Midnight Querist

Submitted by Fozzie on July 30, 2019

Where Do We Come From?

Is the right to work the right to be exploited? Why does the Left make the "right to be exploited" its primary political demand? Is housework work? Do women on welfare work? Did your mother work? What did she get out of it? Is sex work? If so, for whom? Do you work after you retire? Is schoolwork work? Is "unemployment" work? Is work productive? If you work, should you get paid? If your wages rise, do someone else's fall? If the wages in the US rise, do wages in Latin America fall? Vice versa? What is a "high wage"? If wages rise, do profits fall? Should we be afraid of robots? If your job is automated but you continued to get your paycheck in the mail, would you send it back? Is there "meaningful" work? Do you get a raise by working harder? Do you get a raise by going on strike? Do you get a raise because others go on strike? Is there scarcity? If so, of what? Your days, hours and minutes or oil, coal, uranium and natural gas?

Who Are We Now?

Why, in the most liberal state in the US, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1982, did 75% of the electorate vote for the Nuclear Freeze Resolution and 60% vote for the re-institution of capital punishment? Why did we not trust the state to decide our collective death but we did trust the state to decide who is to live and who is to die individually? Would it be different if most of those condemned to death were white? Are "work related fatalities" capital punishment, genocide or necessary accidents? What do you have against the mugger if Reagan is an honest man? Do social workers who "allow" their "clients" to starve or freeze to death deserve the electric chair? Is it more of a "war crime" to burn people in ovens or bombard a city and blow them up in their apartments? Can the US afford national health insurance, an apartment for everyone, a two-day work week, a guaranteed income, good and plentiful food for everyone, wine and beer for every dinner table, retirement at forty, warm northern apartments, cool southern homes, long vacations, food for the "hungry of the world"? All, some or none of these?

Where Do We Go To?

When was our last revolution? 1776, 1864? or the 1960s? Jefferson said there should be a revolution every decade, is he to be trusted? When will the next revolution in the US be? Are you willing to wait that long? If not, what are you going to do? Do you advise children to plan for a revolution in your life-time? If not, why not? Who do you have to trust to make a revolution? is a revolution made like a car, like a shit, like an orgasm, like a house, like a bridge, like a dance, like a child, like a murder, like a brawl, like a play? How low must the profit rate fall before capital dies? Can capital die of senility, of cancer, of a heart attack, of gunshot wounds, of stroke, of suicide, of emphysema, of AIDS? if you "had" an army of one million what would you do? Would you try to seize state power? March into Congress? Arrest Reagan? Shoot the heads of the Fortune 500? Take over the banks and computer network? Distribute food, fuel, housing? Automate factories? Disarm the police and the loyalist army? What is paradise? Utopia? The end of things? Is paradise on earth perpetual fun? What is fun? Is sleep the model of paradise? Is eternal awareness its model? Will your boss go to paradise? Is it death that bothers us or Life? The life that has been taken from us? Is this what makes us ghosts?

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