Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation by Danny Katch

Author:Danny Katch [Katch, Danny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Ideologies, Humor, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Form, Current Affairs, Political Science, Essays
ISBN: 9781608466108
Google: C8aECgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2015-08-09T21:18:16+00:00

1. Yeah, I know that these days Ice Cube plays the police in movies instead of shouting “Fuck them!” with NWA. You’re only noticing now that my cultural references are embarrassingly outdated?

2. We’re excitable, if nothing else.

7.

Workers’ Power

In October 2013 workers in the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system went on strike, disrupting the daily commute for employees of San Francisco powerhouses like Google and Twitter. Tech company executives who like to think of themselves as rebellious “disruptors” of old economic models were furious that they had been disrupted by what they considered the most outdated relic of them all—a labor union.

“Get ’em back to work, pay them whatever they want, and then figure out how to automate their jobs so this doesn’t happen again,” fumed Richard White, the CEO of something called UserVoice, whose website boasts that it helps organizations “find a better way to listen to their users’ voices.”

Richard White certainly wasn’t in the mood to listen to the voices of BART workers that morning, because they were reminding him that even Silicon Valley can’t run without train operators and bus drivers. Like all capitalists, but perhaps even more so, tech bosses prefer to imagine that society has no classes, only millions of individuals freely buying and selling their goods and labor to one another. If a few of them have more money than they can spend while most of us have more needs than we can afford, the rest of us shouldn’t get jealous. Just create the next big app and join them!

For four days in October, the BART strike punctured this fantasy by reminding our Captains of Digital Industry that the working class is real. Even worse (from their point of view), this class isn’t just an unfortunate object of pity but a potential powerhouse in its own right whose strength comes from unity, solidarity, and other age-old concepts that Bay Area bosses must have thought had been buried a thousand TED talks ago.

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