Stan here. I’ve been AWOL at Insurgent American and Feral Scholar. Just as I was about to get the 55-and-can’t-get-a-job jitters, I got hired, for a whopping $10 an hour, to work on a landscape crew in Durham, NC. It’s raining to day — and a good thing, too, because my body was creaking — so there has been no call to come in.
Swinging a mattock and carting dozens of loads of topsoil and mowing miles of grass are harder than they used to be, but just as mindless… so I have plenty of time to observe and think. I’ll just construct a list, in no particular order, of some of those observations and thoughts.
The boss is a 49-year-old white man, a hockey fan with six dogs at his half-million dollar home. The crew are five lads from Guanajuato state (that’s in Mexico). Their ages range from 18 to 35. So they are a pretty good demographic representation of the labor force now populating landscaping, construction, house-painting, grounds maintenance, et al. Male, Latino, between 18 and 35, and often hanging together with friends from down south. These guys are all from the same pueblo.
Between them, they have two pricey pickup trucks — owned by the bank until they are paid off, and made available because these are the Easy Credit Days, as financial institutions compete to squeeze every drop out of an unsuspecting public and secure access to our personal property in the event of a downturn.
They listen to the local Latin@ radio station (noventa-y-seis-punto-nueve); they drink beer in the evenings to steal a couple hours of euphoria. One of them has been away from home for four years. They miss their families. They work other jobs on the weekends when we aren’t fixing up rich people’s finca-sized yards.
Last week two of them were sick (either pollen allergies or colds), and this week I got sick (not allergic, so it must have been colds); and they do not miss work or call in sick.
They have a male (age-based) pecking order among them; and all defer to XXXX, the 35-year-old, also the only married member of the crew, who is also the father of three children, ranging from six to 12.
They speak very rapidly, using lots of slang, and I am struggling to recapture an element of ease in the language. They also employ plenty of Spanglish, which is doubly confusing, since I am listening for Spanish when they call a truck “el troke,” or lunch “lonche,” or they caution me of potential danger with the term “wachale” (as in, watch out). These modismos are part of a merger of cultures that has begun to form a new national identity; one that is neither American nor of the countries of origin, but one defined by where Latin American fit into the newly emerging structure of American society — as a proletarian racial-national caste.
They are different now than before they came. Carrying their own histories north, they have evolved through a new set of experiences that combines Guanajuato (or hundreds of other places from Mexico and Central America), making them different from those they left behind — more familiar with the cultural and economic hieroglyphic of El Norte. And whether they come from Guanajuato or Oaxaca or Peten (Guatemala) or Sonsonate (El Salvador) or Trujillo (Honduras)… those who have learned this hybrid existence, driven north by by land loss and US agricultural dumping and the hegemony of the US dollar, are regarded by the norteamericanos as the same, hence they share not only the common economic displacement and the common caste system within which they navigate here and the new familiarity with the machines that transform and tidy up wealthy islets (as well as with our relentless consumerism)… but that identity that is forged by how people are regarded by the dominant culture.
Last April, this new nationality bared its political teeth in response to the racist initiatives of Representative John Sensenbrenner (R-WI).
It is a new hybrid culture that can be described structurally as well.
Our work is often slave-like in appearance. Six of us whacking away in a row with mattocks and shovels. Invisible to the owners of houses and yards so big and so manicured that the owners couldn’t care for them themselves even if they were so inclined.
When I made a mistake two days ago, I said “my bad” to the boss, and he got the last word by saying, “My time.” That hit home. Time, in life, is a non-renewable resource. He pays me… us… and he owns us for that period of time. Labor theory of value is fine stuff; but here is the real relation: we are rent-a-slaves. XXXX told me so himself. They get this.
The American Civil War was fought between two forces to settle the question of whether American development would proceed with slaves or rent-a-slaves. We are not paid for our work. We don’t have a list that says: $X for digging dead oak leaves out of someone’s azaleas, $Y for cutting the grass in neat lines, $Z for installing a French drain. What every minute on the clock has in common with every other minute is that we are available to obey.
These folks are proletarian and a subject nation and an emerging new nationality… and they are what Andrew MacKillop called “the dream of every reptile-minded capitalist: throwaway labor.” Hard work that requires flexible hours (based on weather and contracts) is best done with labor that is unlikely to go to the authorities when corners are cut.
Many days, we come together with other members of this throwaway proletarian nationality, at the little tienda-restaurants now dotting every town and spread throughout every city. Here is where they grab a taste of home for the 30 minutes they are given for lunch.
If anyone every wants to reach out with a subversive message to the maximum number of this class, just map the tiendas, prepare something on a CD, mix it with popular Latino music (discs reproduce really cheaply), and post the Spanish-speaking distributors at the tiendas from 11 AM through 2 PM every day for a week. Have the CD validate the experiences of those folks with interviews and-or commentary, and someone would have a beginning for building networks (I still think of that film, A Day Without a Mexican).
On another (but related) topic, this job never fails to remind me of what we are doing to the biosphere, and how these net effects on ecosystems conceal the core-periphery eco-relation. Every day, I thank Mark Jones (RIP) for putting me onto Alf Hornborg. We go to the grocery store and buy melons grown as monocrops in Sonora (where growers are subject to fewer environmental and labor protections, ergo we ship our production wastes into the periphery as we cream off the value from the periphery into the core.); then the very people who lost their land, when monocrops swallowed up small producers, are now building, painting, maintaining, and decorating our real estate.
This job gives you a whole new perspective on “beauty.” Beautiful places, even those of the “progressive” petit bourgeoisie in an academic haven like Durham, take on a different aspect when these beautiful houses and properties represent the work that makes them beautiful.
How related is the beauty myth of physical “property” to the beauty myth decried by feminists? How had do we (have someone) work to ensure that what we control and consume is simplified, manicured, idealized-and-subjugated?
Money is an entitlement to the energies of others. When you have a lot of money, you get a lot of entitlements. ABC, eh? Except that groups who are nationally dis-identified with the core have to give more for the same entitlement. Unequal exchange… Hornborg again. Only its inside our political boundaries now.
This has political implications, doncha think? But we may not know what they are yet. As we hypothetically send our missionaries over to the mom-an-pop loncherias, all that’s really needed is to raise consciousness of what folks have in common, and why, and to build the relationships. The Blanquist tendencies of many will convince them that “we” can organize actual programs and agendas.
This runs contrary to nature. Nature self-organizes. It does not attempt to read tea leaves. Raise the consciousness and make the relations. The system will provide the agenda and the program soon enough. Another Sensenbrenner outrage is gestating somewhere. Almost all the freshmen Democrats in the US House of Representatives campaigned last year against “illegal immigration.” Most of the Republicans are already there.
Rambling on here, these guys need these jobs. There is no reason they would leave their families back in Guanajuato if not to make the wages. Unequal exchange between Mexican workers and US workers has created a condition wherein these new friends of mine can take advantage of that unequal exchange by moving north and bargaining for the post-NAFTA in-between wage.
It is the existence of peripheries, as one pole of a relation with the core, that acts as a safety valve within the core. Contrary to the hoary notion that flipping the class script in the metropoles will open the door to a new future, we know now that the genuine independence of the peripheries is likely to precipitate the downfall of core power. We have to hack at tentacles.
Those in the core, and the working class itself, is trapped inside the contradiction of capital. It’s an unequal relation, this connection between worker and owner, but it is also mutually dependent.
“Tell no lies,” cautioned Amilcar Cabral. “Mask no difficulties.”
(The peripheral nations are only one periphery. We have layers of racial-national peripheries here inside the US; and let’s not forget the most universal micro-social core-periphery relation of all: gender.)
Right now, we are seeing — with the post-NAFTA migrations — as profound a demographic shift in the US as Reconstruction or the New Deal. What do we know about this? What can we know about this? What is… to be done?
So there are a few thoughts from my new proletarian job (which I need, even though it makes me dread every morning… yippee, I get to do backbreaking work to pretty up places for rich people to live!!!). I’m way past too old for this; and thank goodness it’s raining today. But if these random ruminations can provoke a discussion or two, it may be worthwhile after all.
Posted by stan in Analysis