That craven caricature of freedom, the weekend, along with the minumum wage and their insidious, ubiquitous partner, the maximum 8-hour day, which Labor pretends to believe it ripped from the Vultures of Great Wealth’s rigor mortis-like grip and touts as a hard-won victory, are simply Pyrrhic palliatives of symptoms, not the cure of the underlying disease.
Such naivete. One would think that the Working Class had never heard of a loss leader, or Brer Rabbit’s plea, “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch”, when indeed that was where he wanted to be.
Corporate Vultures loosed their cadaverous grip on wages and hours strictly for their own benefit, so “labor units” would have the shopping time to service the corporate bottom line by returning their meager weekly wages, the only portion of the wealth Labor created that the Vultures had not already appropriated.
Capitalism’s out-of-control, metastasizing method of mass production needed the corresponding outlet of burgeoning mass consumption, which, aided and abetted by worker productivity and psy ops created by the advertising industry, could be used like small pox-laden blankets to pass infectious greed from the Vultures to the Working Classes, instilling in them the desire to emulate their exploitative predators, thereby sealing their fate.
Labor unrest was lessened by diverting the freedom to choose the direction of one’s life and replacing it with a myriad of meaningless choices which were actually a bribe - the dizzying array of mass produced goods corporations had already chosen for the workers to consume.
Not only would profits soar like vultures circling the carrion of the American Dream, but corporate supremacists could exercise a humiliating Droit de Seigneur at the end of every weekend. For Labor had won nothing but a royal reaming froma scheming cabal of Vultures who were succeeding in picking the corpse of the American Working Class clean.
As we go back on the rack, grudgingly trudging in each Monday, to the eternal treadmill and the Iron Maiden of wage slavery, we yet again submit to rape by the corporate supremacists made all the more onerous by the knowledge that they own us as they rip away the raw and partially regenerated maidenhead of freedom the weekend sadistically created.
“What the people want is very simple - they want an America as good as its promise." - Barbara Jordan
Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.