe this is the job of the arts. But, please, we do not need to get approval from the capitalists every time we discover something cool about our infinitely complex brains, we do not have to justify our need to understand.

Let’s dump the bosses off our backs.

The Galt is Coming!

Dear Screams,

 

It is time for me to stop fucking around and work seriously on my novel. It took me a while to realize that the piece of shit that I had written before was not a novel at all, but a plan. When I had this epiphany it made it easier for me to accept that I had to start from scratch, since as a "plan" it was not wasted time. Now, I have this world in my head. I have my characters' backstories. Now all that is left to do is write a real book with fleshed-out characters and to allude to the structure of society without explaining every last detail. A book where I show and don't tell, you know, like you're supposed to do. So the "plan" was for me, not for public consumption.

 

The book is called "The Galt" and yes, it's about that libertarian society that all these libertarians fantasize about. I'd say it's the antithesis of Atlas Shrugged. It's 1984 set in a different world and, just for fun, it's set in 2084. The society is totally "free" in that there is very little government intrusion into people's lives (but not so free as it turns out). The government exists but only in three branches: The People's Judiciary (a court system based entirely on lawsuits for all crimes) The People's Bank (controls the fully electronic system of exchange) and The People's Security (most security is privatized, but this branch maintains a small border guard and runs the public prison system, there's a private one as well). There are some rules, but very few. The society follows the five pillars of the Galtian Way:

 

To always act in self interest

to always reach one's full potential to accumulate material wealth

To recognize that failure is the fault of the failed

To recognize that charity breeds parasitism and parasitism destroys society

To recognized that from liberty follows purity.

 

Parasitism and Charity are Crimes against the economy, while other crimes such as murder, rape, etc., are crimes against property. These are the only two types of crimes. The government, however, cannot originate lawsuits, so all crimes are brought to the attention of the Judiciary by private citizens. All regulation is "natural": The competition principle, reputation principle (or buyer beware), Insurance principle, lawsuit principle and contract principle make government regulation unnecessary. The Wage Exchange calculates wages based on supply and demand (run by the People's Bank).

 

Since this is the future there are all kinds of technology that makes a "free" society possible. For example, there are drones and surveillance everywhere, so it is very hard to get away with a crime. Also, homes are mostly self contained systems and do not have to be hooked up to municipal supplies, and roads are obsolete since cars are airborne. The VICE, which is a small chip inserted behind the occipital lobe, if a person wants it, serves lots of functions ranging from personal security to health monitoring. 

 

Temporarily, the society (which is located in Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and West Virginia) is necessarily closed off from the rest of the world until it gets its act together. Most citizens accept this inconvenience. However, as the book unfolds one discovers that the true purpose of the society is not to create a libertarian paradise, but to enrich the lives of a few very clever Oligarchs (Known as the Invisible Hand). Not if my band of intrepid but unlikely revolutionaries have anything to do with it!!

 

Anyway, I've said too much already! But it's time for me to write this stupid thing, from ONE person's point of view instead of nine. So, I'm not going to add to Screams From Suburbia for a while. I will miss my adoring fans.

 

Love, Lara