Mr Bageant,
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. I've been reading your essays with a great deal of enthusiasm for the last few months and have been inspired by much of what you wrote. However I have also been concerned by a tone I have noticed in some of the letters and feel that I need to speak up to address it. People seem to be forgetting the basic solidarity of the working class.
American workers vs. Chinese workers, rural vs. urban, northern vs. southern, none of it matters for shit compared to the big divide worker vs boss. As long as the bosses can go somewhere for their cheap labor no matter if it is Winchester, Mexico, China, India, or anywhere there will be no human dignity for any of us.
I am not saying that employers are bad human beings (well most employers, Sam Walton was a bad human being as are all his children) but they have certain economic interests and those involve paying us as little as they can get away with. Let someone else deal with making sure people have enough money to be customers I just want the biggest piece of the pie I can get. Workers also have economic interest and those involve getting as much money for as little effort as possible. This doesn't make all workers good human beings. It makes us different classes with different interests. The bosses have learned to work together as a class. When will we?
In Solidarity
Gabe
--------
Yo Gabe,
You asked, "The bosses have learned to work together as a class. When will we?" Well, as long as we continue to be essentially raised like consumer cattle, happily to grazing in the pastures of Wal-Mart goods and never asking, "Who makes our clothes and under what conditions?", we are only assuring that our children will eventually find out what it is like to labor in the rapidly expanding global gulag.
Personally, I am becoming rather given to violent revolution at some point. But that is usually the result of the direst worker conditions. Right now the working class is completely stuffed to the point of obesity, plugged in at the brainstem to television, the corpocracy's direct feed of operating instructions to our society. And those instructions tell us that we are "individuals," completely autonomous consumer units who do not need our brothers and sisters, just a better brand of toothpaste and some Viagra.
White American workers are never going to rise up as such, or they would have already -- although I am rather optimistic about our Latino brothers. They seem to be growing some balls after decades of crawling around in our fields and lawns. But in our hearts, we both know that the prospects for a labor uprising are not any better here than in repressive mainland China. I suspect that in the end our working people will organize, but will do so around other issues than labor, most likely based upon consuming -- the right to free cable television, maybe? Now, at this point in history at least, our consciousness is so altered as to crave the very dreck and swill that poisons and atrophies our wills and bodies.
Meanwhile, the same sorts of gangsters as ever run the nation. Back in 1968, as a wise philosopher told me, the world is all of a piece, one mass, one planet, and the only reason we see it as a collection of nations is because various territorial political gangsters rule different territories and have institutioinalized their various criminal systems through laws, courts and constitutions. America, however, has traditionally been the best of all because its gangsters had sense enough to kick back some of the money to the people.
I fear that may no longer be true.
Solidarity,
Joe
