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| Weedpatch Migrant Camp - Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri Wikimedia |
(Spoilers Ahead)
The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family displaced by natural disaster and the relentless math of capitalism. We encounter the Joad family after they have been reduced to tenant farmers on what had once been their own land. They had mortgaged their land to cover losses from past years' crop failures. The drought continued, the crops failed again, and the Joads, along with their neighbors, were in default:
"A man can hold the land if he can just eat and pay taxes. Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank. But you see, a bank can't do that... They breathe profits, they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die..".Now the days of reckoning were at hand. The land owners ("owner men") have come to evict them off the land. The mathematics of finance, banking, and money-lending created an unseen force that drove them away:
"All of them [owner men] were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provide a refuge from thought and from feeling."The Joads loaded everything they owned into a truck and began living as nomads. Then, as now, people resorted to living in their vehicles and encampments. In today's parlance, they were homeless. Steinbeck takes us on their journey to California as they burn through cash and fall into increasingly desperate straights. They wander around the state believing that a good-paying job is just around the corner, but there are no good-paying jobs. All the while their economic reality became bleaker. The locals treat them as pariahs. Law officers force them to move from their encampments. They hurry to arrive at orchards and fields only to find out that they can't, as an entire family, pick enough to feed themselves for a day.
You cannot read this book and fail to see today's economic refugees, sleeping in cars, in parks or under bridges, driving ride-shares as second (and possibly third) gigs, trying to survive on stagnant wages as gentrification raises rents and drives people to living on the streets.
The unseen force was mathematics, the equations of finance and capitalism. Mathematics played an important role, and now technology amplifies the power of mathematics a thousand-fold. Scheduling software has wrung out all the "wasted time" out of human labor. Service and retail jobs are scheduled on-demand. Employees are required to drop everything, come to work, or risk losing their job. Second jobs or educational pursuits are put on hold because, on a moments' notice, you can be called in and you dare not refuse.
Employees who are lucky enough to find full or near full-time employment are subject to "strict performance" (KPI) metrics. The relentless math of waste reduction squeezes out the last seconds of idle time in a workers life. In factories and warehouses employees are tracked. In an effort to prevent employee illness from dehydration, urine color charts are conveniently posted in restrooms. Delivery vehicles are tracked as well as delivery drivers. I've seen delivery persons sprint from their trucks to front doors and back. In the end, desperate employees relieve themselves in bottles or in hidden corners to avoid being penalized for not making quota.
Service clerks are graded by their survey results. Many clerks look at me desperately. "Will you please fill out this survey?" they ask. Now that I am more aware of the possible effects on their employment, I take the time to fill them out. Ride-share apps require you to "grade your driver" on safety, cleanliness, and conversation. I once had a Lyft driver preface his answer to my question about the city with: "I won't answer unless you promise to give me a good grade on my conversation".
I was lucky enough to have a "white collar" office job. Towards the end I noticed the annual reviews were getting harsher. If you fell into the bottom third of rankings, you were out, no matter how long you had been at the company. I watched colleagues fired because they had the lowest ranking.
In all this, what is being squeezed out? The time and space to be human.
We need time and space to live beyond service to employers. "Full Employment" simply means we can obtain the 16 hours of work per day to subsist. Do that for six or seven days, and the other requirements of life (sleeping, eating) are cut to a barest minimum. That bit of left-over time at the end of the day leaves little room for relationships, family life, or parenting.
The relentless math of extraction at every level concentrates the wealth from productivity gains into the hands of a small group of capital owners:
The scenario set in Steinbeck's novel is being repeated today. We have again come to a point of precarity teetering on desperation. Today, the total of what many people can earn in a day is not enough to shelter and feed themselves and their families. At a time of record low unemployment, people are defaulting on car loans, falling behind in their student loan payments, and losing their domiciles at an increasing rate. What will happen in the inevitable downturn comes?
What is needed is a morality to balance out the mathematics. A morality that says we will not tolerate that people being homeless, children starving, or the sick dying for lack of funds as an acceptable price of American capitalism. As a society, as an electorate, we need to call in the debt of those who have prospered so much at the expense of everyone else. A debt is owed to society, to all of us who maintain society: the rule of law, the roads and highways, the power grid, communications, who care for our sick and injured. We owe a debt to those who fought for our nations’ survival and those who protect us every day. How is it that those who have risen in power and wealth in this country seem to think they owe nothing to anyone?
The unseen force was mathematics, the equations of finance and capitalism. Mathematics played an important role, and now technology amplifies the power of mathematics a thousand-fold. Scheduling software has wrung out all the "wasted time" out of human labor. Service and retail jobs are scheduled on-demand. Employees are required to drop everything, come to work, or risk losing their job. Second jobs or educational pursuits are put on hold because, on a moments' notice, you can be called in and you dare not refuse.
Employees who are lucky enough to find full or near full-time employment are subject to "strict performance" (KPI) metrics. The relentless math of waste reduction squeezes out the last seconds of idle time in a workers life. In factories and warehouses employees are tracked. In an effort to prevent employee illness from dehydration, urine color charts are conveniently posted in restrooms. Delivery vehicles are tracked as well as delivery drivers. I've seen delivery persons sprint from their trucks to front doors and back. In the end, desperate employees relieve themselves in bottles or in hidden corners to avoid being penalized for not making quota.
Service clerks are graded by their survey results. Many clerks look at me desperately. "Will you please fill out this survey?" they ask. Now that I am more aware of the possible effects on their employment, I take the time to fill them out. Ride-share apps require you to "grade your driver" on safety, cleanliness, and conversation. I once had a Lyft driver preface his answer to my question about the city with: "I won't answer unless you promise to give me a good grade on my conversation".
I was lucky enough to have a "white collar" office job. Towards the end I noticed the annual reviews were getting harsher. If you fell into the bottom third of rankings, you were out, no matter how long you had been at the company. I watched colleagues fired because they had the lowest ranking.
In all this, what is being squeezed out? The time and space to be human.
We need time and space to live beyond service to employers. "Full Employment" simply means we can obtain the 16 hours of work per day to subsist. Do that for six or seven days, and the other requirements of life (sleeping, eating) are cut to a barest minimum. That bit of left-over time at the end of the day leaves little room for relationships, family life, or parenting.
The relentless math of extraction at every level concentrates the wealth from productivity gains into the hands of a small group of capital owners:
The scenario set in Steinbeck's novel is being repeated today. We have again come to a point of precarity teetering on desperation. Today, the total of what many people can earn in a day is not enough to shelter and feed themselves and their families. At a time of record low unemployment, people are defaulting on car loans, falling behind in their student loan payments, and losing their domiciles at an increasing rate. What will happen in the inevitable downturn comes?
What is needed is a morality to balance out the mathematics. A morality that says we will not tolerate that people being homeless, children starving, or the sick dying for lack of funds as an acceptable price of American capitalism. As a society, as an electorate, we need to call in the debt of those who have prospered so much at the expense of everyone else. A debt is owed to society, to all of us who maintain society: the rule of law, the roads and highways, the power grid, communications, who care for our sick and injured. We owe a debt to those who fought for our nations’ survival and those who protect us every day. How is it that those who have risen in power and wealth in this country seem to think they owe nothing to anyone?
Progressive taxation was the norm during the post-WWII golden age that actually had a middle class. The Interstate highway system, Medicare, and Medicaid made life better for most Americans. A successful public space program put men on the moon. Now our roads and water systems are crumbling, healthcare for the aged and poor is under attack, and space exploration is the playground of a few wealthy billionaires. What we are doing now is not sustainable. Every day more people find themselves in precarity, on the edge of an abyss. Just enough crumbs are falling off the edge of the tables of capitalism for people to survive, but just barely. What will happen when the economy contracts? There will be:
"... in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."
