For those who dig

One of the most effective means of social control under capitalism is the threat of losing your job.

Sometimes it is subtle — the understanding every worker has that the job is not really theirs; it belongs to the boss. So everything you do while at your workplace has to please, or at the very least not antagonize, the agents of the boss.

This is especially true for workers who have to interact with the public. Are you feeling cranky or just unhappy, for whatever reason? Stow it. You must be cheerful, upbeat, smiling in order to please the customer. In many jobs, you will actually be given a script of what to say and told exactly how chirpingly to say it.

Maybe you feel upset because you’re not getting paid enough, or you’re working unpaid overtime, or you had to get up at a ghastly hour to get your kids to a sitter before commuting to your job, or you’re getting a fever, or the supervisor treated you worse than dirt. You’ve got to swallow all that and put on a happy face. That, or they’ll can you. With union membership at a low level, the chances that you can file a grievance are very small.

But what happens when this form of social control is no longer effective with people who have either lost their jobs or never been able to get one?

This is the situation for tens of millions of people in the United States. They are out from under the thumb of a boss. But this freedom from wage slavery is the freedom to lose your home, the freedom to shiver without heat or lights, the freedom to starve.

The latest employment statistics put out by the Department of Labor show that more and more people are enjoying this “freedom.” You need to look at the figures twice to realize what they’re actually saying. Fewer jobs are being created than the number of people who would normally be entering the workforce. But because so many people have never had a job or have despaired of finding one, they are not counted, so the workforce is technically “shrinking.” Therefore, the official jobless figure remains at the same proportion — 8.2 percent.

It’s all a bureaucratic way of making the job picture look better than it really is.

But it does mean there are millions of people out there not thinking about pleasing the boss at all, but thinking instead about what a rotten system this is and looking around to figure out what to do about it.

A lot of them are young, angry and ready to struggle against the 1% who have so blithely cast them on the scrapheap. They have been in the streets demonstrating. Or they have just been in the streets of their communities walking around, looking for friends to hang out with.

Repression leads to greater anger

Since the ruling class can’t threaten them with losing jobs they don’t have, the word is out to tighten up on every form of repression before this angry generation can become more organized, more focused on fighting the system of capitalism.

The cops are told they must dismantle the Occupy encampments and bust a few heads as they arrest people in this young movement. The police do it because that’s what they’re paid to do: obey the orders of the 1%, which come down to them via a “justice” system that puts 2 million workers behind bars, half of them people of color, while letting the robber bankers, the corporate polluters and the war criminals free to jet around and work on their tans.

The cops are also told to maintain a heavy lid on the oppressed communities because they could be the first to explode. So they drive around like a bomb ready to go off, looking at every young person of color as a “suspicious character.” Wallets, cell phones, even cans of soda are taken for weapons and a hail of police bullets follows. Sometimes it’s not even cops, just wannabes who have adopted the police mentality.

Chicago. Albuquerque. Oakland. The Bronx. Sanford, Fla. The epidemic of police and wannabe killings of young people of color festers all over this country, from North to South, East to West. It is a grisly part of the fallout from the crisis of capitalism, in which the system has hit a wall of permanent unemployment and the ruling class is getting meaner and meaner, even as it becomes more hated.

But running counter to this grim picture is the spirit of optimism and combativeness of those who are using their “freedom” from working for the boss in order to organize and grow their political consciousness. They are pushing back the dark clouds of depression, economic and personal, and banding together to get at the root of the problem. This system is indeed creating the forces of its own destruction: the gravediggers of capitalism, as Karl Marx called the working class. And they’re saying: “We dig.”