NOTHING TO LOSE WORK
When I had little, everything I had was important. If I found a sweater I liked at the Goodwill, it felt like my birthday. In a way, having nothing meant everything in the world was mine. Even a sandwich was cause for celebration, and nothing distracted me from enjoying it. Every gift was a delight, and I was grateful for everything I had.
NOTHING TO LOSE
Just like holding a flower in the fall, so much so do we want to be every aspect of the flower that our grasp makes the first petal fall of. So much so do we want all of our partners to realize the full potential that is within us, that the second petal falls off. So much so do we wish our lives were as that of the Gods that eventually nothing is left of the flower, and we have to decide that ravished completely by self awareness, did we forget to bridge our intuitions with clarity and creativity, so that for now there is nothing left of us, until the seeds drop to the earth, and are fertilized that by the spring time we see ourselves in a different light, the new you who does not have to change to become somebody else, but you who you are as the flower is, the stillness of life, and perfection by being given this life to live proudly.
Inside workplaces, equally dramatic changes occur. As all successful employers know, the key to generating profits is to control, as absolutely as possible, every aspect of their business. And nothing is more critical than the command of the workers, because they are the main active agents in production. By control, we mean the ways in which workers interact with one another and with the tools and machines they utilize. These interactions comprise the labor process, and it is this that must be ruled. Historically, many and varied methods of controlling the labor process have been implemented. Let us look at some of the most important techniques, each of which reduced the influence that workers could exert over production.
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.
In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many of even the ordinary duties of private life.15
We stood there for forty minutes or so, a miniature lifetime, and the pattern never changed. Car, windshield. Car, windshield. Drudgery piled atop drudgery. Cigarette to cigarette. Decades rolling through the rafters, bones turning to dust, stubborn clocks gagging down flesh, another windshield, another cigarette, wars blinking on and off, thunderstorms muttering the alphabet, crows on power lines asleep or dead, that mechanical octopus squirming against nothing, nothing, nothingness.16
Making matters more complicated is the fact that capitalism is an extraordinarily dynamic system. Firms fail, and employees lose their jobs. New firms enter the fray. Old occupations die, and new ones are born. Both changes make working-class organizations fragile. For example, the trade of machinist required a knowledge of engineering drawings, a mastery of geometry, and delicate physical touch. The workers used their skills to build a strong union. However, after the Second World War, numerical control technology, developed by the Air Force at public expense, destroyed the craft. What the machinists knew is now embedded in computer programs, which in turn operate the machines that convert engineering drawings into machine parts. This has greatly reduced the power on the job of the machinists, who now no longer need a multi-year apprenticeship to perform their work effectively.19
Health. To employers, workers are nothing more than costs of production, to be controlled and minimized. This has profound implications for how employees will be treated. Marx puts the matter forcefully:
The hiding takes the form of an assault on the body and mind of the laborer, relentless and unending. Throughout the history of capitalism and in every country, most workers have been and are rendered at least partially incapacitated after a lifetime of toil. Suffice it to say that the health of the working class does nothing positive in terms of it changing the world.30
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and publication of this article: this work was supported by the Research and Development Division of the Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Service.
With a 7-0 victory over Ridley Area Monday, A-M advanced out of the losers bracket on a five-game winning streak. The boys will face undefeated Marple Township at Newtown-Edgmont Little League Wednesday at 6 in the finals. They need to beat Marple twice to win the District 19 title.
A SWAT team is dispatched with Horatio and Tripp to Radcliffe's house, but it's too late: the man is dead, killed by a shot to the groin. The CSIs find a gun by the dead actor and surmise that he got a shot off: Delko follows a blood trail out to the back but loses it by the water. Tripp interrupts Horatio to tell him that Susie is trying to reach him. Horatio leaves for the hospital, where Susie is sitting by Madison's bed. She's devastated because her bone marrow doesn't match her daughter's; Horatio decides to get his own marrow tested. 041b061a72