“I don’t know what he had going on personally with the company or whatever it was. I know he wasn’t a temp like us,” Montero said. “I don’t know how much he was getting paid, but I was making good money there. You know I’m a little bummed out. I lost my job.”
via CBS
Patriarchy-brainwashed men will do anything, up to and often including decades of jail time, to avoid the long, slow, hard work of solidarity. Of standing arm-in-arm and building a movement with their most marginalized peers. Especially if putting in the work means making soup and watching kids instead of doing something flashy and satisfying in the spotlight. Especially if it involves taking direction. Especially if putting in the work means they have to do something hard every single day instead of just one time.
I’ll say it til I’m blue in the face: from Star Wars to The Matrix, the cult of the solo destroyer-hero is how capitalism controls rebels. It’s like memetic ant killer: wannabe freedom fighters slurp it up and carry it back to the movement to poison everyone’s vision of what The Work looks like.
This shit is how Marvin fucking Heemeyer–a guy who tried to bulldoze children and the elderly over a property dispute—gets turned into a folk hero.
Don’t mistake me. I am in favor of the workers seizing the means of production. I have no qualms with direct action planned in solidarity and towards a common goal.
But excuse me if I don’t stand up and cheer when one guy decides to exercise his petulant drywall-punching hero fantasies by torching a toilet paper warehouse.
Not that I even buy he fully believed what he said. We’ve taught men to dress up their personal grievances as righteous vengeance.
So congrats, dude. You’re not a part of their system. You’re a hero for a day, and a megacorporation gets a free narrative that your little tiktok tantrum was the work of one unhinged “terrorist”. They don’t even have to pretend to come to the table. And the blowback will be on the temp single mom trying to support four kids, who you never even tried to organize with.
Because that wouldn’t have felt nearly as heroic. And you would have had to show up for it tomorrow too.
