StockholmSyndrome
14th January 2012, 16:29
I have an interview for a job as a basic administrative lackey at a private consulting company that does a lot of government contracts, as is common in the DC area. For the past 2 years after graduating from college, I have been one of millions like me, shackled to a constant succession of temporary positions with no benefits and poor pay. All anybody in the reserve army of labor wants is a job. Upon first hearing back from this company about a permanent full time job, I immediately had moral qualms about going to work for a government contractor. But I have recently gotten to thinking that maybe discriminating among different types of workers within capitalism is no different than nationalism, racism, or other forms of divisions within the working class. While some workers are closer to the inner-workings of capital than others, and many of these workers are certainly subsumed by the logic of capitalism, they are still workers nonetheless (think about field slave vs house slave).
The point is that we are constituent parts of a totality, and a worker is no more an agent of imperialism working for a government contractor, than they are working for a company that may been seen as more "innocent" or "neutral". It seems to me completely un-Marxist to view workers in accordance to how dirty their hands are, with the exception of those who work as the actual physical arms of state repression like the police and the military.
What do you all think? Am I just deluding myself in order to justify selling my soul to what David Harvey terms the "state-corporate nexus"? Or is the state-corporate nexus a simple reality of modern capitalism, and are those who condemn people who take up jobs in this sector actually themselves taking a self-righteous step backwards towards idealism and naivete?
The point is that we are constituent parts of a totality, and a worker is no more an agent of imperialism working for a government contractor, than they are working for a company that may been seen as more "innocent" or "neutral". It seems to me completely un-Marxist to view workers in accordance to how dirty their hands are, with the exception of those who work as the actual physical arms of state repression like the police and the military.
What do you all think? Am I just deluding myself in order to justify selling my soul to what David Harvey terms the "state-corporate nexus"? Or is the state-corporate nexus a simple reality of modern capitalism, and are those who condemn people who take up jobs in this sector actually themselves taking a self-righteous step backwards towards idealism and naivete?