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?
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.
