by Mike Ferraro
The
primary objective of mechanical labor is to make the laborer an
unfeeling, unthinking instrument of capital. This is done in order to
achieve capital's chief aim—namely, the endless pursuit and
accumulation of wealth for the ruling class. The definition of
mechanical labor here includes both white and blue-collar work, any
type of mind-numbing, repetitious labor, that is, where the outcome
of enforced docility and alienation is achieved.
The task of mechanical labor, then, is to
rend and dull the senses, to degrade the worker into a state of
permanent docility and vegetative dependency. This debasement has two
main components: physical exhaustion and cognitive debilitation. In
both, the desired effect is foremost a functional dehumanization. In
this way, the underclass of mechanical laborers is reduced and
alienated. For the vast majority in a control society, this defiled
existence is the summation of life. So much for maximizing human
potentials, that great fairytale, and purported goal, of liberalism.
Unfortunately, I know this torment firsthand, as does anyone who has had the misfortune to work for a living. In this dehumanized state produced by enforced mechanical labor, as Jack London observed in his “alcoholic memoir” John Barleycorn, the active or awakened mind suffers most acutely. In relating his time at a steam laundry, London deftly delineates “the misery of stagnancy and inaction” of the active mind in harness. From Chapter XXIV:
At
the laundry, I was suffering physical exhaustion again...But
there was a difference. When I went
coal-shoveling, my mind
had not yet awakened. Between that time
and the laundry my
mind had found the kingdom of the mind.
While shoveling coal,
my mind was somnolent. While toiling in
the laundry, my mind,
informed and eager to do and be, was
crucified. (1053)
Here
London succinctly articulates the effects of toil on the awakened
mind with lyrical precision and blunt force. As noted earlier in the
steam-laundry chapter, London accessed “the kingdom of the mind”
through his acquaintance with books, and this acquaintance triggered
his “informed and eager” mind “to do and be.” But this
awakening is short-lived, immediately thwarted by toil. As the
passage indicates, under the conditions of mechanical labor, physical
exhaustion is customary and expected. Far worse and unexpected,
however, is the new torment the awakened mind experiences and
endures. In fact, where the somnolent mind merely endures physical
exhaustion as a result of enforced toil, the awakened mind, in
addition to experiencing physical deprivation is, according to
London, “crucified.” In this way, a new state of persecution and
torment, previously unimagined and unknown, is introduced. Further,
the vacillation between these two states—the elation of awakening
and the torment of persecution—is embedded in the syntax where this
awakening occurs, specifically the involution of the last line of
text: “While toiling in the laundry, my mind, informed and eager to
do and be, was crucified.”
Notice, too, the subjective and stylistic
shift from “I” to “my mind” above. Here London writes of his
mind as a distinct entity, the anthropomorphized object and vehicle
for both his enlightenment and eventual torment. This anthropomorphic
shift is crucial, precisely locating the intensity of the joy of the
mind's awakening. In rhapsodizing his awakening in this way, London
magnifies the intensity of joy experienced. Conversely, the intensity
of the tragedy of his suffering is also located and amplified by this
technique.
London’s anthropomorphized and
crucified mind, then, is an apt metaphor for registering the
intensity of this crisis experienced by the awakened mind forced to
toil. Yet the metaphor implies an end. A crucifixion can’t last
forever after all, eventually the degraded object, mercifully,
expires. And that is where the metaphor falls short. In reality, the
alienated worker is afforded no such luxury. What she knows, instead,
is more, and increasingly bitter, toil.
A life of toil then lasts interminably
and obscenely long, much longer than the verb “crucify” implies
or allows. Thus, the extremity of emotional suffering conveyed by the
verb is accurate, as is the degradation produced by such toil, but
the articulation of the temporality of everyday suffering is off.
Again, this condition—the pervasive alienation felt—is closer to
prolonged vegetation—the byproduct of senses dulled and coarsened
through years of mind-numbing, repetitious servitude. This, then, is
the essence of enforced mechanical labor: it is a unique type of
perpetual degradation, an unending crucifixion onto itself.
And that, too, is exactly London’s
point. In describing the condition of the awakened mind in this
barbarous way the image of that most famous crucifixion is, of
course, evoked. In appropriating this imagery, London imbues the
plight of all awakened minds caught in mechanical labor with the
mythic status and weight of Christ’s end, and by extension this
allusion situates and enfolds the plight of such workers into this
shared, aggrandized suffering. And this is as it should be. For in
the old ancient moral sense, whose mind was more awake, and as
consequence, more persecuted than the Christ’s? And, as retribution
for this corrupted grace, has a harsher punishment been met, or a
higher price paid or exacted?
After
all, persecution of the strong by the weak is a timeless practice.
And vanity orders and misshapes the world. Everyone implicitly
understands this and is complicit in this knowledge. Yet, for reasons
known and unknown, we cling to our imprisonment, and imagine
ourselves safe, rather than buried, by our chains.
