Marxism International

July 4th falls on a Monday this year.   Bummer.   I like it better when it’s a Thursday.   Then you can see the fireworks Wednesday night, celebrate all day Thursday and Thursday night and then, yes, have three whole days to recoup.   

But, I’m kidding really.   I’m the kind of person who doesn’t care much for holidays.   I like working.   So much in fact that I would rather be working at something that I enjoy and which calls fully on my skills and acumen than I would doing almost anything else. 

In my fifty-five years of life I have never known a moment of genuine love or fulfillment or joy or whatever in any personal relationship I have ever had.  [This is due less to the failings of others than to patterns of relating that were set really early in my life; I have been extremely fortunate in the people that I have met and who have tried to care for me in so many ways.]   But there is something almost ethereal about witnessing the production of a machine or a building by the competent use of tools and human experience.   I get much the same feeling during spring plowing when I hear the engine of a well-restored John Deere farm tractor flawlessly “pick up” as the plow bottoms sink into the dark, moist earth..

I think a lot of people feel that way, after a fashion.   Unfortunately, most of us do work that is repetitive, boring, and socially useless, and which in time could be performed by a machine or a reasonably intelligent arboreal anthropoid ape.    And with no loss to our employer in quality or profitability..   We know that we are valued little by those to whom we hire out, our society, and most fearfully, ourselves.    Just as most of us are “homeless” (defining home as a place that makes us feel secure and which promotes fully a sense of growth and belonging), and unloved (most of all of by ourselves), the majority of working Americans I feel are really “unemployed” in that our work has become a “disutility”, performed grudgingly to gain a greater good, or more commonly, to avoid a greater evil.

The most famous phrase to emerge from our War for Independence was I guess something about the “Pursuit of Happiness” which ordinary people are taught to believe had something to do with Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms (speech, worship, as well as emancipation from the curses of want and fear).   But what the Founding Fathers meant I think was the right to make money which, in their society and ours means a kind of freedom.   It is the pursuit of profit untrammeled by a meddlesome government, a negative freedom of sorts.   So work means making money.   The few among us who make enough will in some larger definitive sense be Independent.    And “free”.

But there is in all of us I think something that wants more.    We secretly and poignantly know that we are not all that we can be, that something is missing as we grow older and more fearful of what lies ahead.   We know too I think that there is another kind of freedom, unrealizable perhaps in our current circumstance but which promises someday that we can as they say “enter our house justified”.  It is a freedom that perhaps most of us might never know but that we glimpse, fleetingly and with a sense of joyful expectation when we earn the approbation and respect and, yes, the love, of others.  

And I know all these years later it is far, far better to know that — and to know it in person — than to hear something in the sound of hammers and saws and tractors starting up in the Spring.

Have a fine 4th of July, whoever and wherever you are.