I feel so dirty.

C. Petersen ottilie at u.washington.edu
Thu Dec 31 13:25:25 PST 1998



> >animals. But check out the latest Harpers for an absolutely riveting
> >account of her taking minimum-wage jobs in Key West as a way of finding out
> >how women might fare if they were pushed off welfare. It is not only makes
> >you think about the real oppression of capitalism, almost in the mode of
> >Engels' Conditions of the Working-Class in England, it is superbly written.
> >
> >Louis Proyect
>
>
> I agree with what you say about her Harper's piece. For those of you who
> haven't read it, at one point she takes a job as a waitress. This caused me
> to laugh out loud:
>
> "The worst [customers], for some reason, are the Visible Christians--like
> the ten-person table, all jolly and sanctified after Sunday-night sevice,
> who run me mercilessly and then leave me $1 on a $92 bill. Or the guy with
> the crucifixion T-shirt (SOMEONE TO LOOK UP TO) who complains that his baked
> potato is too hard and his iced tea too icy (I cheerfully fix both) and
> leaves not tip. As a general rule, people wearing crosses or WWJD? (What
> Would Jesus Do?) buttons look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do, as
> if they were confusing waitressing with Mary Magdalene's original
> profession."

Ha ha.

My favorite commentator on bad jobs is Pete Dishwasher in Dishwasher zine. He worked for 3 weeks at the Black Cat Cafe where I volunteered, but I only dropped by once while he was there so I never met him. His goal in life is to wash dishes in all 50 states. I've heard him on NPR twice now, and once he was invited on D Letterman, but he sent his friend in his place and they never knew the diffeence. But anyway, he has all these stories where he is working in some restaurant with an abusive boss and just when the restaurant is in some stressful situation, like where there are twice the normal number of people and the cook is sick, he will spontaneously quit and then move on to the next state. There are some people who are really clever and really intelligent in the 'having a clue' sense and in terms of having insight during conversation, but they are otherwise pretty unemployable. My boyfriend is like this. However, I really have to say that with almost every job he has quit, I would have quit sooner i.e. working for $6 in a nursing home where he had to run around at a breakneck pace and the residents were scared of the workers, or at Burger King where his coworkers all ganged up on him and would threw his property in the sink or in the grease, and would make him do the worst jobs. Ted Rall, the cartoonist, has a really funny description of how bad of an employee he was in Revenge of the Latchkey Kids. He is brilliant - he's really bitter about his father abandoning his family. Jim Goad (of answer me!) was kind of interesting & provoking in this subject area in The Redneck Manifesto, yet he is in jail awaiting trial right now for assaulting a girlfriend, and his strange wife is always on and off again with her charges of rape against him.

With regards to "Geopolitics of Leftism", I would agree that russian communism wasn't 'socialism' but state capitalism etc. and etc. but I think the most relevant point here isn't to just say that socialism hasn't been tried yet, but to ask why every single country that tried to move to a socialist system didn't get socialism but instead ended up with very similar totalitarian systems. My answer (I have no economics background, BTW) would be that it's obviously the systemic flaw of having central planning, and vanguardism. But how would it be possible to eliminate vanguardism in creating a 'real socialist' economy (assuming we aren't considering Sweden, Denmark etc. are a valid alternative). I know a lot of activists who are totally vanguardist in their approach and don't comprehend when you offer criticism of this. A lot of socialists come from a successful academic background and don't really have a vision of a future where they wouldn't be in a big leadership position, guiding the less well-read. You can see this when leftist types say that the masses are just being satiated and misled by television and their religion, and sports. What if that is what the average person really wants? Then again, what is the opposite of having a vanguard - would that mean that leadership by motivated individuals is bad? I don't really have an answer for that myself.

CP



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