Well, folks, it’s that time of year again. The birds are a-chirping, the flowers are a-blooming, and Trotskyites and Stalinists alike are falling head-over-heels in love with the working man like it’s the very first time.
That’s right dearest motherfuckers, it’s May Day! That blessed of holidays when even the bougiest of leftists can be caught waxing philosophic about the glories of a carefully organized proletariat and as usual, just because they’re a tad bit obnoxious doesn’t mean that my comrades are wrong.
The few privileges that American workers have left in this miserable dystopia we call a country were paid for with the blood of wild, wild unions who literally went to war with entire armies of heavily armed Pinkertons and federal Gestapo. I’m talking real-deal working-class arsonists who shot it up and got shot up in downright suicidal attempts to organize the poor into voluntary direct democracies capable of holding their own in what once vaguely resembled a free market in this nation.
Mainstream shitlib hagiographers will tell you that FDR delivered us from the Fritz Langian sweatshops of the Gilded Ages on a silver platter. Don’t fucking believe it. The eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek are the bruised fruit of wildcatting anarchists and communists with guns, and the New Deal declawed them by federalizing the whole goddamn operation and turning thriving workplace democracies into corporate boards with labyrinthine bureaucracies and CEOs pulling down six figures without ever having to break a sweat.
I have the full respect for America’s largely forgotten labor martyrs of a ferociously neurodivergent autodidact and I very strongly believe that words like ‘Haymarket’ and ‘Ludlow’ should be as synonymous with American history as genocide and apple pie. I just tend to feel a tad bit left out of all the proletarian festivities do to the fact that I am unemployed, never have been employed, and am in all likelihood largely unemployable.
A Freudian alphabet of syndromes and disorders from PTSD to DID left me high and dry in the poorly paid purgatory of federal disability by my thirtieth birthday and my history of switching personalities every time I have to alter my schedule leads me to believe that I’ll probably be here until the American Empire finally freezes over.
I have spent plenty of time beating myself up over these hard swallowed truths, partially because even what passes for the left in this country is still enslaved by the Protestant work ethic that weighs every individual’s sense of self-worth by the volume of the sweat on their brow, but also because I am a committed anarchist who doesn’t even believe in taxes, not even if those IRS pilfered dollars keep me off the streets.
However, the hindsight of recent rounds of trauma therapy have brought me to a few startling conclusions that feel downright revolutionary and have led me to put down the flail and consider the very real possibility of a May Day free from guilt and self-flagellation.
The biggest revelation is that I am not rendered unemployable by chronic fatigue and social anxiety alone. My inability to live a nine-to-five existence comes from the fact that I am literally triggered by wage slavery. To put it in the simplest terms available, work in the modern context feels way too much like the child abuse I endured at the hands of the Catholic Church and to put it even more bluntly than that, I quite simply can’t take orders from some adolescent despot in a stupid hat without feeling like I’m going to get raped all over again.
While this reaction may be extremely traumagenic, it also can’t be discounted as totally irrational either when you consider the level of sexual abuse that trans women like me experience on the job if we’re even “lucky” enough to get employed in the first place. The only thing sicker than how quickly a mild-mannered, middle-management drone delves into downright sadomasochistic behavior once afforded even the slightest amount of power is how willing we all are to put up with it for even the meagerest of paychecks.
My complex PTSD and dissociative identity disorder simply make me chemically incapable of putting up with being some superior wage slave’s plaything and they should probably be grateful that I’ve given up on trying, considering that Mona, my alter, defined by my long-repressed rage, is a corpse paint drenched lesbian separatist who would gladly feed anything with a hard-on its own teeth like a buffet of blood-flavored Chicklets.
This isn’t to say that I’m incapable of labor. That too has very recently been made bluntly apparent to me. I just can’t cope with it being organized by anyone other than me.
Since my found family’s homestead burned to the ground this February, I have found myself hustling as a Times Square Mack possessed. Bouncing through personalities like a one-girl Bowie tribute band and practically crashing my shitty Ford Taurus through Friend’s Meeting Houses to sell perma-guilty, white liberal, church ladies on saving our farm, one nickel at a time.
I nearly ended up swallowing my tongue in the process and even my own people have politely asked me to shut the fuck up about it, but I also raked in more money in six weeks than most adolescent despots in stupid hats make in six months. All while still managing to publish one of these crazy gonzo tirades each week. So, where the fuck do I punch that card at?
We as a species have allowed a cheaply manufactured master class of managerial Nazis to dictate the very definition of what we consider to be work for way too long, and tragically, even large segments of the radical left have fallen hook, line, and sinker for this grift. Any form of mass labor should be organized democratically to ensure the market remains free for everyone who participates in it, but I can’t help but to feel like we are all doing ourselves a great disservice by failing to even question the value of mass labor itself.
Mankind spent 99% of its existence in the so-called Stone Age. During this time, human beings existed in small tribal, nomadic, and largely matriarchal societies defined by the primitive grind of hunting and gathering. But historical studies have also shown us that these supposedly savage ancestors of ours spent less time working and more time relaxing largely due to the simple fact that they didn’t define their interpretation of wealth by the sheer volume of the things that they possessed but by the amount of time they spent doing the things they loved with the people that mattered.
I’m not necessarily telling the world to go back to that. I’m not Tyler fucking Durden or even John Zerzan here. I fully accept the fact that you can’t put the shit back in a donkey. But I also feel very strongly that human beings were not meant to spend eight hours a day or more in a fucking cubicle the size of a prison cell or putting together boxes of frivolous nonsense on an assembly line in some so-called fulfillment center.
Maybe certain kinds of labor shouldn’t even exist. Maybe we should start organizing consumers so that their existence becomes irrelevant to our own. Maybe victims of systemic child abuse should unionize and demand reparations from tax-exempt churches and overzealous teachers’ unions. Maybe we should all spend at least a few hours of every May Day discussing what the word labor even means to us, and more importantly, what it should mean.
Just a few thoughts from the hardest-working welfare queen in show business. Catch you in the soup lines, working class heroes. That’s where we’re all heading.
