For all the theory laden passages, much of the rest of the text reads like a breathless social protest novel with brilliant and bitter humor. For these sections photographs of Lewis Hine and paintings by Rivera and Orozco fit very well. Maybe some newer photographic work from garmet districts in the US and textile districts from Asia. You should see what these newer giant cloth production machines look like. For the more theory side sections, then biology textbook illustrations of processes and relationships fit better to explain how these work. Even Harvey's rather crude drawings on the board, make things clearer for me. What they really reminded me of were metabolic pathway illustrations I tried to study. These really help to follow processes that are difficult to understand.
In many ways, I was an ideal reader, a fancy version of what Marx must have imagined as his more literate self-taught workers, with experience under a long series of capitalist pig bosses. In my student days, I really wasn't ready for it. I would have thought these were conditions that disappeared long ago. Then too, I managed to escape the soul crushing lash of working in small businesses. The larger owners of small retail shops were even worse in a way, since there was no pretense of service, just a cold indifference to the processes of extortion called private sector service delivery. Walk out the door and leave them weeping if need be---which it seems was often the case. What choice do they have? We've got health insurance contracts that pay XX.XX dollars per call, get it? You leave when we tell you, not went you think the job is finished. Since I was in a service truck with virtually nothing but some crude hand tools, no parts stock, but well endowed with GSP, corporate HQ could monitor my every move, how long I stayed at a service call, and how well I followed the pre-planned service route. I lasted two weeks and quit. Biggest asshole job I ever had. This was a Kaiser contract and Kaiser has a nice liberal reputation. Think about it.
Now I can think back over various jobs and relationships between bosses and co-workers, the often palpable fear of mentioning union or even small group resistance. I was even in a foolish and failed strike in a community organization that achieved nothing but the break-up of the organization as the exploitation of its underpaid work force was laid bare---and how much the higher paid directors and managers depended on the goodwill of the subordinated work force, and how that was manipulated into a form of submission---the preamble conditions for privatizing social services.
That experience was a small and distant example of what I think the less resistant public school teachers and staff are in for. The mode of goodwill and therefore submission will come from a concern for the children. The psychological weight of this political trickery is very difficult to imagine, if you haven't been suppressed with something like it yourself. Basically you are told that your interest as a worker who needs to maintain a certain standard of living for your own family is pitted against the public interest of providing services to some needy and vulnerable population. So your own economic necessities and humanistic instincts are used against you to cave in on thoroughly valid and much needed relief. Your demands are labelled self-serving and hostile to a greater social good.
This kind of propaganda campaign is highly effective. The reason that Joanna's dinner guest the other night who worked for NYC school district could feel righteous about blaming the unions for the budget problems was because he had followed this psychologically manipulative logic.