When you hear the phrase “reopen the economy”, what you’re really hearing is a group of monied interests and media dickheads wanting you to go back to work and to keep the creature comforts of their lives and the profits flowing. They want you in harm’s way, making coffee or waxing their luxury SUVs, they can’t be bothered. That’s work you’re supposed to do.
The economy is something designed for them to reap the benefits of, not to labor in. They only consider themselves essential because they are on top of the pile. You are essential only in the ways you serve them. There is no cost, no sacrifice that you can make that will be enough to satiate the machine.
Nothing but endless work and a not-to-costly death if you get sick. That’s the calculus here: can the system make a profit of your illness or death? If so, how much?
It’s very easy to tell someone else to shut the fuck up and go back to work when they themselves aren’t being put in harm’s way. The cure isn’t worse than the disease if there’s no cure and they’re not at risk of the disease. This is the mindset of the armchair general ordering drone strikes overseas, the ICE agent cosplay telling people to “go home where you came from”, and now the pretend CDC directors and wannabe hedge fund managers demanding we all be thrown into the economy’s furnace as fuel.
This isn’t “let them eat cake”, it’s “let them eat a bullet”; a cruel philosophy of Social Darwinism that has found a comfy home in capitalism’s most virulent defenders. Opening up the economy is not a harmless idea, nor is an ideologically agnostic idea.
The dehumanization and mechanization of your working life is a central pillar of this economic system. Coronavirus and the anxiety it brings make this truth all the more evident, pushing it right up to the surface into the harsh light of day. Bread lines miles long, people dying alone, forced to make impossible choices for pennies. Your money or your life, it’s a false binary created by the people who create all of our choices for us; from whether we live or die from disease or poverty.
To capital, you are expendable. You always have been. You are a drone. You are a cog in a larger machine that they hold the levers of. Considering 22 million people are out of work during a pandemic (as of the time this article’s publication), there is no systemic way that you can be valuable without being a good little worker bee. Your life simply isn’t worth enough on its own. If you’re not working, you’re worthless.
Since you flip hamburgers or pick Amazon shelves or fill out spreadsheets, you are not a person to them, you’re a name on a list, an employee ID number, a unit of untapped resource. When you’re not working, you might as well be an oil patch in the Canadian wilderness with no drilling rig on it.
“These unemployment benefits are better than their wages, so they’ll stay home rather than work” is seriously one of the most hateful, callous, inhuman things I’ve heard during this time. If you voluntarily quit, you can’t collect unemployment. It is the pure ideology of capitalism, a machine built to consume your labor and pay you as little as humanly possible.
The concept of unemployment payments are a nightmare to this system. People being paid not to work? What the fuck is this?! People who don’t produce expecting certain protections, making demands?! Those ingrates! Wait, people are getting money from the government even if they’re not unemployed?! Imagine the hellscape this must be for neoliberalism.
It’s not that we don’t want to work, we either can’t because we got laid off, or we can’t because it’s simply too dangerous. And America does next to nothing for you, you’re on your own. Americans already live on a razor’s edge of poverty, the boot firmly stepping on us from above, slicing us in two. That’s a sacrifice the system is willing to make because there’s always another warm body to fill the spot, and there’s 22 million of them now.
Capital has to operate this way. Those demanding you go back to work don’t care if you live or die, they care they can get snacks in colorful boxes. They care they can go to the water park or lift weights and fuck their yoga instructors again, getting back to the normal that was already terrible for millions.
Pelosi doing a TV interview showing her $24,000 fridge stocked with ice cream is a slap in the face to anyone who is wondering where their next meal is coming from. Nancy Pelosi and her husband are worth approximately $16 million, approximately 106,000 minimum wage workers. Does Nancy Pelosi and her husband perform the labor of 106,000 people? (That’s a rhetorical question.) No wonder this optics clusterfuck was such easy fodder for the Trump campaign.
The most infuriating aspect of this is that Trump is actually a million times more flagrant and dismissive of poverty and loves to bloviate about his own wealth. It’s his brand: wealth as personality. The reason this attack doesn’t land on Trump is that he has no shame and doesn’t give a shit how he looks, and his base doesn’t care either. Their sole motivations are power for them and no one else.
He doesn’t want to advertise what his plan is, which is to let everyone die unless not doing that makes him look good. Rather it’s to attack the elitist snobbery of the House Speaker, an attack that rings true because it is, in fact, true. It’s an effective anti-Pelosi ad because it’s an attack using materialist concerns, but done in absolute bad faith because the messenger is far worse. Liberals actually care about their image, conservatives like Trump and his horde care about humiliation and power.
Pointing out this hypocrisy is not going to matter because Trump’s base is fundamentally a cult unconcerned with actually doing anything other than brutal punishment with glee. Their lives are empty and alienated, and the cruelty gives them the dominance they so desperately want.
They’re ordering you to clock in, mouthpieces of capital working for free for their masters. Trump’s cult cannot be swayed, cannot be convinced their God Emperor is wrong or a hypocrite, but those workers who don’t vote and are now being sent back to meat grinder can be swayed to a more powerful message.
Predictably, unsurprisingly, the answer comes once again to the near-omnipotent power of labor, shown by the economic shutdown, that if we don’t work, nothing gets done. A new labor radicalization is happening right before our eyes, the likes of we haven’t seen since the turn of the century might be on the horizon. 22 million people have the best reason to start a union at their next job: their company didn’t protect them, didn’t care about them, and tossed them out into the cold. Time to change that.
The answer to “Shut the fuck up and go back to work” is “Nice economy, think we’ll take it.”
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.