Wage Slavery in the Mississippi's Bywater
Another heated and humid day of watching my precious life-force drain away in exchange for a greasy buck. The task at hand: rehabilitating the fragile facade of a friend's home in the residential region of poor blacks, gutter punks, and upwardly mobile gay couples from California - the up-and-coming, gentrific-0-rama Bywater barrio. As soon as my erstwhile companion in the manly arts of construction, Mr. Jason Neville, can pull himself once and for all from peaceful slumber to face another day of brutish labor we shall have our start. Working with a friend for a friend: is my labor thereby being alienated from me? I think not, not fully anyhow. Sure, my life-force is draining away and at the end of the day I am given that greasy buck in exchange. But at the same time I am not left with that same soul-sucked-out-of-my-mortal-coil feeling as when, in that past, I have worked for the anonymous business of scale (British Petroleum for instance - for whom I was once a mail-room delivery boy). A little twitter of personal satisfaction accompanies me home each and every day because I have invested my labor not only in the spectral universe of market interactions but also in the face-to-face fleshworld of friendship and human ties that feel meaningful and relevant to who I am and to the path my life has chosen. I had this same mitigation-of-capitalism feeling when I worked painting houses with the nonviolent Catholic-anarchist collective Jonah House up in Baltimore all these many years ago. Curious. Still, doing any sort of manual labor during the sweltering New Orleans summertime inherently involves much suffering and smiling, "pickin' and grinnin' I believe they used to call it, no matter how much one manages to mitigate the alienation of one's nasty and brutish labor. Cheery-oh!