Leonid Bershidsky has written a thing for Bloomberg concerning his take on the gig economy, opening with these lines,
“Karl Marx defined the proletariat as laborers “unencumbered by any means of production” who were increasingly impoverished by the rise of machines. In that classic form, Marx’s favorite class doesn’t really exist in the rich world today, except in the so-called gig economy.”
Which made me realize that Marx was wrong, or at least is wrong by today’s definitions, as all laborers can and usually are unencumbered by ownership of whatever means of production, except where regards the main means itself, which is to say, themselves. The warehouse may be owned by Joe Q Millionaire, but his machinery is useless without the hands and minds of workers to bring it all into action. Over-reliance on whichever tools of whichever trade is a very industrialized way of seeing the world. As I’ve argued before, full automation will never come to pass, because the wealthiest crave the superiority, and because they have no desire whatsoever to float society. Why pay the unemployed masses to buy products built by robots, when the billionaires could simply cut out the middlemen and keep the money outright?
But Bershidsky goes on to make the silly claim that this gig economy before us only applies to those working underpaid in the tech sector, when in reality odd jobs are more common than anything part-time or full-time, and always have been the world over. Temporary is the norm. He only offers more innocuous corporate thinking that is industrialized without even realizing how culprit its wording truly is. He would be no less asinine for saying that only fast food grunts make minimum wage, his presumptions are that far removed from the mass of modern reality.
While pundits may perpetuate the ideology that only possessors of physical tools have means for production, rather than anyone with a pulse, I would suspect that the Powers That Be have always known better. Switzerland, the most neutral of self-professed neutral nation-states, has an embarrassing story now concerning its largest crematory developing special technology to extract whatever metals from the burned bodies, to then resell without any of the profits going to surviving family or friends of the deceased. It would appear that those funding this brave new world, rather than permitting their wealth to ever trickle back down to where it came from, would prefer instead to rob all the more, well and beyond the sacrilege. Voltaire did say that to the dead we owe only the truth, but then he was the first real political comedian, which in fairness is redundant as fuck.
Even the baldy believed to be the world’s richest man has just stated in no uncertain terms that his companies’ efforts towards low-cost space travel is his most important venture, as though the eleventh hour guilt is kicking in and the asshole is realizing the population may soon be in dire need of rescue from what he and his fellow captains of industry have done to them. Or perhaps he fears the public’s response to those lucratively ongoing crimes against humanity, and aims to get out while the getting’s good. Google’s own former PR chief Jessica Powell seems to have grown a conscience, but pulling a Buddhist monk and dousing herself in petrol would probably better get the point of direness across. Terrence Newton reports that the global rollout of 5G for cellular and Wi-Fi networks is using the same EMF frequencies which militaries of first world nations use for crowd control due to its harmful effects to eyes and flesh. At this rate, the masses won’t live long enough to buy enough products to make it worthwhile for the billionaires and trillionaires to suddenly, magically, grow either a heart or a spine.
In Kentucky, the term “gig” has an older connotation, one of shoving a sharp stick through a frog for easy meat. Generally you stun them first with a bright light or shotgun blast, which freezes them in their tracks long enough for the miniature, makeshift spear to do its job. Fast-forward to the civilized world, and laborers today must job-hunt with such desperation they should wish spears were as legal as guns. Poverty is already criminalized. Potential customers are so diminished by the game of life that they are as wanted as outlaws of olde, with anybody and everybody else simply existing in the way to that fabled bounty. The captains of industry who obsess over owning the world, if they had any inclination in taking the moral high road in their respective lives they would never have obtained their wealth and power. If the USA is the Capitalist capital of the world, and it most assuredly and blatantly is, then more of its citizens should wonder at the implications behind suicide being a felony, when so much regard is just oh so freely given for life in all other respects. *not*
Because we are not programmed to acknowledge our present lack of ownership of ourselves. Which is in fact ownership of the definitive means of production. Try to assert that natural right, and you will be branded an outlaw today. Refuse to payout the captains of industry for their kindly letting you live just long enough to make as much money for them as possible, and you will be strung up for all the world to see, a click-bait example in the form of a man or woman for others to follow and like on Facebook. Refuse to work, refuse to pay bills, refuse prescriptions, refuse all forms of insurance, refuse a bank account or credit cards, refuse taxes, refuse to give your business to businesses which already have more resources than you and all your loved ones combined will ever see in your lifetime, and you will bring back lynch mobs with designs on you, in keeping with the wishes of men in suits who could not care less if you live or die, provided you sell your soul in their specific direction. No thanks to that!