I like to imagine 1848. The revolutionary wave sweeping the continent.
It is lost in the popular imagination now, just a note in a history book, but
at the time it must have been rife with optimism, the possibility of a better
future ahead, capitalism and the bourgeoise states finally seeing their death
throes and a new world which would be built upon the ashes of the new was soon
to come. All the while, Marx is stuck in England, writing this text, which in
my memory of the events, hit the streets too late. It was a manifesto for a
time which had come but come too late to be the driving force. But the time for
the Manifesto is always here.
A hundred and fifty years later, I was working at Burger King. It
was one of those jobs that is constantly denigrated as being low skilled. But
it wasn’t low skilled. It took a lot of coordination and hard work to make
everything go smoothly. I worked in the back, making chicken sandwiches and
fries. You had to keep track to make sure you always had the raw materials ready.
You needed the frozen patties ready to go, and the right number of cooked
patties in your heat lamp area, and fries, always cooking or ready to be
cooked. The minute an order appeared on your screen, you jumped to attention.
You grabbed the bun and dropped replacements for whatever you were going to
take in the fryer. You toasted the bun and grabbed a pre-cooked patty and
assembled the sandwich. You wrapped this up and sent it up front so they could
put the sandwich in the bag or on the tray. You did this again and again, until
you caught a break and were asked to go check the dining room trash or to clean
up vomit in the kids play area. That was the break. Otherwise you were faced
with the relentless repetition of making sandwiches, with little variation. You
dropped the frozen patties into the grease that you kept at 400 degrees. That
grease splashed and your forearms were covered with burns. Grease was in the
air, and it covered you everywhere. In your pores, impossible to wash off. And
you did this for minimum wage, an amount so small that it was the lowest
statutory rate that you could be paid, and the rate had been set four years prior,
so that the purchasing power has dropped. A wage that would take another eight
years or so for the national politicians to increase again, and its slow erosions
began again.
If you walked to the front, around the counter, you could see the
menu board. The menu board had listed the sandwiches I made, and it was easy to
compare your price to that of a sandwich. There is no better way to see yourself
to the commodities you make than to make that comparison. One chicken sandwich,
three dollars. One hour of my time, five dollars and fifteen cents. Two of
those sandwiches and I could be paid for the whole hour. I could make a sandwich
in thirty seconds, so that meant the first minute they were paying me, the
other fifty-nine minutes they were paying themselves.
The company tried to avert such facile comparisons. In the back,
they had a pie chart of where every dollar went. It showed that labor was a
significant component of revenue. But even now, knowing how narrow the margins are
in food service, it still doesn’t take away the fact that my menu price was so
low. And not just that, as workers we were below commodities. We had to precook
most of the food, so that it would be ready to serve as soon as someone came
around in their car or up front. But we could only have it ready for so long on
hold before it was no longer any good to serve to customers. It was waste. If
we created too much waste, then we could get in trouble. But if we had orders that
needed certain ingredients and they were not ready for the customers, we also
could get in trouble. There was a strict inventory control over these trash
items. They were trash, but they were forbidden to eat. I saw a co-worker fired
for eating this waste. He was fired for eating trash. This is the system we
introduce the working world to so many people in the western world.
It was working this job when my then girlfriend came home from
college and talked about, he political science class. She had to read the Manifesto,
and she was not happy. She was majoring in accounting and was going to take the
business world by storm. (She is now a small business owner in Charlotte, so
her dreams came true). I read it in the context a young worker. The book I have
in front of me is that very same book she was so dismissive of, but it spoke to
me. Well, mostly the first chapter, then the ten-point plan in chapter two and
then the short chapter four – chapter three is somewhat dated. It has four
different colors of highlighting, since it was not just read once, but
revisited as a central text in who I see myself as. It makes it hard to pull back
and be objective of the Manifesto as a text. Class struggle against the
bourgeoise class seemed as relevant in 1848 as it did in 1998 and as it still
does today. But that might be a problem. Socialism came in one state and then in
some others, but the tide has gone out once. The criticism of capitalism is still
valid. The bourgeoise therefore still produces “its own gravediggers” (Marx
24), but what Marx and all his followers didn’t consider was both how solid the
ground was and how well it shifts, making that grave so hard to dig.
Personally, what I think we need to focus on is that last chapter.
It is a clarion call for revolution, but it is “Proletarier aller Länder,
vereinigt euch” (Marx 62). That is as workers we have a world to win, but we must
be united as workers in a world-wide movement. That is respect needed and given
to our comrades in Cameron instead of just privileging white voices from the western
world. This, it seems, is the hardest hurdled because it is so difficult to
pull back from your own personal relationship with capital and see that we all
struggle with the same forces, if you are making sandwiches or editing
journals.
Works Cited
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party.
Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969
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