Cannibalism

According to the Economic Policy Institute, as of 2001, a “living wage,” or the minimum hourly wage to be able to sustain a family of one adult and two children, is $30,000 a year, or $14 an hour. 60% of Americans earn less than $14 an hour, or the living wage. The vast majority of those earn about half that, at $7 an hour for many entry-level positions. This means that the majority of Americans are struggling to pay rent, health insurance, car insurance, credit interest, groceries, etc. With the relatively recent welfare reform bill signed in 1996 by Clinton, thousands of people are suffering, namely single mothers living far beneath the “living wage”. The poverty line, which is at about half that of the “living wage,” is grossly outdated and is not a substantial measure of poverty. Americans feel relatively confident in the fact that the percent of Americans living under the poverty line hovers somewhere around 13% (a number that I find disgustingly high), but do not realize that many Americans live above the poverty line and yet still cannot afford rent. According to a 1997 report of the National Coalition of the Homeless, “nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full or part-time jobs” (1).

To me, what this all boils down to, is that capitalism works in a way in which many are left out. Capitalism is the problem. According to the principles of capitalism, businesses operate according to the law of supply and demand, and exist only to raise their bottom line. They do not care for their workers, as there is always a fresh supply of those in poverty willing to fill in when a corporation decides to discard a former employee. What does this create? People working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, to feed their children and make rent. What is the point of a life wasted as a wage slave? It seems to me that capitalism has forced us all to sell our lives away for $7 an hour with the pathetic hope of moving up the corporate ladder, as if that will somehow change something and suddenly fill our lives with meaning.

I believe that we can operate our society in a way in which everyone can enjoy life while contributing positively to society. I call this direct action. I call this anarchism.



(1). Direct quote from Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel And Dimed.

That’s Not Your Marble Bleeding...

This is a quote from Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed. In this book Ehrenreich works minimum wage jobs to see if she can survive on them. Here she is a maid:

“Self-restraint becomes more of a challenge when the owner of a million-dollar condo…who is (according to a framed photograph on the wall) an acquaintance of the real Barbara Bush takes me into the master bathroom to explain the difficulties she’s been having with the shower stall. Seems its marble walls have been ‘bleeding’ onto the brass fixtures, and can I scrub the grouting extra hard? That’s not your marble bleeding, I want to tell her, it’s the world-wide working class—the people who quarried the marble, wove your Persian rugs until they went blind, harvested the apples in your lovely fall-themed dining room centerpiece, smelted the steel for the nails, drove the trucks, put up this building, and now bend and squat and sweat to clean it.”

Although I am only about halfway through it, I really recommend this book as it is full of amazing insights such as this and is wonderfully written.