The Proletariat Christmas

The last two weeks have been pretty rough at the retail gig. The holidays have come and gone, save for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. It's been rough. That's a phrase I've been saying a lot at work. I'm just a little stressed. That's another likely quote. How do you fight back against this stress, this holiday frenzy, eating away at the core of modern American society? 

Well, the thing is, you just have to rise above like the Black Flag song. Inevitably every little thing in our lives affects us at least somewhat on somewhat of a scale. One of the best pieces of advice my manager at work gave to me was, "no matter what happens, just go with it." At first, this sounded to me like a plea of defeat. But then you put it to practice and see how useful it really is. 

There are two kinds of customers in retail work: assholes and friendly people. There is no in-between. You might think you're a tough guy and that nothing anybody says to you can ever affect you but in reality, every interaction we have affects us in some way, however small, or large.   

Think of all the people you've met in retail work [if you work in retail] that you've ever had contact with.  Most of it is overwhelmingly positive, at least for me. I'm pretty much something of a celebrity at my job, just for the sheer fact that I'm a unique personality [I talk a lot to people about books, music, guitar] that people never forget me and want to talk to me more the next time they come in. I think that it just shocks people that I'm a big black dude that shreds the guitar like Hendrix and reads Heidegger. They will never meet a black man quite like myself ever in their entire lives. In that sense, I'm something of a novelty. The other side of it is the depressive, melancholy that comes with the retail experience. 

A large chunk of that melancholia would be bad interactions with customers. Customers who are overwhelmingly rude, customers who want to take advantage [return things with no receipt, demand cheaper prices, yell if it doesn't go their way, etc], upper management that tries to tell you how to do your job even though you've been working there longer than them, and the rest is just low-level grunt work that gets old fast.

There's also a sort of late-night depressive side of retail. When you work 430pm-1am 5 days a week for seven years straight you start to find that you're thinking more about the darker side of life at the later hours of the shift. Ironically it's at these hours that I feel the most awake, the most alive, in a sense. When I come to realizations. 

But wait. Here's the good news. This is happening to other people too. Not just you. The modern American workers need to rise up in solidarity. The middle-class, upper-middle-class, and rich people with their nice cars, their mocha frappuccinos, their office jobs, and their gym memberships know nothing of the true struggle of the proletariat.  If it were up to them they would stay rich and you would stay poor, indefinitely. And if you don't recognize this truth, then you aren't one of us. 

This is why it is so important to have a worker's movement in America. The modern American worker is losing so much right now. The rich are so happy with their fancy video games, their pornography, binge-watching their favorite Netflix TV shows. They know nothing about what it's like to be a true proletariat. 

The next worker's revolution is coming sometime. There will be no video games, pornography, or Netflix in it. 

The revolution will not be televised. Say goodbye to the bio-mass.