NB: this piece was difficult to write for a couple of reasons, one being that it is really hard to put feelings and emotional experiences into words that make sense. If something is vague or hard to understand, do let me know and I’ll try to improve it!
**CW: Descriptions of interpersonal abuse**
The first real job I ever held was as a cook, working for a retirement home in Asheville NC. The ten-person kitchen crew served three square meals a day to about 70 residents and another 30 or so nurses, janitors, and other staff.
I’ll be honest, I was ridiculously naïve before this job. Not in that I was unaware of the existence and effects of racism, sexism, poverty, etc., but in that this understanding was entirely abstract. Insulated by my white, male, middle-class experience, I didn’t know what the oppressive realities of the world meant for actual human experience.
Well, I started the job and things changed quickly. That job kicked my ass. I don’t know how I avoided being fired because I was a *terrible* employee for the first three weeks. I’d never done anything so hard in my life, and nothing – not college, not my first job afterwards, and not any job I’ll ever do – was or will ever be that hard. I kid you not, I still have stress dreams about running behind on the morning shift.
After my family upbringing, that job is the single largest influence on my life. It was my first lesson in a lot of things, the most brutal lesson being that the U.S. economy sure as hell ain’t about anything like meritocracy, equality, free exchange, or hard work. Not in the slightest.
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The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines abuse in the following way:
Abuse (transitive verb):
- To put to wrong or improper use; to use excessively or without justification.
- To use or treat so as to injure or damage.
- To attack using words.
I don’t mind this definition, but I also think it doesn’t quite capture the meaning of abuse in human relationships. Interpersonal abusive relationships aren’t fundamentally about violence (intentionally causing harm); they are about control. In an abusive relationship, the abuser starts a war with you over reality, and if they win they gain control over your reality. This sometimes means bodily reality (physical and sexual abuse), but it always includes mental reality. Violence is the tool for achieving this control, but control is the end goal.
If you haven’t been there, I don’t know how to best describe it. To be abused is to have your agency erased. It means for your experiences and hopes to be re-written in another’s image while they burn down your dreams and secret desires. It means for someone else to decide what meaning you can and cannot have in your life while they deride your pathetic choices. It means to be forced to accept someone else’s life-experience as gospel truth while your own are desecrated.
Violence is the means by which this abusive control of reality is accomplished. None of us give up our reality without a fight; violence is required to raze that reality to the ground. This violence may be physical or symbolic, aggressive and direct or quiet and subtle, but either way the reality of the one abused is cut away. As your relations with friends and family wane, as your trust in your intelligence and memory is corroded, as even your belief in the very legitimacy and worthiness of your identity is shaken, your former reality slowly fades into memory, until you reach the point where there is no other reality than the reality of your abuser.
The endgame of abuse is death, because eventually there is nothing of you left to be controlled except for your very existence – and death is the only expression of that kind of control.
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I’m sharing this because I think we cannot understand the base evil and danger of the U.S. capitalist economy until we realize it is an economy predicated on abuse at every level. And economic abuse in the US can be every bit as controlling, every bit as exploitative, every bit as merciless as the worst abusive relationship.
I don’t mean to suggest that the two forms of abuse are identical in action or in consequences, or to conflate structural damage with individual trauma. Nor do I at all intend to speak for anyone else who has experienced interpersonal abuse. To be clear I have never been physically or sexually abused, nor have my own work experiences involved personal harm at that level. I am only stating the parallels that I see between my experience and the larger functioning of the U.S. economy; I can only understand the U.S. economy as one of irredeemable abuse.
Think about it in terms of control. How many of our life choices are controlled, directly or indirectly, by the logic of capitalism? Think about the abuse that so many people endure just to keep themselves and their loved ones housed and fed.
When employers hold the power of instant dismissal over their employees, and use it to keep employees from challenging them in any way - that is abuse.
When raising concerns about unsafe work conditions, or challenging instances of sexism, racism, or homophobia/transphobia can get you fired - that is abuse.
When people have to endure this violence because losing their job also means losing their car, their home, their stability, or even their kids (and no, that’s not hyperbole) - that is abuse.
When people have to work while sick because even if they aren’t fired, to miss a week of work is to not make rent, not buy food, or not pay for utilities - that is abuse. And let me tell you, if you’ve ever wanted to visit the inner circles of hell, just work a short-order restaurant line while you have the flu.
When medical bills can bankrupt you in a heartbeat, and you avoid going to the doctor for that very reason - that is abuse.
When education is locked behind a price tag that demands a lifetime of debt – that is abuse.
When goals of education, travel, self-improvement, and community building are shunted aside again and again by the exigencies of staying financially afloat – that is abuse.
When all of the above steals your mental health, steals your very sense of well-being and your ability to, y’know, *enjoy life* - that is abuse.
When the owners of companies reap billions upon billions in profits – just unimaginable amounts of money – while paying their employees less than a living wage – that is fucking abuse.
When consumer and environmental safety are blindly disregarded to save a few pennies – when thousands are exposed to poisons bringing disability and chronic illness and even death and we do nothing because it would be “bad for jobs” – that is abuse.
When women are forced to choose between children and career, to endure sexual harassment and assault or at least endless belittlement and dismissal so that the men in charge don’t destroy their professional future – that is abuse.
When the very historical foundation of the economy is slavery, the most heinous economic abuse ever invented - and the economy has continually stolen wealth from Black people and people of color to line white pockets – and white supremacy has been intentionally and regularly inflamed to disempower poor Black and white people alike at the expense of Black bodies – that is abuse.
When employee safety is disregarded to the point that workers die, on the job, all the time, from coal ash spills and mine collapses to meat packers essentially forced to contract COVID-19, SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF A FEW PERCENTAGE POINTS MORE IN PROFIT - THAT IS ABUSE.
And like any good abusive relationship, it’s all gaslit. It’s all denied. We’ve all heard the free-market gospel. We aren’t abused. No, not at all. We just aren’t good enough. We don’t work hard enough, don’t try hard enough, aren’t smart enough, to deserve anything better. In fact, the struggle is proof that we don’t deserve anything better. If we just become a little more perfect, a little more accommodating, give a little bit more of ourselves to the market, then we’ll finally be taken care of. Then we’ll be treated like humans. Just give a little more, hand over a little more of your dignity, then you’ll be safe.
The U.S. economy takes and takes and takes and takes from us, takes our health and our dreams, takes our **lives** away from us – and then tells us that we should be grateful. Yes, grateful, because we’re lucky to be in this relationship. No other system will ever take care of us any better, but you’d better not even try to find out because then we’ll take the jobs away and then you’ll be starving on the street and then you’ll be sorry.
Do you see the parallels? Do you see how abusive the system is?
I’m sorry. I know this is raw. I don’t know how else to say it because the truth is raw right now. It has always been glaringly obvious but COVID-19 has somehow exacerbated the abuse even more – where for so many it is now a literal choice between safety or economic solvency. Capital’s control of society is so great that there’s hardly even a pretense anymore that returning to work is somehow in our best interest – we either knuckle under and take our chances, or face the certainty of economic ruin.
Corporations are abusive sociopaths. There are no two ways around that. This is true because their goals are not human well-being. Their goal is monetary profit. That’s the whole point, that’s why we created corporations as legal entities in the first place.
The millionaires and billionaires who own those megacorporations are abusive sociopaths. There are no two ways around that. This is true because they *have* the choice to share their wealth with the people who actually make it for them, and don’t. They have the choice to use their *unimaginable* resources to make the world a better place – and don’t.
These two groups can *never, ever, ever* be trusted to act in the best interest of anyone – their workers, their customers, the world. Never. Like all other abusers, they have every opportunity to do the right thing and never take it. They aren’t going to change.
They. Will. Not. Change.
The system as it stands will never be anything different. Never.
And the sooner we wake up to that fact, the sooner we can build something better.