Property is Theft

I'm doing this on my own, voluntarily, in my ironically named "free time," but I can't really tell if I'm in charge of the means of production or not. I don't think an argument could be made that what I'm doing doesn't constitute labor in some way, it's more a question of whether I'm a sucker to decide to do it for free. Well, almost free. There are some very generous people in the world.

I feel pretty safe saying I'm not the capitalist in this scenario since none of this has involved the raising or expenditure of capital. There's nothing about it that I "own" except for the implied, immediate copyright to my work. But even that is being done under a weird pseudonym for some reason, so just about anyone could claim this was theirs and there wouldn't be much I could do about it. I guess I could challenge them to a public write-off to determine who sounds the most like the voice behind the 20-odd years of this misguided enterprise. Obviously whomever uses the least amount of words per sentence loses. I've spent all this time building a brand on obfuscatory noodling and meandering, I've got to make that count for something,

By quiet default, I can say I do have a direct relationship to a global megacorp in that Google owns the Blogger platform. I'd be all in claiming they were persecuting me in some way, or conspiring through the nature of our relationship to alienate me from the product of my labor, my compatriots and ultimately myself. But I have to remember that the programmatic reconsideration of the system as it was by Marx was about a fairly straightforward Victorian capitalism, a novel thing breaking down and repurposing the constituent splinters of an exploded aristocratic and agrarian ancien régime into a pressboard society that would one day culminate in its ultimate expression as a worldwide IKEA. Looks OK from a distance, but probably wouldn't hold up in a light rain or a sustained jackboot kicking.

The capitalism of today is of course a lot more nuanced, more practiced in the way it promises things like equity and a fair shot, undergirded by some concessions to a commonweal outside of pure economic gain like limited work weeks, child labor laws and healthcare. Like every generation of humans ever, our overlapping emergent ones all lack a memory of a Time Before, so we are born with an earnest human sense of This Is Just How It Is. So the growing threats to a status quo that at least considers your existence, over time, can operate more openly, more brazenly, in an ironic way, because there are few left to imagine the possibility that the institutions as they are might fail. We sort of thought we would learn in 2008 what GenX's grandparents figured out in 1929, but instead we protected ourselves from a repeat housing bubble by deciding to make housing entirely unattainable. But that was a direct result of government intervention in 2008 to save the institutions that might have failed even as they were failing, only reinforcing the appearance of permanence and a lulled, mollified complacency no amount of viewings of The Big Short could un-fuck.

Unions and worker action are kind of all the rage from a popular culture infotainment point of view, especially since famous people are involved in the SAG-AFTRA and recently resolved WGA strikes and the president is out there marching with striking UAW members. I'm happy about what seems to be a rousing from long dormancy the bound and unconscious, thoroughly defeated labor movement in the United States. The numbers of course do not bear a lot of this new feeling out as union membership overall is half of what it was 40 years ago and not graph-tending in the direction of stabilization. Reaganomics convinced way too many people that corporations will look out for you eventually, all we have to do is roll back all these monopoly protections and worker safety measures and limited work weeks and child labor laws...

I would love to show my solidarity and go on some kind of strike, but my job is not organized, alas. I was almost in a union back when the teaching assistants started to organize at the University of California, but I bailed out of graduate school altogether before I could become a card-carrying collectivist. To be clear, I didn't leave in protest of the unionization, I left in celebration (if that's the right word) of my crippling, then-untreated social anxiety. It's hard to shout "Solidarity!" when the idea of being heard in public makes you hyperventilate and reflexively swallow your tongue. I'm pretty sure one of the disqualifying traits for being a movement leader is nervous diarrhea. If Lech Walesa had it, it never made it into any of the documentaries.