Comradeship // Freechat

While I was in a blue collar job, on my really bad days (the worsened poverty was destroying my mental health) I would literally think to myself, "I'm better than this/smarter than this."

Which was insane. I was surrounded by competent, hard workers with pretty vast sums of knowledge on the science of our work. Whereas I knew nothing. They also easily understood Marxist fundamentals in repackaged language.

When I moved to a computer man position, I realised I had stepped into liberalism central. While everyone will smile and agree about everything, it's ice cold. The strangle hold lay-offs have on everyone is brutal.

Just a bit of a ramble but when I switched high schools near the end of my education, my new principal looked at my unimpressive test scores and said something along the lines of, 'well, somebody needs to drive the trucks.' It was reflective of the attitudes drilled into me through my primary educations, that Blue Collar work represented the 'bad path' you'd fall onto if you failed your education.

So, even though I had no particular interest in academics at the time, and had no idea what fulfilling work felt like or what I wanted to do with my life, I had always told myself that I needed to end up in White Collar work. That I would have at least 'made it' then and not be cursed to labor, something I saw as a punishment for lack of performance. I went to uni and accomplished it, too, ending up in a comfortable but deeply unfulfilling bullshit job.

I'm the rube, of course. As I became more politically actualized I realized who actually held the value, it became clear that I had put myself in the ideal position for a worker under capitalism. Earning hardly enough in an insecure position - I'm not exactly a specialized professional. I could be laid off in one bad swing of the job market and since my skillset is built around a bullshit profession, I am vulnerable to having to accept any work should this happen.

My peers from school, the ones seen at the time as lacking promise and doomed to 'drive the trucks,' have of course built practical and valuable skill sets directly valuable to the economy and always relevant for society - concepts I had never been properly exposed to in my education. They're not on the greener side of the fence, of course, as they are dealing with their own material issues like health issues and longer work hours. It just amuses me sometimes how effectively me, a young directionless boy, was steered away from work that would have built character and purpose, in favor of chasing a deadend desk job that, at one point, made me feel superior.

I think this is actually a pretty common experience for not-dirt-poor white dudes in the western world, and is of/c reflective of that deep societal rot everyone is ignoring. There's a lot of complicated feelings causing that build up of resentment among the White Collar world to their Blue Collar comrades, and I find, more and more, that it doesn't go the other way.