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this is all very strange.
a/ when folk think about wage levels, they now by-pass questions of control at the level of the firm or sector and think wage---market relations and higher wages-->inflation.
during the fordist period, which dissolved in the early 1970s, higher wages for working people were fundamental to integration of working people into the machinery of consumption---the politics of wages were entirely different--and strange (though this is not the only explanation) the fordist system worked relatively well. you know, more equitable, more stable than is the current barbarism.
b/ there's a bizarre-o moral economy abroad in the land as well, thanks in large part to the workings of the conservative media apparatus----which has managed, by smart packaging of empty bromides enabled by deep funding which enabled the Key Factor in Ideological Conflict---repetition---to be worked to their advantage---which managed to convince people that a ceo "works harder" than someone with a minimum wage job.
fact is that in terms of expenditure of physical energy, the opposite is true.
the more onerous the task, the less you get paid for it.
sitting in a chair is not that hard.
it really isn't.
this entirely counterfactual notion of the hard-workin, hard-drillin ceo is self-evidently nonsense, but it is interesting as an index of the extent to which reasonable folk have taken over images of the world for themselves which not only explain but justify the extent to which they are fucked or, just as bewildering, the fact that most other people are more fucked than they are. by virtue of social and economic position.
it's like the denial of class across the board by americans, who operate inside a brutally stratified system.
distance distance=passivity passivity.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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