Saturday, September 09, 2006
Labor Day Resolution: Lose the Plastic!
My apologies to my loyal readers, I have been away from the Crossroads for two weeks while busily engaged in getting all my beginning-of-the-school-year balls in the air. Juggling does seem like an apt, if tired, metaphor for what I am doing, multi-tasking away at my two paid jobs and several more unpaid ones!
Instead of writing in this space last weekend, I was busy re-reading Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, always the book with which we launch the semester in the Simon's Rock Sophomore Seminar class "Voices Against the Chorus." Every time I teach this course, I am gratified to be reading Marx just in time for the U.S. Labor Day celebration; and every time Labor Day rolls around, I feel more glum and irritated by the superficial show of support for working people that this holiday entails.
In Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, she talks bitterly about New Year's Day, which was one of the very rare occasions when the enslaved people of the South were allowed to take the day off, drink a little booze, and celebrate with each other. It wasn't really a happy time, however, Jacobs says, because January 2 was the day when many slaves would be sent to distant plantations to work for the next year, separated from families and friends and thrown on the mercy of unknown overseers. How can one celebrate with such an imminent trial ahead?
I feel that way about the current Labor Day celebrations, and indeed about each of the seasonal secular long weekends: Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day (Christmas and Easter are somewhat different because they're religious holidays, though for many of us they feel like just one more three-day weekend). In each case we're being thrown a crumb of a holiday, which often just has the effect of making us work all the harder when we go back to the four-day work week that follows.
Now of course, as a teacher with summers and school vacations off, I am personally in a different situation, and I can't complain too much. But I do feel that we Americans are increasingly enslaved by our jobs, by our credit cards, by our mortgages and car loans and home equity loans. And in fact I'm always thinking these days about whether I could possibly manage to juggle a third paid job in addition to everything else I do, just in order to make ends meet.
It's really another form of debt bondage, isn't it? In many places in the developing world, debt bondage is a fact of life: in India it's common for people to borrow money to, say, build a house or marry off a daughter, in full awareness that they will become indentured workers as a result, possibly for the rest of their lives. It's also all too common for girls to be sold into prostitution, or boys into servitude, in order to pay off such debts.
Here in the US, things are more subtle. Children aren't sold to pay off debts here, at least as far as I know. But parents do routinely go deeply into debt in order to pay for their children's education, and to maintain the lifestyle they have been led to believe should be theirs. Sometimes the only way out of this debt bondage is bankruptcy, and indeed the bankruptcy laws have been tightened this year, as personal bankruptcies threatened to get out of hand.
Karl Marx described the capitalist system as "naked, shameless exploitation" of the poor by the rich, and he had the courage and vision to imagine that another way of life was possible. When students today encounter Marx, they tend at first to dismiss him as overly idealistic. It's human nature to be greedy, they say, it's our nature to exploit others aggressively for our own gain. So it has always been, and always will be.
But usually as we talk about it, this surety of theirs falters. Could it be that we have been indoctrinated to believe that might is right, that the rich deserve their wealth, that the poor are somehow deficient--that it's their own damn fault if they're poor? Could a socioeconomic model based on cooperation and compassion, rather than competition and greed, be possible?
Readers of Women's Crossroads know that I am a diehard believer, with Arundhati Roy, that "another world is possible. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Communism in practice turned out to be repressive, rather than liberatory as Marx envisioned it. But his theories are still sound, and his description of capitalist exploitation rings as true today as it did in 1848 when the Communist Manifesto was penned. If anything, globalization has made things even more grim than they were in those days. Certainly the need for an international workers' movement is just as urgent today as it was then.
A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times asked plaintively, "Where have all the protesters gone?" And it's true--the days of colorful and powerful protests, a la Seattle, Genoa, and Montreal, seem to have passed. But some real gains have been made, and the continued vibrancy of the World Social Forum attests to the on-going efforts to imagine another, better world.
Another world is possible. But we may have to tear up our credit cards and detach ourselves from American consumer culture in order to manifest it. Now that's something worthing Laboring for.
Instead of writing in this space last weekend, I was busy re-reading Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, always the book with which we launch the semester in the Simon's Rock Sophomore Seminar class "Voices Against the Chorus." Every time I teach this course, I am gratified to be reading Marx just in time for the U.S. Labor Day celebration; and every time Labor Day rolls around, I feel more glum and irritated by the superficial show of support for working people that this holiday entails.
In Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, she talks bitterly about New Year's Day, which was one of the very rare occasions when the enslaved people of the South were allowed to take the day off, drink a little booze, and celebrate with each other. It wasn't really a happy time, however, Jacobs says, because January 2 was the day when many slaves would be sent to distant plantations to work for the next year, separated from families and friends and thrown on the mercy of unknown overseers. How can one celebrate with such an imminent trial ahead?
I feel that way about the current Labor Day celebrations, and indeed about each of the seasonal secular long weekends: Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day (Christmas and Easter are somewhat different because they're religious holidays, though for many of us they feel like just one more three-day weekend). In each case we're being thrown a crumb of a holiday, which often just has the effect of making us work all the harder when we go back to the four-day work week that follows.
Now of course, as a teacher with summers and school vacations off, I am personally in a different situation, and I can't complain too much. But I do feel that we Americans are increasingly enslaved by our jobs, by our credit cards, by our mortgages and car loans and home equity loans. And in fact I'm always thinking these days about whether I could possibly manage to juggle a third paid job in addition to everything else I do, just in order to make ends meet.
It's really another form of debt bondage, isn't it? In many places in the developing world, debt bondage is a fact of life: in India it's common for people to borrow money to, say, build a house or marry off a daughter, in full awareness that they will become indentured workers as a result, possibly for the rest of their lives. It's also all too common for girls to be sold into prostitution, or boys into servitude, in order to pay off such debts.
Here in the US, things are more subtle. Children aren't sold to pay off debts here, at least as far as I know. But parents do routinely go deeply into debt in order to pay for their children's education, and to maintain the lifestyle they have been led to believe should be theirs. Sometimes the only way out of this debt bondage is bankruptcy, and indeed the bankruptcy laws have been tightened this year, as personal bankruptcies threatened to get out of hand.
Karl Marx described the capitalist system as "naked, shameless exploitation" of the poor by the rich, and he had the courage and vision to imagine that another way of life was possible. When students today encounter Marx, they tend at first to dismiss him as overly idealistic. It's human nature to be greedy, they say, it's our nature to exploit others aggressively for our own gain. So it has always been, and always will be.
But usually as we talk about it, this surety of theirs falters. Could it be that we have been indoctrinated to believe that might is right, that the rich deserve their wealth, that the poor are somehow deficient--that it's their own damn fault if they're poor? Could a socioeconomic model based on cooperation and compassion, rather than competition and greed, be possible?
Readers of Women's Crossroads know that I am a diehard believer, with Arundhati Roy, that "another world is possible. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Communism in practice turned out to be repressive, rather than liberatory as Marx envisioned it. But his theories are still sound, and his description of capitalist exploitation rings as true today as it did in 1848 when the Communist Manifesto was penned. If anything, globalization has made things even more grim than they were in those days. Certainly the need for an international workers' movement is just as urgent today as it was then.
A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times asked plaintively, "Where have all the protesters gone?" And it's true--the days of colorful and powerful protests, a la Seattle, Genoa, and Montreal, seem to have passed. But some real gains have been made, and the continued vibrancy of the World Social Forum attests to the on-going efforts to imagine another, better world.
Another world is possible. But we may have to tear up our credit cards and detach ourselves from American consumer culture in order to manifest it. Now that's something worthing Laboring for.
