``...Chuck, I think all the things we're experiencing are *concrete* enough, we feel 'the weight of oppression and the grip of authority', we just don't see these personal disasters as political or collective, we blame ourselves, and anyway the U.S. is better than anywhere else ... isn't it? ..'' Jenny Brown
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I realize we are not really arguing from different positions---so try to ignore the apparent contentiousness---I need a reason to vent.
But yes, this is the point or the key move of consciousness, from personal psychology to collective consciousness: that oppression while it is a social instrument and construction of the political economy, it is experienced as a personal trauma. However the standard bourgeois reform is to seek `counseling', or some other form of social service remedy that effectively transfers and then maintains responsibility for the effects of oppression on the victim, without ever moving on to attack the systemic causes. Thus the poor and marginalized are seen as parasites of social, educational, vocational and health services---massive budget problems. Thus they are the collective burden, rather than the predictable social product of a completely out of wack political economy and its re-enforcing socio-cultural system of merits and hierarchies.
I realize that psychological trauma is as concrete as it gets from a personal perspective, but the point is to also establish the concreteness of the laws, policies, procedures, and customs (the instruments that create and configure the political economy as it is) and that render such personal suffering and its attending pathologies as almost guaranteed outcomes.
And the fact is that by personalizing issues even if recognized as concrete, they are nevertheless propagandized and reified as moral, ethical, and social dilemmas, and are therefore intractable. Say violence, crime, teen pregnancies, drugs---no predictable pathologies of the political economy there---all moral dilemmas. So, the assholes in public office and their corporate slime behind big desks who prescribe neoliberal free market fundamentalism as the reigning paradigm get off squeaky clean.
I understand the dignity aspect, but again, that is a personalized or psychological view. It has to be understood that the Body as the primary productive tool is also the locus of oppression turned on itself. Bodies are the focal point of coercion and oppression. This was the intention to noting the pill and abortion. That is to say the escape routes, the concrete freedom from the instrumental and oppressive abuses of the political economies of reproduction.
But all Bodies are the social locus of oppression, simply because they are also the primary form of social being or social expression. So that the ultimate trap, the ultimate prison is always the Body, as the exploitive means of the political economy and its self re-enforcing social institutions. (This conceptualization of the Body by feminist theory was its core insight for me, because it focused and made explicit what was there in some laten form in other work.)
The working woman with too many kids, the work broken old black man, the white kid in a wheelchair can all nod their head when you start talking about the body as an instrument of oppression. They all feel the weight and interpret it as a loss of dignity and respect as human beings. But that psychological evaluation is also an oppressive mechanism, which obscures the political economic dimension, which is of course in these cases one big zero for `productivity'. They are non-productive, useless, a burden, yet another big budget item in the social services column.
This is what is so pernicious about neoliberalism as it conceives human society as one giant market system. The economy and market are supposed to service the needs of human society, not become the needs of human society.
So then Trabajo Con Dignidad has to be de-coded from its personal and spiritual dimension, its indefiniteness, back into its specific and concrete political and economic dimensions. Loss of dignity and respect can mean anything, but it has to be identified specifically within the social relations of work. The rules, the procedures, the power relations and job hierarchies, the objective conditions themselves.
I've notice that capital and management are particularly adept at negotiating these demands for recognition into terms that don't translate into actual cash or material improvements and benefits, but rather various feel good bullshit, like: `sensitivity training', `recognition of cultural diversity', `conduct codes', `motivational courses', `productivity awards', and such forth.
What are these sobs compared to the idea that your labor, that is your body, is often cheaper to hire and therefore more efficient and productive than a machine?
For example, (I've post this before) my last construction job was as a day laborer breaking up a concrete slab and loading the debris into a dump truck. It took me about ten hours and I was paid nine bucks an hour. I realized that 90 dollars was less than it would have cost to rent an air hammer and portable compressor for the day! And the only reason I could command the big bucks (joke) was because I was white and spoke English. The guy that paid me acted annoyed as he told me one of his regular guys (Hispanic, day laborers, hired off the street) could have done the job in eight hours for less. I ignored all that, because I was proud to have been able to make it through that kind of day at fifty-five. I already had another job and would not have to face him tomorrow.
Chuck Grimes