You tote a lot more to work in a lunch pail than Ring Dings. You pack alimony and autism diagnoses and car notes and the rest of the workingman’s grind. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Also braces, a better school, and a down payment on that spring field trip. And you chew whatever has been dumped on your plate in silence. You don’t go into therapy. You go to work.

—

The Loading Dock Manifesto [via]

Loving this John Hyduk essay

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

—

Preamble to the IWW Constitution

Spending the morning getting kind of worked up reading the news

Here’s the thing. White supremacy crafted the problems of Detroit just as much as capitalism did. In fact, in many ways, White Supremacy and Capitalism can not be separated. They are the same thing. And so when you hear things like: Detroit should be left to die, or Detroit is dead, or Detroit is dying, or the dying/death of Detroit is so tragic–in many ways, what you are hearing is White Supremacy commenting on itself. Or: White Supremacy encouraging the viewer to look the other way in the face of its violence.

— Detroit housing

All the wealth that black and white workers had created was looted from the city by the capitalists and moved out to the suburbs or down to the southern United States. Along with that went the tax base of the city, and forty years later the city is falling apart due to an emaciated infrastructure. This story is shared by other cities where brown and black folks rose up to take their city back. Gary, Indiana and Newark, New Jersey are only two more examples. I’ve heard Detroit described by visitors as resembling a war zone — well that’s what it is; it’s the American Third World.
Growing up in Detroit you learn to appreciate the hidden beauty of a city gutted by white supremacy and capitalism. The resilience of the people there, despite all we’ve endured, is one testament to black civilization and oppressed peoples everywhere. I have friends from the east coast who say that Detroit and much of the Midwest has its own unique form of scathing charm that is normally attributed to the tough personality types of New York. To survive in a war zone you gotta be tough. The working classes of New York live in a city which some of the most brutal capitalists in the world call their home, and everyday they go head-to-head with these capitalists. In Detroit it’s a little different. We were left for dead, and despite that, and all the odds stacked against us, we remind the bosses, the crackers and the cops that we’re still here.

— The Landscape of Detroit [via&via]

Interestingly enough, it seems like a large part of the reason that makes it so difficult for a disruptive response to occur is, paradoxically, the history of revolt in Detroit. In Detroit, working class conflict has entirely reconfigured the urban landscape. The riots of the 1960s were a catalyst for white flight and the subsequent loss of business investment and decline in home equity. The factory struggles of the following decade were followed by years of deindustrialization and unemployment, as factories moved to areas that lacked dedicated and confrontational workplace movements. In short, Capital responded to the popular struggles of the past decades by transforming Detroit into a desolate landscape of empty streets and abandoned buildings. In this environment it is difficult to imagine many places for people to spontaneously congregate, because people are spread so far apart, separated by blocks and blocks of vacant lots and foreclosed homes.

— Detroit, Do You Mind Dying?

In the halcyon days of the final economic booms, everyone on your cul de sac could have died overnight from some mysterious plague, and while you might have been sad, you wouldn’t have been inconvenienced. Our economy, unlike any that came before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand miles). If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. We’ve evolved a neighborless lifestyle; on average an American eats half as many meals with family and friends as she did fifty years ago. On average, we have half as many close friends.

— Bill McKibben, EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010).  Excerpted on Alternet under the title, ” The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors.” [via]

Since businesses often rely on being able to exploit migrants as a permanent underclass produced by criminalization, what happens if there is no criminalization based on migration status (or very little, since there will still be some “illegal” people)? Would migrant workers still be cleaning the toilets in office buildings like so many insist the rich should be appreciative of? What I’m getting at here is, if reform legalized most or all of the migrants in the country, would the migrants’ wages and conditions improve since they are not subject to the lack of stability caused by criminalization? Or would precarity be created (or does it already manifest) in some other way? Why would businesses/capitalists allow for a more equal work force? Which leads us to ask if there will still be exploited workers, and the answer is yes, as we know that plenty of “legal” people are currently exploited. I would argue that business just wouldn’t allow something like mass legalization to occur in the first place- at least not without other benefits to the businesses themselves (as an example, over 2 million undocumented migrants were granted amnesty in 1986, but there were also stipulations that while employment of “illegal” migrants was outlawed, businesses didn’t have to verify the documents that they received and they could also participate in temporary worker programs. There was also an increase in the use of sub-contractors). But in the unlikely scenario, we must imagine that something else will be used to divide people so as to continue exploiting labor through low wages, long hours, the lack of safety protections, and that may take the shape of new ways to criminalize people, or encouraging further racial division, or something to that effect.

— The Best Immigration Law is No Law at All

How did it come about that a country with a growing underclass of unemployed workers has 12 million illegal immigrants?

—

John C commenting on The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever

If only capitalism was that simple, John C!

Our critique of capitalism is precisely that value production turns everything, whether meat or poetry, into commodity, and that it’s no use asking for more love poems and less hamburgers. As long as both products are profitable, factories will keep on churning them out. It could be a factory of anything. It’s the conveyor belt society that has to be understood and revolutionised, no matter if it’s manufacturing packed beef, wholemeal bread, or fridges.

— Letter on animal liberation, by Gilles Dauvé [via]