Hall of mirrors
It occasionally occurs to me to wonder how wierd the world must
look to people who don’t think capitalism is insane. It occurred
to me today during a job interview. Like almost every job, the only
actual qualifications required were not being illiterate and not being
a complete arsehole (for some jobs, you can substitute ‘not
physically disabled’ for the former). There are obvious
exceptions to the whole thing which include some intellectually
skilled jobs, such as doctors, some sorts of engineer, perhaps
computer programmers, and physically skilled jobs such as some
construction work, carpentry, art. But, as a rule, there’s no
good reason why I should get any of the jobs I’ve applied
for. There’s no good reason for any given job to go to
any particular individual. Now, I accept this, and am happy to play
along with the game, pretending that what I put on my CV or what I say
in interviews has some bearing on my ability to do the job, and,
because I know it’s just
bizarre idiosyncracy of late capitalism, I’m not
disheartened by my evident unemployability (everyone else is equally
unemployable, and equally employable, too).
But what about people who think that capitalism works? Who
think that markets are efficient, that wage labour is a free and equal
exchange on the labour market? Do they just not notice that most jobs
are worthless, or that the entire process of recruitment is a complete
farce? I mean, I can see various ways you could avoid concluding from
your everyday experience that capitalism was shit, but for any of them
to be at all convinving, you’ld have to be mendacious or
stupid. I don’t like the idea of dismissing one’s
political opponents as necessarily inferior, but when the
truth of communism is stamped on every aspect of the phenomenal world,
it’s difficult to see what else you can do. Or do
pro-capitalists experience the world in a completely different way to
me, like some horrific hall of mirrors where all the bits of
capitalism fit together perfectly, but in new and grotesque
shapes?
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