Society, You Crazy Breed

I am beginning to see more clearly the industrial-military conspiracy and have begun to doubt all recommendations bore of this, our, age. To the uninitiated, I am a cynic, a pessimist, perhaps a paranoid. These are the self-labels warranted…warranted by the very entity I am excessively skeptical about. The labels identify an agent awry - namely, me - in a smoothly operating, efficient system unchecked, unscrutinized, kept powerful. We call this monstrous beast society. Essentialized, or absolutized, we view at as a necessary populace organizer - we are a collective, yet we are in dire opposition to it, not members that constitute it. It looms large, over and against us, molding the intricacies as well as the large movements of our lives, something we must be fit within, yet none of us feel apart of.

Is this not tyranny? The label of cynic or pessimist or paranoid I am bound to receive are the retorts of the oppressed, of a Nietzschean slavish morality. I too am oppressed, but I am refusing the ideology of a slave, and am instead advocating for Nietzsche’s overcoming: the will to self-flourishing. Any collective entity is going to be at odds with individual whims, I get this. There is no way around this one, it seems. But, here, where I reside, in a mountain state of the United States, to reiterate, I am beginning to feel uneasy with everything, feeling stuck in an eco-anxiety (due to Environmental Ethics’ lifting the veil of ignorance in the Fall of 2009) that has widened into a society-anxiety.

Let’s get down and dirty with what I am alluding to in vague, sweeping statements by investigating my concrete forms of realization. First, an easy instruction almost no one questions, something I never questioned until I questioned everything in the era of society-anxiety. Banking. Who doesn’t have a bank account? The only one I can find still alive is Daniel Suelo (see “Blogs I follow”). Seems every hint of conspiracy has some lone advocate, assuring me I am not paranoid, that there is truth to the unsettledness I feel in our deeply engrained, common, unquestioned practices. We are taught, early on with astonishing, exponentially-eye-popping graphs of equations, to save money. This, according to the diffuse panel of experts spread in and out popular culture, is a responsible thing to do. A practice for our interests, both generally and fiscally. But not under covert mattress corners. Not in piggy banks. No, we are told we must save money at a bank, whose service is to store money in safekeeping, really that alone.

A bank’s veneer as a benign and necessary social institution, existing as a basic service for the people, is simply a cover-up, or a pervasive misunderstanding, for what it is and why it does so. How could a megacorporate entity convince the populace to willingly and warmheartedly hand over the entirety of its money? Let’s back up for I am perpetuating more misperception- banks are not this ‘it’ I keep referring to. Banks are collections of people. Powerful people. In the terms of basic economics, money is capital, captured and frozen, a storeable product of labor. Within this system, more money can be accumulated with more labor, real-time production of money, or far less back-breakingly, through interest, money “working for you”. I know this firsthand via my budget strategy for this year-off income thing. I saved and now I withdraw from my stash. In yesteryear I commuted weekly 15 hours, waited up to a half hour in rain, snow, sleet for my vehicle of mass transit to escort me, endured mind-numbing data entry for hours at a time with others, well, frankly I despised. Now I extract the excess of this labor, with the help of its power to generate itself, in the interest percent I agreed upon when I locked it up at the bank. Sounds great, huh?

Capital earns more capital, through a process that continues to elude me (Blog readers, please help me out in edification through commentary, if you can). Here’s a shot: capital is reinvested in the economic system, used in productive avenues, loaned and won back at a higher price with ensuing interest rates (or, created out of thin air by banks at the request of a loan by an individual. Think not? Check out “Money as Debt“ on Youtube). The banks just have to sit back with a nation’s worth, generated through real labor, with their hands clasped, gluttonously smiling, as it uses this enormous power to enlarge itself. Banks are the most powerful institutions of the world. My father finds it difficult to conceive that all of his blue-collared allies, the people who actually produce real goods of real value are all indebted to bankers, who just abstractly “manage” and who couldn’t probably, say, milk a cow, or build a desk, or bake bread from scratch. How did this happen?

I am beginning to see that the recommendations of this, our, age exist to perpetuate the powerful behind the societal oughts. These recommendations benefit the few greatly. In this case of banking, individuals are seldom harmed , in fact we get rewarded - but this fact merely makes banking more insidious and less likely to be challenged. Just think of how hard credit card companies press in junk mail and advertisement. They’re nicely proposing to give me a 1% return as a “customer appreciation”, and yet they send vast onslaughts of applications. They want to drain me and as a token thank-you, they’ll give me a droplet of my own blood back. I merely point out that by participating in this practice, we fuel the very accelerating divide in power we first learned about in Introduction to Sociology. And by this point we face such a power divide that I feel helpless under the weight of such things such as our corrupt political system, that under my scrutiny IS the bank, is the megacorporate entity, they are fused, no distinction need be made. This is the problem of powerlessness, of society being imposed on selves. We live in a pseudo-democracy.

Newt Gingrich said “If you have government this big, it’s going to be really dumb, it’s going to have large sections of corruption, it’s going to waste a lot of money, and it’s going to be a threat to your freedom…as a citizen, you better be actively involved in running your own community, because that’s the only way to preserve freedom.” Of course, he has his own political agenda and I am unconcerned with party politics. But he paves an idea I have latched onto like a desperate anchor in a hopeless void, at least in principle: we’re going to have to stop feeding the monstrous beast if ever we are to be free. The power has always been in community, even if now it is leeched from us. Remember, we are the ones who milk, construct, and bake. Yes, we are tangled in a complexity that makes it difficult to see how much resides in us. We must pierce. Otherwise, accept the “free” plight of taking at least thirty years of your life and handing it over to employment (see “To Be Employed“ written in December 2009), the heft of one’s peak productive years, simply to own a place of dwelling. How can we claim we are free? Our hearth and bed in our caves have become shackles.

And, the looming part about all of this is that it isn’t just about banks, if that weren’t broad enough. I buy Kashi products regularly because they, too, seemed like some kind of benign social institution, providing wholesome foods for the public. Yah, I understood Kashi as corporation, but I always had envisioned some mom-and-pop, yes expanding, but retaining some original vision of supplying the supermarkets with an alternative to high fructose corn syrups and hydrogenated oils, not to mention TBHQ and ammonium phosphatides. What has been appealing is that I don’t have to laboriously read the Kashi nutritional content and ingredient labeling - I trust they’ve complied a granola bar or frozen pizza well. Then I learn that Kashi is Kelloggs, a moment when the grocery store gained a possibly sinister, definitely questionable, status. Not that Kelloggs is the heart of the matter. The veneer, again, the veneer. Kashi is not in the business of selling wholesome, nutritious food products. Kashi is in the business of appearing to the consumer in whatever way the consumer seems to desire in the trendy moment. All that matters is the veneer. It protects market share, its existence there solely for monetary gain, and will dupe, deceive, and mislead, all if these qualities generate the bottom line. As depicted in “The Corporation”, corporate entities, even Kashi - the last of the trustworthy, display the traits of a psychopath. And I don’t trust psychopaths.

&*^%, I’ve got to grow a garden and just do it all myself, I resign, take back the city tonight. But I can’t grow mp3 players and I infinitely enjoy my (beat up, old-school) one. Rush of society-anxiety. I will leave you with more to ponder, and as always, generously comment, this is my favorite part, the virtual gathering.

1. “Having served its original purpose in announcing independence, the text of the Declaration was initially ignored after the American Revolution

” (Wiki on the Declaration of Independence).

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSanIAROSc0
An aside: It was a joyous opening and immediate recognition of “The Patriot” score (John Williams) - how fitting!

To Be Employed

We are saturated with an ideal and felt necessity of being with employment. It’s the first topic of acquaintancing. Violations of this obligatory component of adult life are seen as an imposed condition the affected are trying to overcome - being unemployed rings pity. Too many and it’s a national crisis. My current, chosen situation of exalted unemployment is nearly inconceivable, it cannot even be registered by my interlocutors. Inevitably the conversation meanders to when I will return, come back to some kind of perceived ’original state’ of adulthood or ‘normal path’ of which I am now in deviation. Its discourse irritates me, continually being thrown back onto my being as an assumption: When will you have a job again? When will you begin your career? How do you pay the bills? Inquiries into bill paying really rile me up. My existence seen as bill payer is disgustingly insulting.

Let me tell you folks, this is seeing life through a manipulated lens. The capitalists no longer are external tyrants. They are internalized superegoic agents - they have won. This crazed craving for jobs is rationalized as survivalist, “we have to eat”, but it is a sickness. Jobs are gobbled up with an incredible overflow of applicants. We compete for them. Okay, I’ll break, cease now from this tirade, which must be understood, but for now, let us backpeddle for a closer examination, lest I fulfill the lurking suspicion that I begin to blame the victim of a systemic malaise.

What does it mean to be an employee? For most, it is the condition of a steady stream of income that supremely validates and drives them toward maintaining the role, and desperately seeking it if it is lost. Money is problematic - like food, it must be constantly sought and replenished, its stockpiles dwindling as one lives. Self-sufficiency seems no longer viable as we depend on goods and services we cannot ourselves offer, and we purchase them from groups (companies) that can. The Thoreauian question of the way in which we live in constant purchasing will be taken up elsewhere, as I digress. But the digression reveals the structural complexity of the problem of employment as desirable - we are deeply and heavily mired in a societal framework that resists the changing of one element. Because so much rests on that element.

Back to the central meaning of being an employee. Being employed is to be commissioned into a contract of compensation for labor. Most often today, at least in the first world, the employed denizens are compensated directly for offering temporal inhabitation in a work setting - they are to perform tasks in a pre-specified block of time that they willingly give up for a pre-specified amount of money. Thus, monetary compensation is more valuated than time, at least for the amount that is exchanged. There are variations of course. However, the basic structure remains. This is straightforward enough and I don’t expect the workforce to really argue with this description. What is more intriguing and liberating to make explicit is the real meaning of being an employee, beneath this reciprocal veneer of exchange between workers and companies - a Marxian analysis of the grinding-out of capitalist processes. Our time and what we can do in it is essentially purchased and appropriated for the particular goals of the organization to which we commit. These are never our goals - they are not things we choose to do autonomously. They are foreign, other, extrinsic. Thus, as employees, we advance the goals of others, and not just any others, but more powerful others than ourselves. For we are working for them. Looking at employment from a longview, one’s dedicated and long-term employment is a tragic life project - one has merely lived for another’s cause and purpose and has failed in the task of self-creation and individual exploration, this being left to dwindling "spare time". Now, if one identifies with this other’s cause as worthy, that one‘s individual efforts can be subsumed into larger endeavor one couldn‘t possibly effect by oneself, perhaps this kind of employment is redeemable. However, this needs to be well-scrutinized in particular instances for it is the perfect type of justification that capitalists prefer workers to have (so, caution!). All for-profits ultimate aim, we must all admit, is to generate profit. And so at the end of the day, being an employee means to further advance the more powerful others’ profit surplus and by doing so, employees are monetarily compensated. But if all employees contribute income to their employer and the employer’s compensation to the employee is income, we can clearly see who it is that is being entirely ripped off. Duped. Taken advantage of. It can be no other way: to be an employee is to give over labor and time for far less than it is worth. You receive a paycheck for your labor and time only because your labor and time pays powerful others a lot more. I finally understand my father’s admonition: “You can make money in a good job, no doubt, but you will never get rich working for another.” Why would anyone desire handing over the wealth inherent in their time and labor to others who exploit that wealth by channeling it away from the employee?

The generations of today are being born into a system of mass employment. It is no longer an unusual practice in a more basic setting of subsistence living, in which everyday life is managed independently by the household. Our households are open loops of goods and services and these loops extend far wider and along complex trajectories that surpass the availabilities of our enwombing communities. Back to our lack of self-sufficiency as related to our analysis of employment, we are essentially caught up in a position where we cannot provide for ourselves: the foods we digest, the clothes we don, the entertainment we stream into our dwellings are all loci of continual monetary feeding - they require us to generate payments, relentlessly and regularly. Lacking self-generating abilities, we outsource. Note that in other times and in the agrarian cultures of the world, there was or is no problem of continual income replenishment - their problems, however real and dire, were and are of a different source and structure. Participating in a postmodern world, we are beset by the need for income. The generations of today were born into this need yes, but also born into a network of income opportunities that are satiated most easily and readily by employment. This seemingly basic fact reveals our moment in history: that already, an elite minority controls and regulates, who hold the vast majority of the wealth, the very means to catapult further away from the rest in assets. When you accept employment, you continue to extend this divide. Your labor, as exploited, further engrains us all in a system of dependency. You make the already mightily powerful still mightier. Employment may be a perceived necessary, but employment is the means of the weak and powerless to live. So much for the “grand success” of securing a position, good-paying nonetheless.

It’s a difficult entrenchment, but this shouldn’t and needn’t render us hopeless and resigned. This is precisely the attitude capitalists depend on the working class to engender. That our smooth-flowing economy without recession or depression “depends on”. It requires its masses to be employed to run efficiently, making challenging employment anathema. It often works against us, at this historical moment, to take an independent, contrary stance by self-employing and self-supplying because the resources of individual production are far outstripped by those aggregated at the apex of employment. Power so removed from the people is dangerous.

There are many nuances and considerations in which I will further refine and expand, for this question of employment, in its written unfolding, has proved far more expansive and problematic than originally anticipated. This initiation is merely to set the stage for deviant thought, to provide an exposé illuminating the basic nature of employment that has been repressed by the impotent workforce. It is time to resurrect what it is that we are actually doing when we are employed. It is time to resurrect what it is that we are actually doing, period. Welcome to the scope of this blog. Readers, I encourage you to meditate on your concrete lived experience of being an employee, for surely most of you are employed, given our situation, given our birthright. Workers: share, and then we will unite.