Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....
[…]
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. (The Meaning of July The Fourth for the Negro, Rochester, New York, 1852)
Read the whole damn thing, why don’t you. And remember, s was true in his time, so it is in ours: you don’t have to be black man to be treated like a slave. His was the slavery of whips and chains. Ours is the slavery of economic pressures, interest rates, propaganda, eternal drudgery. The very form of slavery that the slaveholders of Douglas’s time decried. From their lofty perspective, toiling in a shoe factory for sixteen hours a day, performing the same task over and over and over, was beneath the dignity of any white man, save perhaps the Irish (who weren’t really white in any case, being largely Catholic and thus tools of Satan). At least, the slaveholders argued, their brand of forced labor uplifted an otherwise idle and obviously inferior race, giving them the twin gifts of Christianity and Civilization (which, to most Americans, then as now, is the same gift given twice).
One of the most famous articulations of this perspective, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters by George Fitzhugh (of Port Royal, Caroline, VA, as the title page adds—so readers will literally know where Mr. Fitzhugh is coming from) went so far as to claim that, “Christian morality is the natural morality in slave society, and slave society is the only natural society. Southern Slavery “has become a benign and protective institution, and our negroes are confessedly better off than any free laboring population in the world.” After all, “The whole moralé of free society is, ‘Every man, woman and child for himself and herself.’ Slavery in every form must be abolished. Wives must have distinct, separate, and therefore antagonistic and conflicting interests from their husbands, and children must as soon as possible be remitted to the rights of manhood. Is it not passing strange, wonderful, that such men as Channing and Wayland did not see that their world of universal liberty was a world of universal selfishness, discord, competition, rivalry, and war of the wits. "
All bullshit, of course, save the part about “universal selfishness” and “discord.”
I walk the all-but empty streets of my adopted city and in the distance I hear the mortar-crack of fireworks. I can’t help but be un-American on this, our most sacred of secular holidays. I can’t help but think, “What the fuck are you people celebrating?” The fact that, for the first summer in God-knows-how-many-millions of years, the Arctic is melting? The price of gas, set to reach $7.00 by year’s end? This and every other nation’s increasing wage disparity? America’s new national past-time of conspicuous consumption? Or the ubiquity of wage slavery?
It’s a term I’ve longed to reintroduce to the American idiom, as it so perfectly sums up our position in this mournful first decade of the twenty-first century, when the rich get richer and the poor eat themselves away to nothing, all with a smile on their face.
Most generally, you could define “wage slavery” as “a social condition, whereby a person is rendered totally dependent on the cash economy for their survival and the survival of their immediate dependents (parents, children, guppies, whathaveyou).” But, wait, you might say, Isn’t that all of us?
Precisely.
As with some much else, the concept of predates American by centuries. One thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two years before the Declaration of Independence the Roman lawyer/statesman/philosopher Cicero, in what may or may not have been a letter to his son, noticed that, “vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labor, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.” (De Officiis, 44 B.c.) And we can’t even think about a topic like this without bringing in the obligatory quote from Karl Marx:
“The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.” (The Principles of Communism)
Currently, I sell myself for $11.25 an hour. The CEO of Goldman-Sachs (the firm predicting that $7 gas, mentioned above) is pulling down $6 million a year. He won’t be worried about a two hundred dollar dentist bill breaking his household budget. His name is Henry M Paulson Jr, and I don’t know what his wife does for a living. My partner daily wastes her life riding the highways of our adopted city, prostrating herself before any employer with the merest hint of an offering. She’s falling all over herself for the chance to be exploited; to become just as burnt out, depressed, bored and unmoored as I’ve become.
For the past two years I’ve been a tick on the hide of my region’s largest utility companies. Portland General Electric, Comcast Cable, the Seattle Steam Corporation, the Spokane River Water District…these are the faceless, corporate entities that pay my rent, buy my shoes, and put food on my family (as Our Glorious Leader might say). They are, in effect, bribing me to not care, to keep my head down, do my job, and not worry about the fact that their actions have destroyed the salmon population, despoiled the local river systems, turned lakes into toxic soups, flattened mountains for their coal and gas, and poisoned thousands of miles of ground with their ever-expanding network of leaky, bargain-basement pipelines.
I should ignore the fact that, to the U.S. Forest Service, everything is an excuse to cut down trees. Weevil infestation? Grab your saws and hardhats, boys; we’ve got to kill those trees to save ‘em. Fire season? Can’t have fire without wood to burn, and why burn it when you can turn it into x numbers of board-feet, which equals y dollars, which equals a z increase in Weyerhaeuser’s stock price. That way the CEO’s can feel good about themselves when they award themselves another pay raise.
Should we celebrate the fact, on this July 4th, that CEO Robert J Stevens of Lockheed Martin makes over thirty-six million dollars a year? What about Mr. David J O'Reilly of Chevron, with his “mere” $34.61 million? Is that what you get when you sink a pipeline deal with Burma’s military rulers? Not bad, all things considered. Closer to home, there’s Brian L Roberts of my good friends at Comcast, pulling down $38.98 million.
Do you think you’ll catch any of these men scratching their heads in the grocery store dairy isle, wondering if they can afford a block of cheese? No. Extra sharp cheddar doesn’t even count as an “expense” to someone with a summer home in Big Sur, a penthouse in Manhattan, and the ability to actually pay for a $200 hamburger.
Yes, we can actually shit gold. What a dream this is, this American Dream. Would that we could all wake up one day and realize that things don’t have to be this way.
Noam Chomsky observes that
“Anarchists of this tradition [the libertarian, Anarcho-syndicalist one that Chomsky favors] have always held that democratic control of one's productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful…”
But who wants to hear something like this? On this of all days, how can I, a free, American male (who, thanks to my ten-hour days inside an office, can even pass for white) talk about “income inequality” and wage slavery? Today “my” country turns 232, and in spite of the perfect socio-economic storm I can feel, even now, gathering on the horizon American shows no signs of slowing down. No force on earth seems capable of opposing the onward march toward the Apocalypse. As a concerned citizen of country owned outright by rich assholes who, as George Carlin so rightly articulated, “don’t give a fuck about you,” what have I to celebrate today, save one more day of life on Earth?
I’m under no delusions here: no one will read this post. Any who do will probably accuse me of being a pinko-commie-faggot-Marxist who’s obviously rooting for Al-Kay-Duh. But as Eminem says, “I write songs for me. Fuck what you like.” Replace “songs” with “essays,” “blog posts,” or “masturbatory rants” and you’ll find yourself face-to-face with my exact frame of mind. In that spirit, I’ll let another contrarian writer from Missouri, Samuel Langhorn Clemens, play us out.
“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office- holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is a thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to. Its institutions are extraneous. They are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags, that is the loyalty of unreason.”
