EGO LECTOR

In her book Working Girl: Selling Art and Selling Sex, Sophia Giovannitti writes:

Of course, I can do wage labor, and I have, and I do. I have held many jobs; many are fine. But fine is not how life should be. I firmly believe that no one should have to work to live, that the imperative to sell one’s labor in exchange for the fulfillment of basic survival needs is a foundational violation.

The objection begins to form in the minds of the average citizen trained through endless capitalist propaganda to accept that this is just how the world works, you should grow up and do your time. Most of us have to go to work, and as much as we may hate it ourselves, we tend to suppose that people who advance notions like this are living in some kind of Candyland fantasy world; our response is to think that everyone just needs to suck it up and suffer as humans were meant to.

And yet, consider this: most people, if asked what they would do upon receiving a massive financial windfall such as winning the lottery, would likely say that they would want to ensure that some person or people in their lives never had to go to work again. We know that wage slavery is unpleasant and degrading, and many of us fantasize about escaping it ourselves and granting that release to the people dear to us. But when such a notion is applied to society at large, the abstraction of people into statistics leads to a rejection of empathy in favor of what passes for disinterestedly rational realism.