Anyone old enough to have tried to get a job in corporate America knows that there are plenty of people who have power over you as an adult. It starts, more or less, when you have to submit a resume to something known as HR in order to be considered for a job. A job being the thing you have to have to survive.
Your first clue should be the fact that you submit yourself to anyone as a ‘human resource’. But it’s probably not your first clue. Because by then you’ve gotten so used to people having power over you that you never even consider what a completely strange system you are supposed to operate under.
Apparently you are not really worthy of living in this country unless you can ‘find’ a job that apparently these people at ‘Human Resources’ don’t really want you to be able to find. Or maybe the HR people desperately want you to be able to ‘find’ the position you are looking for. Because then they’d no longer have to ‘look’ for suitable candidates to assume a position as a ‘resource.’
But the HR people have a problem. The problem is that lots of other people are ‘looking’ for a job at the same time that HR is ‘looking’ for people to assume the position. Which turns out to be really annoying for everyone. It seems that people really don’t like ‘looking’ at each other in this way; they find it stressful, fatiguing, and alarmingly close to futile too much of the time.
What on earth made anyone think this was a good way to organize society?
Nobody had to deal with this crap in the early 1800s.
Back then, you were kind of born into a certain milieu and set of traditions and you followed them. You followed your father and brothers into the military. Or you went into the seminary. You might get a job in a bank, but you didn’t have to deal with HR to do it. You could study medicine and become a physician.
If your family had money and position, you could have been an amateur scientist. Or have a patron. You could be born into aristocracy or wealth. Study law. Tutor the wealthy or aristocratic or be an assistant of sorts. You could be employed by a government. Or a school.
You could explore the world. Be an author. Or farmer. Or, if you lived in America, a slave. You either did what your birth station in life determined you would do – or you went off to make your way in the world.
When you went off to make your way in the world, you went to ‘find’ your fortune or your calling, not a human resources manager. You could do a lot of things in the extremely dynamic 1800s, and a great many of them sucked big time.
You might have to submit to dire poverty. Or to politics and war. Or be victimized by petty bureaucrats out to eliminate the position you fell into based on your family connections. You could starve. Or die early. Or worse.
HR departments were invented in the early 1900s because the things that preceded them were worse. Serfdom. Indentured servitude. Slavery.
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution, a proud sponsor of capitalism, created employers and working conditions so horrific that modern corporate human resources departments were an improvement. Trade unions fought like tigers and sometimes died for basic safety measures, to escape company control, and against child labor. Human resources departments developed in part to create a better society than the ones that came before.
Probably time to develop something better than HR departments though. Because, HR or not, the underlying concept of labor is still the same as it has been during slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, industrialization, management theory, productivity measurement, and blah blah blah. That concept is control by the ruling class and submission by the laboring class.
That’s all they ask, these owners of enterprise that employ people as resources:
that you completely submit to their methods for generating profit for themselves.
That’s it. That’s the bargain. You get some set form of compensation for doing that and are allowed to survive.
Well, unless you’re in America, and you get some sort of disease. In that case, you may very well not survive, seeing as you are not doing anything to enrich anyone in the owner class so things like medical care may be off limits to you. Sucks for you!
So the real power in America lies not in the tyrannical government that people have been so afraid of. It lies with the tyrannical employers. The corporations big enough to have HR departments.
Since the 1980s at least, perhaps before, government has been more afraid of corporations than corporations have been afraid of government. An interesting mania for ‘deregulation’ has emboldened corporations all the more. To the point where wage theft (i.e., not paying people for the work they’ve done) is the number #1 the theft in America.
Corporations are criminals.
Kinda weird. How things evolve. How the bestest economic system ever created has itself created an entire vast network of criminals who hold the most immense power on the globe. Who siphon off more money from the planet that many nations do. Corporations owned by people who have decided that the bestest form of government ever would be government by criminal technocrat CEOs. They call that ‘libertarianism’ by the way.
What it means is ‘fuck you if you’re not a criminal technocrat CEO.’
The thing, or one of the things that was supposed to prevent what amounts to a vast criminal conspiracy from happening, was competition between employers. If an employer wanted to get you to submit to something you didn’t want to give in to – well you found a job with someone else.
Competition was supposed to be the cornerstone of capitalism
Competition, the invisible hand that made the whole damn system super wonderful for everyone.
Ha ha ha! Ho ho ho!
Turns out nobody who actually has to compete really likes competition. Corporations do everything possible to avoid it. Can’t blame them for the sentiment. Can blame the neoliberals for allowing it.
Cuz the so-called liberal democracies of the world decided, in their infinite cowardly craven wisdom, that absolutely nothing bad could happen if they allowed increasing monopolization by megacorps until there are only about 35 companies in the entire world that control almost every aspect of Western life. That absolutely nothing bad could happen if you let the richest corporate owners in the world gain more wealth in the last 5 years than the ENTIRE ECONOMY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Yeah, these guys are bigger than the USA.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when we bow the knee to corporate wealth.
The truth is, for the last 45 years or so, the single driving force in Republican politics has been:
To put every working American into abject terror of losing their job so that they will submit utterly to corporate interests with nary a peep.
It’s mostly worked.
Why it’s worked is slightly complicated. Democratic politicians are just as complicit as Republicans in establishing the reign of terror.
So now the question is, and it is a difficult question – will you continue to submit?
Because we’re at the point where it’s either stop submitting or accept tyrannical CEO kings. If you want a tyrannical CEO king to make you give in to everything they want, then you’re sitting pretty. All you have to do is – well, submit. If it’s submission you adore, you are in luck!
The problem with right-wingers, and it is a problem, is that they assume that everyone is like them. This happens to be the exact same problem left-wingers have but that’s a story for another post.
The problem for right-wingers is they think everyone else is driven by fear and wants desperately to submit ASAP, and so they start these wars thinking their opponents are gonna cave like the little bitches they themselves are.
As popular as craven cowardice has always been, it’s not a universal value. And many times these wars turn out to prove it. To wit: the American Civil War, the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the Korean war, World War II, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and so on.
Just because you think you are superior to someone, and just because you think you should reign supreme over someone, does not mean said potential subject to your ruthless whims agrees. Strange!
Some people just don’t submit.
Lots of people just don’t submit.
The United States of America came into existence because some people just don’t fucking submit.
The will to resist submission is just a fact. People who have it can resist an incredible amount. They are willing to die rather than give in.
And strangely, they prevail. Because they just don’t give in. They may get beaten; they may even break. But they get back up again. Because they DON’T GIVE IN.
In fact, the people who don’t submit have at their disposal the most powerful force in the universe: the human desire for goodness.
This force, perhaps improbably, is stronger than fear, than short-sighted self-interest, than blood ties, than evil, than greed, than hunger. The longing for goodness can be defeated; it cannot be conquered.
Go figure.
Good beats evil.
The ratio may only be 51% to 49%. But that little bit of an edge makes goodness the ultimate victor in any battle with evil.
NOT the immediate victor. The ultimate victor.
Do you want to be on the winning side?
Your choice. You can get pretty fed up.
Or you can submit.
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