Retirement or Revolution
I have a bad habit of not thinking ahead. I work on what's right in front of me and I try not to get too distracted by the world crumbling around me. One step, one word at a time. It's a method of being productive while simultaneously a way to not go mad.
I work with a fellow communist who we will call R. She thinks I'm nuts for only working four days a week. She says she is working as much as possible before she is too old to work, and then she hopes to retire. I long ago gave up any ambitions to one day retire. Again, this might be a result of my bad habits, but on the other hand the things I'm passionate about, the “work” that I want to do isn't exactly super physical or labor intensive. Writing and streaming is basically deskwork. Playing the guitar and the piano is moving your fingers in certain positions in certain rhythms. I like to sing. There's really not a whole lot to it.
I don't like work and work don't like me, as the poetet says. All I like to do is write and play music and video games, and I can do that when I’m 900,000,000 years old. Whether or not I make any money off of it is another matter altogether. But that's what the job that actually pays the bills is all about. And I don’t ask a lot to live on.
We've been conditioned to have the opposite of solidarity, to look out for “#1,” even if it kills everyone else. Ironically, that's why this country is falling apart. That's why we let the billionaire pedophile rapists take over. That's why nobody cares when brown kids in some mound of dirt on the other side of the planet get blown up. We are conditioned to only care about ourselves, and we have no one to turn to when we inevitably break down.
It's time to accept something terrifying: that we're not all going to make it. Even if the revolution happened tomorrow, a non-zero amount of people are going to die. If the revolution never happens, a non-zero amount of people are going to die. Hell, a non-zero amount of people are dying already. Frederich Engels called this social murder. It's the reason healthcare CEOs get got in the streets and nobody seems to mind, that they wish more would get got. Because (and here's the dirty little secret most people are too scared to talk about) there is a class war, and only one side is fighting it. And don't fool yourself into thinking the law is on the side of the poor. Because the law forbids the rich and poor alike from sleeping under the bridge at night.
Often the question gets asked “what radicalized you?” At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I'm certain I was radicalized when someone told me that “life isn't fair.” Somewhere in the dark recesses of my childhood brain, the question was asked: Why? Why isn't life fair? It just isn’t? That’s not good enough. Isn’t fairness supposed to be a good thing? Maybe life should be fair. Doesn't it stick in your craw when justice gets denied? It sticks in mine.
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