Work doesn't block the doorway it pretends it is the destination.

Waged work remains today the centerpiece of late capitalist economic systems; it is, of course, the way most people acquire access to the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. It is not only the primary mechanism by which income is distributed, it is also the basic means by which status is allocated, and by which most people gain access to healthcare and retirement. After the family, waged work is often the most important, if not sole, source of sociality for millions. Raising children with attributes that will secure them forms of employment that can match if not surpass the class standing of their parents is the gold standard of parenting. In addition, "making people capable of working is," as Nona Glazer notes, "the central goal of schooling, a criterion of successful medical and psychiatric treatment, and an ostensible goal of most welfare policies and unemployment compensation programs" (1993, 33). Helping to make people "work read" and moving them into jobs are central objectives of social work (Macarov 1980, 12), a common rationale for the prison system, and an important inducement to preform military service. Indeed, enforcing work and the other side of defending property rights, is a key function of the state (Seidman 1991, 315), and a particular preoccupation of the post welfare, neoliberal state.

-- Kathi Weeks "The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries"

"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere..."

James Baldwin at writer's congress, 1962. Copyright Marc Riboud / Magnum Photos

A passage from "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption –which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negros accept and adopt white standards– is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from  Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals.

It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal –an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man's sense of his own value. Alas, this value can scarcely be corroborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man's public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this. Therefore, a vast amount of energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produce by white mans' profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man's equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love, is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace –not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy –on the contrary, indeed– and are involved only symbolically with color. These tensions are rooted in the very same depth as those from which love springs, or murder. The white man's unadmitted –and apparently, to him unspeakable– private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro.

The only way he can be released from the Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the nights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveler's checks, visits surreptitiously after dark. How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should? I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result nearly in his attainment of the present level of American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worth-while if I am now –in order to support the moral contradiction and the spiritual aridity of my life– expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power –and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standard, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in the fruitful communion wit the depth of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks –the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. Why, for example– especially knowing the family as I do– I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.

In short, we, the black and the white deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation –if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create on nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white.  -- James Baldwin 1963

Democratic Vistas

In 1871 Walt Whitman wrote an essay titled "Democratic Vistas". He seems to be aware that keeping women –in his time white women– from the vote was a great crime. He seems less conscious of the flaws woven into our country by chattel slavery. Those are flaws we've only started to mend and often against what seems like the will of the masses. Human rights should never be put to a vote. In spite of this all-to-common blindness I think Whitman's vision of democracy can offer us some hope. He recognizes that democracy as is popularly understood by the white Americas of his time is polluted with a belief that some humans should still be ruled, just in a democratic manner. Not so, says Whitman. The true aim of democracy is perfect individualism of all humans expressed by joining the masses, not ruling them, “Would you have in yourself the divine, vast, general law? Then merge yourself in it.” Here are a few highlights:


"We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken'd, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted."

“The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.[...] The political history of the past may be summ'd up as having grown out of what underlies the words, order, safety, caste, and especially out of the need of some prompt deciding authority, and of cohesion at all cost. Leaping time, we come to the period within the memory of people now living, when, as from some lair where they had slumber'd long, accumulating wrath, sprang up and are yet active...”

"Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs -- in religion, literature, colleges, and schools -- democracy in all public and private life, and in the army and navy."

"I think, after all, the sublimest part of political history, and its culmination, is currently issuing from the American people. I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election."

"I have everywhere found, primarily, thieves and scalliwags arranging the nominations to offices, and sometimes filling the offices themselves. I have found the north just as full of bad stuff as the south. Of the holders of public office in the Nation or the States or their municipalities, I have found that not one in a hundred has been chosen by any spontaneous selection of the outsiders, the people, but all have been nominated and put through by little or large caucuses of the politicians, and have got in by corrupt rings and electioneering, not capacity or desert. I have noticed how the millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics are thus the helpless supple-jacks of comparatively few politicians. And I have noticed more and more, the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the government, and openly and shamelessly wielding it for party purposes."


"Sad, serious, deep truths. Yet are there other, still deeper, amply confronting, dominating truths. Over those politicians and great and little rings, and over all their insolence and wiles, and over the powerfulest parties, looms a power, too sluggish may-be, but ever holding decisions and decrees in hand, ready, with stern process, to execute them as soon as plainly needed -- and at times, indeed, summarily crushing to atoms the mightiest parties, even in the hour of their pride."

And a few lines that I find are a quintessential example of "same story different era" (NOTE: I do not think all business people are corrupt):

"The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field."

You can read the whole thing here.