Tag: Unemployed

Stephen King, in one of his books on the field of horror fiction, was asked about the political import of all the 50’s movies that featured scary monsters created from radioactive fallout.  King’s response was that there was no politics at all.  Spooky radioactive stuff was simply part of the public consciousness, a throw-away, and the question was simply whether the monster should be a sea creature or an insect or a giant lizard.

Today, if you look at popular movies for the past 40 years, there is a constant theme that if you know evil government secrets, the government will kill you.  If you expose a secret military operation, the military will kill you.  If you can reveal corporate wrong-doing, the corporations will kill you.  If you know of illegal police operations, the police will kill you.  Government officials, corporate officials, military officials, are all routinely portrayed as ruthless seekers of profit and power who will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.

Jaws.  A local government leaves people exposed to a giant ravenous shark rather than hurt the local tourist business.  This was a shock?  Did people react to Jaws with, “No, we can’t imagine them doing something like that”?  No.  Of course not.  The exciting part was whether the heroes could kill the shark before it ate them.

Now there’s this oil leak

The left leaps into action.  The oil companies are evil.  The government is corrupt.  Obama is a tool of BP.  So fucking what?

Despite the system trying to project an aura of unflinching omnipotence, I believe it is actually extraordinarily sensitive, even fragile.  Thus it took 10’s of 1,000’s of dead in Vietnam to bring down Lyndon Johnson, but Bush went psychotic over there being any pictures of coffins coming home from Iraq.

Likewise, they greatly fear the images of the homeless.  It’s fascinating how many Republicans have voted for extensions.

But the Democrats tried hard to bury the lack of a Tier 5 for unemployment benefits (benefits beyond 99 weeks).  Any one of “our” good liberals could have made news by addressing the issue.  Obama could have talked about the country’s commitment to the victims of the depression.  Instead, the headlines all bragged that Congress had extended benefits, they were going to take care of the long-term unemployed, yakked about benefits to the end of this year, yay Congress.  No details.  This was deliberate, to prevent us from building momentum to help the 99’ers (those about to lose their benefits after the 99 week max).

Based on the responses to my post last week “Organize the Unorganized?” it must have struck some nerves.  For better or worse.  I gave an extremely brief look at some of the history of organizing the unorganized, dynamics among craft workers, unskilled industrial workers, the unemployed and welfare recipients, successes and failures, problems of social leverage, etc.

Some announced, as though it were news, that organizing the unorganized was hard.  (Could that be why they’re unorganized?)

Others picked up on what I was saying and were eager to work in terms of class.

Then there were those who were offended at the words “organizing” and “poor” appearing in the same post.

… organizing “the poor” depends first and foremost upon becoming “the poor.”  Otherwise, it’s just one more case of salvationist liberals coming in as tourists, to tell the proles how to better live like liberals.

and

You can’t organize a group you aren’t already a member of. As a poor person, I am sick to death of meddling middling middles hand wringing about the poor only to blame us when shit hits the fan (think of all the moaning about undeserving people getting home loans). Unless you are one of us, then perhaps skipping the condescension and following the first rule of being an ally is best- shut up, listen, learn.

After posting last week Boots Outside the Box, which argued that the poor MUST be organized, I got a few comments to the affect that the poor COULDN’T be organized.  Too demoralized.  Too vulnerable.  No leverage.  It’s a worthy question, and one that has a long history.

Another commenter posed the question in terms of middle-class organizing VERSUS organizing the poor.  My response:  there is no versus.  The question is, what is the relationship between them?

Since the poor are largely unorganized, I think it appropriate to respond in terms of organizing the unorganized.  Which also has a long history.

Back when dinosaurs stalked the earth …

Karl Marx introduced two terms — the Reserve Army of Labour (or Industrial Reserve Army) and the Lumpenproletariat.  The reserve army was considered part of the working class, either suffering temporarily from unemployment, or part of the never-as-yet employed, which capital could employ as needed.  The lumpenproletariat was considered a criminal class of petty hustlers, smugglers and prostitutes, recruitable by the bourgeoisie to be used against the working class.

I’ve been unemployed since July 2008.  My tech job was outsourced to the Philippines.  The week before that, my wife had been forced out of her job in retaliation for having reported sexual harassment at one of Wall Street’s leading regulatory agencies.  I was intrigued when she showed me an article on AlterNet telling about a newly formed Union of the Unemployed formed by the IAM.  I joined online.

Then I set out trying to figure out what I had gotten myself into.  The union is organized into 6-person Cubes.  One could communicate to everyone within a Cube, but all other communication had to be done one-by-one from the membership links.  As for what the union was fighting for, the emphasis was on excoriating Jim Bunning for holding up unemployment extensions (which Democratic Party dallying made possible).  While there were references to IAM press releases supporting jobs creation, the actual agenda was to support the bill whose heart was giving tax breaks to small businesses so as to encourage them to create jobs (the lowest paying jobs).  There was no link for contacting the union.