The Rise of the New American Worker
Cold working morning brutes into the doors, asking for a mocha in a ceramic cup. I go and sit to the side, watching the factory workers buzz about: the clanking of dishes, the beeping of machines, the grinding of beans. I think to myself, “I’m watching the new American worker.”
The rotation of my wheels in my ears as I buzz by the tall buildings across from Pullman Square. On a side street near the entrance to the Social Security office there is a group of people smoking. They all have badges around their necks. I watch as they bring the cigarettes to their lips, moist, and kiss the tips. And I think to myself that These people work for a call center. I think of their office like a hive, buzzing with the clicking of machines, voices chattering, excuses or pleas for sales, people moving about trying to meet their quota…and I think to myself, “This is the new American worker.”
Driving with my brother and our assistant across the coal fields, I gaze up at a mountain whose top had been removed and then replaced, and the young man standing on the side of the road, inquisitively/suspiciously watching us as my nose is pressed to the glass. Then a giant coal truck interrupts my thinking, and with its rumble I am reminded that each one of these groups, whether it is Starbucks, the call center, or a coal miner, have something in common. I think to myself, “The coal miner is the bridge between the American workers of the past and those that are toiling presently.” The working class is not dead, because nothing dies, not even societal systems. They just transform into something new. But in that transformation, they keep a piece of what I like to think of as “societal DNA.” Imagine that societal systems are like currents in the ocean. Just as one current ends, another begins. Sometimes we perceive a current as ending when really it does not. It simply merges in with another current.
So the worker is alive. They are making our coffee, digging our coal, cleaning our toilets, greasing the wheels of America’s system. A trend towards pretending the worker no longer exists in America has proliferated politics and the media, and I think in that mass thinking we have begun to believe the lie. Wake up, America! The worker is alive and well! They have been reborn…but they still breathe. In waking up, we must begin to understand that through writing the worker out of history, politicians and the systems they support have begun crafting a consciousness of people who do not know the struggles of the common man who do not know the history behind fair wages, the 8 hour work week and the struggles to change child labour laws. By writing out the worker’s struggle in America, mass culture is not encouraged to think about where their energy comes from, where their clothes come from, and who builds their houses.
As I began to think about this more deeply, something dawned on me. Karl Marx once said that at some point the worker’s plight would become so great, their communities so massive, that they would rise up and create revolution. This did not happen as he thought it would. Of course, you do have the rise of the Communists and countries that have accepted a form of socialized government, but all in all the worker has not risen to begin to craft a paradigm shift. Lenin thought he could create revolution for the worker. All he crafted was tyranny. So many people have raised the banner of the Marxist idea without seeing the full picture. The worker/individual must be engaged in the transformation of the self and in that the system will change.
If I begin to know my history and I begin to identify with it, it will change me. If I begin to know my spirit and love my brother within that spirit, that will change me. The workers of today get paid a good wage for the most part. They can feed their families better now then at the beginning of the industrial age. They can even buy nicer things than many people with a college education can here in America. However, with the accumulation of things, there is still a lack of substance. Marx said that once this worker community grew so large, then wages would become more and more miniscule. It would be harder to support the family. He was wrong about that. But here’s where I would like to offer a change. Marx was thinking about physical capital and poverty versus abundance. Instead, lets think of capital in the idea of social capital.
Social capital would be things like knowing my history and being able to act on what I know about my history. In that acknowledgment of self, the worker would begin to understand their self worth. they would see a physical, social, and spiritual connection to their overall community, and we would begin to see the worker in America rise up against systems that did not serve them, because they would have a deeper understanding of self. We would have more of a stake in the molding of America. For what it’s worth, what has been systematically denied to the working class is their social capital. Their history, their intelligence, their spirituality has all been corrupted, twisted into a kind of psychological self restraint that keeps them from reaching for the full height of self actualization.
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