Below, reader Frip suggested that we need to stop being nice guys. Which violates the spirit of Joe Biden’s America, in which the people who stole the election and pissed in our faces have commanded us to come together in unity, so regretfully I have reported you to the Thought Police, comrade. With that unpleasant task out of the way, here’s a history lesson, on a topic totally unrelated to passive resistance to power, with no modern day applications whatsoever.
I’ve always found the history of labor disputes interesting. You could, in fact, have been forgiven for thinking America was on the verge of another violent revolution in the 1880s and 90s — the Pullman Strike, Federal troops at Homestead, etc. (And if you think infiltration and entrapment is something new, look up the Molly Maguires. McParland was a Pinkerton agent, i.e. a proto-Fed. Note that this was the 1870s, even). Though the Federal leviathan was a minnow compared to today, the Yankees had gotten a taste for blood in the Civil War; they wouldn’t hesitate to use massive force if they felt they had to. And this was an era in which Big Business literally owned the government (in case you don’t want to click, that’s J.P. Morgan bailing out the US government — all of it, himself, personally — during the Panic of 1893). So the workers were hosed, right?
If those poor bastards had known how things would turn out in our glorious future, of course, they would’ve hopped the first available ship back to the old country, preferring to starve with dignity among people who shared their culture (and knew which pronouns to use), but alas, they didn’t. So they stayed, and they developed various highly effective techniques of passive resistance. One of these was the work-to-rule strike, a personal favorite of mine, because I enjoy the writings of Franz Kafka.* This one takes a bit of unpacking, so:
Scientific management, a.k.a. “Taylorism,” was all the rage around the turn of the 20th century. At its crudest (and I’m only exaggerating a little), you’ve got some dork with a stopwatch and a camera standing behind you while you do your job, and after some observations and a little math, the dork tells you you’re pulling the lever wrong. There’s a scientifically optimized way to pull that lever, one that shaves 0.6 seconds off each of your work “processes,” and henceforth you shall be required to do this exact sequence of steps, every time… and if you disagree, too bad, why do you hate science?** Similar regulations follow, until the whole plant is “scientifically” optimized.
And since this is the great age of “Progress,” you’ve got umpteen government regulations to deal with now, too. And then as now, the august personages in Congress wouldn’t dream of soiling even their shoes, let alone their hands, by going anywhere near anyplace labor is actually performed, so all these regulations have been promulgated ex cathedra. Suddenly the straightforward, mindless job of lever-pulling — the one that was already so insulting to the human spirit, so “alienating,” as Marx put it, something to be endured because one has no choice — is bound up with reams of regulations, too. If you don’t like it, build your own factory.***
But in this, the workers saw opportunity. You’re going to tell me how to do my job? Fine, but you’d better tell me how to do all of it. Is there anything the Policies and Procedures manual leaves unexplained? Where to place my feet as I stand in front of the lever, for example? I’d better not do anything until the manager tells me exactly what to do, in writing, in a fully-vetted update to the P&P, and have you run that by Compliance, sir? Perhaps the lawyers in the Environmental Division should take a gander, too, since who knows what might contribute to Global Warm…. errrrr, whatever, you get the point. It turns out that even back then, when there was no such thing as OSHA or the EPA or the rest of the Federal alphabet soup, the “scientifi managers,” let alone Congress, simply weren’t able to envision the nuances of everyone’s day-to-day job. Or, for that matter, the very basics of everyone’s job. Work ground to a halt because everyone was following the rules.
As I said, this has no applicability to The Current Year whatsoever, when the Federal law codes are so complex that we all (as everybody knows) commit at least three felonies a day. Also not applicable is the related technique of “work slow-age.” Imagine what would happen if a mechanic, say, simply refused to work on a Leftist’s car. That would be bad, of course, very bad — “bake the cake, bigot!” can just as easily become “change the oil, bigot!” So nobody should do that. But what would happen, hypothetically, if the mechanic just… kinda…. took his time with it? Oh, sorry, I can’t get you in today, but I can pencil you in for the 24th. Of April. And hey, gosh, the EPA just put out another ruling about the amount of unicorn piss, in parts per million, that is required in all new bottles of motor oil. And I just sold the last one in compliance. I’ve got some on back order; it’ll get here around the 9th…. of August.
And so on.
Once again, nobody should do that, as that would be very, very bad. Not even the factory hands of the 19th century steel mills would be so awful, so inhuman, so contrary to the ideals of peace love and understanding that the Bidenreich is about to shove up our asses, as to do that.
Or anything similar. All of this, as they say, is for informational purposes only. It’s just a history lesson.
*A title that is so, so much better in the original German: Der Prozess. In fact, I nominate that for a good catchall name for what’s going to happen to your anus under the Bidenreich — you’ll get the full rigors of Der Prozess.
**Just in case you thought that was anything new. Proggies don’t know any history, of course, least of all their own, but in this case they have an excuse: So many of those early “Progressives” really thought they were helping “the Workers,” and were doing it from the spirit of Christian charity, too. Obviously that’s unacceptable — there is no God, and fuck the workers, who go to church and watch NASCAR and haven’t even taken a single Gender Studies class.
***Another fun irony: I’m told that out in Silicon Valley, the digital plantations maintain housing for their H1-B indentured servants. Whites would balk at living ten to a room, but that’s luxury living where the techno-serfs come from, so lots of little towns have become, in effect, company towns. Just in case you thought that was anything new, and I for one am looking forward to the bankrupt state of California simply selling Cupertino to Tim Cook, Menlo Park to Zuckerberg, etc. Watch how fast a big beautiful wall goes up, and how ostentatiously not-defunded the police are.
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