Jacob Wren - Rich and Poor

I’m thinking back to the informal gathering, how I couldn’t manage to get on top of it, couldn’t find a way to fully dominate the room, something I believe I once managed to do effortlessly. So if I can no longer dominate maybe there’s some other way, instead of domination something more like co-operation or collaboration. An organization that people work for because they want to be there, and a slightly decreased margin of profit is in fact a small price to pay for the energy I will get in doing the right thing. You catch more flies with honey than you do with poison, and yet I know the opposite is also true: if you give people a few small benefits and concessions, they will keep demanding more and more, practically forever. Try to be a friend to the workers and they will treat you like a cash machine that dispenses free cash until your dying day. And yet there still must be some way to get away with murder, to have the best of both worlds, to have our employees see me as a hero while I remain in control, never letting them feel they have the upper hand. This is the magic trick I will need to master if I only want to lose a few pawns without ever sacrificing the king. What kind of king is loved by his subjects and is it too late for me to make a play for such populist love?

For weeks and weeks I think about my presentation, which for all intents and purposes went normally enough, but it keeps coming back into my thoughts like an ongoing curse: what have I begun and what have I done. And yet, at the same time, I’m still not sure it’s actually started. I’m still not sure I’ve done anything at all.

2.

Sitting in the library these past few weeks, reading about the history of labour, I have often been shocked by the ferocity of violence directed against the workers. I remember something I heard as a child; I feel almost certain it came from my parents: if at the very beginning you knew how hard it would be you’d simply never start. Tomorrow we start, and though I now know so much more then when I first arrived, I still have basically no idea how it will be. How long a fight we’re actually in for. All I know is that, however naively, it has already begun and there’s no turning back. I know I need to sleep but I’m too wired, lying awake in this tent: thinking, thinking, thinking.

I have never felt so energized, so alive, so frightened, so engaged and supported. But this is only the beginning — when we’re still gaining energy, when everything feels possible — and later, as the strike progresses, everything will only become more difficult. Tomorrow will be perhaps the most challenging day of my entire life and I now realize I will have to face it with relatively little sleep. All of the reading I have done in the library in some way tells the same story over and over again: that they will do practically anything to protect exorbitant profits, resort to any savagery or brutality, but with guile and perseverance it is possible to wear them down, to win concessions. I know I shouldn’t be asking myself these questions now, that I should be steeling myself for the upcoming battle, but I can’t help but wonder: are concessions really enough? Around the bonfire someone said we must turn all these fields into co-ops, and that might be another step in the right direction, but would even that be enough? There is so much injustice in the world, the more you know the more endless it seems. So much of this injustice is aimed at people who look more or less like me, who come from parts of the world far from the so-called centre, but why do they only take from us? Why must we take all the bullets? They want our labour, for as cheap as possible, and they want our resources, and it’s easier to take from those you can say are different, from those you assume are less, even if you’re no longer able to say so as blatantly as they once did. And then hatred always has the fire to take on a life of its own. Concessions aren’t nearly enough, but this is where I’ve landed and this is what I will fight for in the long days to come.

If we make a union in these fields, is there anything we can do to ensure it doesn’t become corrupt? Or that later it doesn’t only look after the people who work here, we just look after our own, and everyone else can fend for themselves? We need to fight for ourselves, here and now, but we also need changes so large and impossible they encompass the entire world. I wonder if things moved so fast here because we could sit in a circle and talk, look each other in the eyes, feel each other’s presence, that we had each other’s backs, and I have no idea how that could ever happen on a global scale. I’m wondering how much I’ve really changed since the piano wire in my jacket pocket felt like my only hope. Or how much more I might change in the future. Here in the fields, since I got here and this terrifying project began, I’ve had such an intense feeling of people coming together, that people here want to care for each other, that this wanting to care for each other is so much more important than any money or benefits we might eventually be able to wring from the organization. How can we keep wanting to care for each other, not turn on each other, as things continue to get more difficult.

That we have to care for each other, that must be the point. Right now we must fight, as hard and for long as it takes, but we can’t just keep fighting forever. Sooner or later we will have to stop fighting and care for each other. This is actually the real work. To be with people who we care for, and who care for us, instead of working for people who care nothing for our well-being. The more I think, the less likely it seems I will fall asleep any time soon. I’m full of doubts but know I cannot let these doubts stop me. There is so much in life we have absolutely no control of. My parents weren’t religious, or politics was their religion, and I’ve never considered believing in any church or any god, but I can see how at a moment like this, how useful it would be to believe in something, to have some otherworldly faith. So many times around the bonfire I heard the word dignity, that we want to live with dignity, and I wonder if this desire for dignity might be a kind of faith. A faith that there’s some basic value to being alive and that we all partake in this value. If you look around, people are being killed all the time, left to die, left to their own devices without resources to survive, for no good reason, and I don’t know how we can say that all these deaths, all these lives, were lived with dignity. I want to think that when we start fighting tomorrow we are also fighting for all of them, but worry we are only fighting for ourselves.

Sitting in the library I read about so many unions that began as bold, noble fights and over time declined into complacency, corruption or even worse. Imperialist unions that supported the destruction of left-wing unions in other countries. A story that repeats over and over again. Today I know we are not corrupt; we are fighting for our lives and all our reasons are good. But what can we possibly do about the future? Christ preached love and then the inquisition was a rolling orgy of hatred committed in his name. How do so many things devolve into their opposite over time? I keep telling myself that now is not the time to worry about such things. Now is the time to focus on the possibilities for our immediate struggle. And, at the same time, it is always the time to question oneself and one’s motives, if only to sharpen the blade, to make sure one’s blind spots don’t hide monsters that in the long run might upset the entire game.

I remember reading an interview with a concert pianist, perhaps one of the most successful musicians of his generation, who had much of his success when he was very young, just starting out. The interviewer asked him what it was like to be so successful so young, and his reply always stuck with me. He said there was so much happening, so much coming at him all at the same time, that he barely even experienced it happening, barely had a moment to take it in or enjoy. In the weeks or months or even years to come I feel my life will be the same, overwhelming. I will be overwhelmed by all the obstacles, tensions and decisions that must be made. But as I lie here in this tent unable to sleep, I tell myself I must pay attention, I must experience everything that is about to happen to me as fully as possible, I must experience it as some kind of joy. I can’t just let it all speed by without living it fully. I can’t let this life or struggle happen without me. But it is possible that it might, that it all will blur past and when it’s over I’ll look back and barely know what happened. Either way I will live with the results.