Get Rid of Wage-Slavery with Communist Revolution
March 31—“I guess if you are vulnerable to becoming enslaved to Amazon as a 60-plus gig worker, you gonna wonder why this film didn’t get political,” posted a friend on Facebook.
This film’s politics are a cover-up for racism and exploitation. It tells the story of one (fictional) woman out of the many over-sixty workers who live in their vans and work as temporary wage slaves for Amazon.
Wage slavery is essential to capitalism. You can quit one job, but you have to work for some boss unless you want to starve. Communism will have no bosses and no slaves. We’ll work together for the good of all.
Nomadland, the book, romanticized the “resilience” of the mostly white nomads of the gig economy. But at least it quoted some van-dwellers who had lost their homes in the Great Recession of 2007-2008. It exposed the “American Dream” as a fraud.
And it exposed the working conditions in Amazon warehouses, where aspirin and ibuprofen are provided free next to the water fountains. Ambulances are stationed permanently in the parking lots for the inevitable injuries caused by the relentless pace of work, aged bodies, and concrete floors.
Linda May, who plays herself in the movie, says in the book, “I hate this f*ing job,” and calls Amazon “probably the biggest slave owner in the world.”
But the movie centers on Fern, a fictional character, who has chosen the freedom of the nomadic lifestyle. She says in the movie that Amazon is “Great Money.”
Unsure if Hollywood is purposely covering up exploitation? This award-winning movie is being promoted at the same moment as Amazon workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse are engaged in an all-out struggle to organize a union.
During the pandemic, Amazon’s business has expanded. It has made super-profits off the labor of workers who are extremely vulnerable to the virus.
Amazon workers hope that a union will give them safer working conditions. They want the ability to take breaks to eat lunch and go to the bathroom without being fired. Amazon has fought all-out to stop the union drive. As we go to press, the votes are still being counted.
Most of the workers at this warehouse are Black. The mass unemployment created by the pandemic has made the most oppressed workers even more vulnerable.
Amazon opened this warehouse last March and has enforced inhumane labor discipline on people who are desperate to keep those jobs.
Unions can make a job slightly less precarious, and maybe even win Amazon workers permission to go to the bathroom, but it doesn’t change the basic relationship of exploited worker/wage slave to exploiter/boss. At $15/hour, or at $20/hour, with or without bathroom privileges, workers are still exploited, forced to work to survive, and to do whatever it takes to keep a job.
Black workers in Bessemer, Alabama have experienced the limits of trade unionism. The steel mills of Birmingham and Bessemer were sites of intense racist exploitation and fierce, communist-led, union drives during the 1930s.
Communist organizers built the majority-Black local of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in the steel mills. They led a militant strike in 1934, fighting the company, the cops, and the racist international union leadership all at once.
But these communists abandoned the struggle for communism. Instead of organizing for revolution, they fought for union contracts, which will always keep us as wage-slaves.
As the US empire declined in the 1980s, steel plants all over the country shut down. Those union jobs disappeared. Steel mills, automobile and tire factories have been abandoned or turned into outlet malls. And workers, especially Black and immigrant workers, are forced to take jobs working for Amazon, or to travel the country looking for a gig.
Union organizing drives can’t even touch this problem. To end wage slavery, we need to put an end to capitalism.
Vicious coverups like Nomadland are clearly the rulers’ propaganda. But the union organizers—supported by Joe Biden and the New York Times—who say they can make capitalism work for us are also spreading a more popular form of capitalist propaganda.
We need communist culture and organizing—not for unions but for revolution.
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