from The Girls (a story of revolution)
- You seem different.
- Need a haircut?
- No. Distracted.
- Yeah. I'm thinking about class. Social classes. What they are.
- At least things are getting better. People like me couldn't walk down the street without the police driving up, shouting, "get on the ground", and being searched for drugs.
- Sure. Now there're millions of what you call your people in jails. Twice as many as before.
- I can see you're passionate about this subject, but you have to give me a chance to talk.
- Talk.
- I've got to make some money. Want to sign my petition?
- What do you get?
- A dollar a signature.
- What's the petition for?
- No more casino's in the neighborhood, without voter approval.
- Who cares? Do you go to casinos?
- I go see the girls.
- Strippers?
- Yes.
- Yesterday, in Beverly Hills, in fact at another branch of this market, I was talking to a friend of mine. He likes to sit outside, smoke, and meditate on god, on being a good man. You ask for signatures and get a dollar. He knows all the desperate people of the neighborhood, as they come and go he asks how they are, gives a dollar. There are a lot of them. He gives all his money away, says his wife left him because of it.
- The world is full of different people.
- Well, not so much. He's the same as you, in passing over of single dollars, and like you in visiting strip clubs. Do you think wise men visit strip clubs?
- You're saying I'm not wise?
- Expressing doubt. Is it wise to take pleasure in another person's slavery? No girl would do that job who had a place of her own to live and food to eat, who could chose another use to make of life. No wise man would enjoy a girl pretending to think he is attractive enough to make her want to make movements to attract him to her.
- The girls like me.
- Because you pay them.
- I don't.
- You pay to get in, which pays their salary.
- I don't pay them to talk to me. They want to.
- You're deluded.
- How do you know? Have you ever known any strippers?
- Lived with one a couple weeks, a long time ago. Don't believe me?
- I didn't say that.
- Do you know what class is? What you called "people like yourself"?
- Tell me what you dictate it is.
- It's not clothes, offices, houses, possessions, gestures, manners. Class is defined by what it does. Our stronger class buys and sells things, and uses force to hold onto things acquired. The other class, people like yourself, as you put it, are forced to sell their labor to them, and then use the money they make to buy and sell things also. Both classes see private life as recreation from the work life of buying and selling things. Recreation meaning getting your body back into condition to return refreshed to the work of buying and selling things. The recreation takes the form of letting the body do what it wants, whatever that is. Since the purpose of life is buying and selling things, no meaning is to be found in what the body wants once released from work that enslaves it. Classes can go on doing the same things because all the buying and selling and bodily release, as chance would have it, falls into a stable pattern.
- How?
- Supposedly by "laws" of supply and demand. But in practice, various forms of vanity, which is the sense of power gained by putting yourself in a stable relation to other people. In small business, that takes the form of insisting on the highest profit in each transaction, the high profit being a show of power. In big business it takes the form of monopoly, buying up everything, even if that means destruction of markets and lower profit. Responding to supply and demand, serving vanity, creating monopolies are behaviors that fall into a stable arrangement, and allow a class that creates monopolies, expresses vanity, trades things back and forth to continue to exist.
- If the world works that way, what choice do we have?
- The world doesn't work this way. Our world does. Other economic arrangements can create a different class of people.
- People like you?
- No. I'm a monster, a fighter, a transitional creature. I don't like rules. Other classes have rules. I'll give you an example, Ok?
- Yes.
- Anarchism, the idea that government should not be allowed to become the principle of life, has rules that prevent the government becoming the principle of life.
- Anarchist rules? It doesn't make sense.
- Doesn't make sense because we live in a society where the meaning of work is the meaning of life. The rules of doing things with each other, buying and selling things and ourselves, provide all the meaning there is, private life is considered mere recreation, refreshing our ability to work. Anarchist rules prevent this from happening.
- How?
- Rules, like our selling things and ourselves in accord with supply and demand, provide stability.The anarchist rules are: No employment, and no possession without use. The rules insure no one can keep too much: without hiring people to take care of your 4th house and 5th car, they fall into disuse, are by rule no longer your property. Property doesn't get concentrated, people don't become property-less, and so don't need to sell themselves into slavery for wages. There's no need to continually redistribute property.
- You're dreaming.
- What are you doing when you sit in the dark at a strip club and stare at the girls? I'll tell you what you're doing. You doing what people like you, your class, a mirror image of the ruling class, does. You are letting your body free, but only in imagination, from the total slavery of what you do when working. You don't have a care for the lives of the girls, you don't have a care for your own life either. Meaning is not there, in your private life.
- And meaning is in anarchy? You're the one who's deluded.
