The Brooklyn Rail

Read Part I in the December/January 2024–25 issue.

At the end of my shift, my legs are bruised and my muscles burn like embers glowing in the ash of a dying fire. Freezing mist coats the windshield as I drive home through the massive port complex. Loading cranes loom in the distance under towering spotlights and razor wire glitters at the top of the fences wrapped around each container yard, ensuring that residents of the nearby villages cannot pilfer the billions of dollars of commodities flowing like a river to the delta of the port. But it also gives you the sense that you are traversing a sprawling prison complex: a space designed to hold in some eldritch animus seething through the mass of commodities and through you trapped there with it, the force passing from the grid and the burger into your body, its carcass. And there is, in fact, a literal prison within the figurative one, since the region’s largest migrant detention center (the Northwest Detention Center, run by the notorious GEO Group) is lodged within the bowels of the port, its borders patrolled by Homeland Security agents in blacked-out SUVs. Inside, detainees have launched regular hunger strikes in protest of the facility’s abysmal conditions as well as lawsuits alleging beatings and threats on the part of the guards. Several years ago, an elderly anarchist committed suicide by launching a doomed one-man assault on the facility, where he was promptly shot to death by the police. I pass the prison in the darkness.

It is sometime between 3 and 6 a.m. and, by the time I park in my own “light industrial” neighborhood just beyond the border of the port, several neighboring cars will have had their windows smashed out and interiors plundered of anything remotely stealable. If a car is left parked too long, the battery will be mined from the engine and the tires harvested like bark stripped from a tree. Some vehicles are set on fire for no apparent reason, their burned-out husks left on the streets for weeks, stripped bare of any salvageable metals before they are finally towed away by the city. In fact, the neighborhood is something of a magnet for arsonists. In addition to the campfires lit for warmth and regular cookstove accidents that wipe out villages in sudden blazes of poisonous smoke billowing black from burning plastics, random fires are often ignited in service of some more inscrutable purpose. Every few nights, the smell will wake me up and I’ll have to check that our building is not ablaze. Once, on just such a night, I saw one of the pyromancers from my window: a shadowy figure robed in mildewed blankets, gathering trash up from the streetside and arranging it into a little circular pyre. The fire wasn’t placed up against a building and it was too small to be used for heat. It instead seemed more like a maddened ritual, perhaps conducted to appease some enigmatic entity that only those living out in the cold have eyes to see. In the morning, all that was left was a perfect circle of grey ash, hosed off the sidewalk by one of the artists in the neighboring ceramics studio. Thankfully, no one ever tried to light my truck on fire, but the catalytic converter was long gone, both door locks were gouged out, and the ignition was periodically smashed open by clueless thieves. It is simply another tax on the poor: paying out your insurance deductible (around sixty hamburgers) every other month on top of rent. And, if your vehicle survives the night, the city will be sure to come around in the morning and place their little canary-yellow tickets on any car that still has a windshield. You cannot escape your punishment.

 

The Battle in the Burger

Obviously, as the currency of survival, the burger also becomes the immediate focal point of class struggle. In so doing, however, it takes on a contradictory character, serving as both the source of subsistence needed by all workers and the specter of scarcity forcing us to work for others in the first place. Nor is this anything new. As early as 1844, Marx explained that “the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labor, i.e., in that he receives work, and, secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence.”¹ In other words, the burger is not simply a form of sustenance. It also represents the wedging of market mandates into the metabolic gap that separates people from their means of survival. As a result, we are forced into a hostage situation in which we have no choice but to rely on the very thing—the dictatorship of profit and its priests—that has taken us hostage in the first place.

Imagine the vast surplus of goods that we all contribute to make in any given day. Since there is no real scarcity of goods, nor any technical issue in distributing them to those in need, the limit to doing so is essentially social, embedded in the relations of domination that make some lords over others. In our society, this domination is expressed in the rule of property. And that is precisely why, if you fail to provide your tithe of burgers to one of your several lords, the robed cleric at the county courthouse will declare your existence unlawful and the soldiers of the local fiefdom will be sent to kick down your door and drag you outside, where you will be forced to live caput gerat lupinum: “wearing the head of the wolf,” in the language of medieval jurisprudence, an archaic name for those pushed outside legal convention who could be deprived of access to society and freely punished, with no means for recompense. In other words, our social order is enforced not so much by the overt threat of violent punishment (though it of course hovers in the background) as by the implicit threat of violent exclusion: the withholding of the burger.

Since we literally have no choice but to depend on the burger for survival, any struggle against this order is also a struggle within and against the burger itself. In this struggle, however, politics risks taking two, equally premature forms: First, those who stress only the “against” in this equation tend toward an academic or artistic idealism which, though often correct in theory, proves vacuous in practice, and therefore tends to retreat further into its own idealism by policing language, polemicizing on the internet, encouraging schisms over minor points of exegesis, and enacting rigorous lifestyle protocols that approximate its strict moral requirements. At best, this idealism results in the reduction of politics to a merely academic pursuit. At worst, it metastasizes into a suicidal adventurism, obsessed with the mythic image of “militance” for its own sake and completely disconnected from mass politics. But the second error is even worse: those who stress only the “within” progressively sacrifice any strategy for remaking the social world at all, each of their meager victories giving way to an endless chain of ever-worsening compromises conducted for the sake of “real gains,” or simply “development.” This latter error is, in other words, a form of anticommunism, invoked again and again in the historic suppression of revolutionary politics. And, although these two seem to be fundamentally different errors, they are in fact symbiotic, each reinforcing the other as its natural counterpoint and both rejecting the balance of the “within” and “against” necessary to any truly partisan project.²

Perhaps the most insulting part of the warehouse job was that, shortly before I started training, the union had won what the progressive press referred to as a “historic victory,” resulting in the 2.5-hamburgers-an-hour pay rate I received for nights of backbreaking labor. Union leadership characterized this as “the most lucrative contract in labor history,” winning “more money, higher wages than ever before [and] huge non-economic gains.” The company’s CEO (who makes roughly 436 times the median worker salary) seemed equally satisfied, characterizing it as a “win-win-win” deal that secured “industry-leading pay and benefits while retaining the flexibility we need to stay competitive, serve our customers, and keep our business strong.”³ Meanwhile, all of this was taking place in the wake of long-fought victories by grassroots reform factions within major unions (including our own) and in the midst of a more general increase in support for unionization, especially among the youth.

And, at face value, it is certainly true that the contract was a “victory.” As pointed out by union officials, “workers gain more in this tentative agreement than over the last 40 years.”⁴ But, given the nearly continuous undercutting of real wages, rollback of workers’ protections, and vicious increases in the cost of necessities like food and housing that have occurred over that same four decades, any contract that doesn’t completely capitulate to the company (as the widely-reviled 2018 contract did) can be deemed “historic” in these same terms. What’s worse, in hailing minor gains like this, the progressive press is made to appear either uninformed or outright delusional to those suffering under these labor regimes. On the ground, this “victory” felt more like someone who was getting beaten to a bloody pulp finally throwing back one weak punch at their attacker. Anyone watching could only cringe at the weak attempt, knowing the flurry of violence that was about to be released in response to even such a meager act of defiance. The real question is, therefore, the opposite: with the old union bureaucracy ousted, the “most pro-labor president since FDR” in power, and a massive surge in support for unions spanning the political spectrum, why was one of the largest strike threats in recent history able to secure only a moderate raise, returning the majority of the company’s employees to barely-scraping-by poverty wages, which were then almost entirely wiped out by the effects of inflation? In other words, why is poverty seen as the “reasonable” immediate goal to be fought for and, if won, declared a major victory?

The simple answer is that twenty dollars still buys more hamburgers than sixteen (the last contract’s lowest starting wage, after tax) and certainly more than the horrific national minimum of $7.25, which will not even purchase a burger and a half at current prices. Supporters of these conservative contracts will always appeal to their ability to compromise, negotiate, and win these “reasonable” and real gains for the workers. Similarly, any attempt to vote down such contracts is portrayed as unrealistic or even seen as breaching the implicit agreement for both sides to “bargain in good faith.” By encouraging further militance among workers, campaigns to extend or intensify strike actions may even threaten the union with legal repercussions. This administrative ethic, intrinsic in the basic institutional structure of modern labor relations, thereby serves to suppress any independent, partisan forms of organization that might otherwise gestate within the workplace. For example, over a decade ago as a fast-food worker in Seattle, I helped organize a series of walkouts led by the SEIU, aimed at winning a new minimum wage of 15 dollars an hour. While many of the fast-food workers who participated hoped that this was the beginning of a city-wide unionization drive, they were instead gradually ejected from any decision-making roles within the “movement,” which, it soon became clear, was essentially just a PR stunt for a series of electoral campaigns led by the city’s established alliance of business, government, and labor interests.⁵

 

Subsistence Struggles

Hold the burger in front of your face and stare into the glistening meat for long enough and you will see these contradictions revealed. As the immediate means of our survival, the burger is the natural starting point of class conflict. All struggles begin, in one way or another, as struggles over the terms of subsistence: fights for increased wages, for lowered costs of necessities like housing and healthcare, for adequate support for the enormous and rapidly-increasing portion of the US population unable to work due to (often work-induced) disability, for the elimination of onerous debt burdens, or quite literally for the mere ability to live without fear of being murdered by police.⁶ Struggle begins with survival. Limited to survival, however, it ceases to be struggle at all and instead becomes something more like administration. After all, the easiest way to secure “real gains” for “working Americans” is to collaborate with the companies themselves and with relevant political elites to negotiate marginal victories, winning moderate but material kickbacks for a minority of workers in particular sectors or particular locales. This is exactly what happened in Seattle, where the “victory” of the minimum wage campaign (itself a laughable eleven-year plan to reach 18 dollars an hour by 2025) was buoyed by the money flowing through the city’s tech, logistics, and real estate industries—and, notably, did not extend to the sprawling logistics complexes in the inner ring suburbs, where most low-wage workers had since been forced to flee by rising rents. Politically, the function of the “real gains” is not even to benefit workers so much as to prevent subsistence struggles from getting “out of hand” by taking on a truly antagonistic character and thereby triggering legal action against the union (or leading to even more extreme state repression).

But structural trends in the economy as a whole also ensure that the space for even these moderate victories is shrinking, since the most lucrative gains have, historically, always been secured as a share of generally rising growth rates.⁷ Large manufacturing industries selling to external markets are what allowed wage increases to be linked to productivity growth in the postwar compact between business and labor, such that gains for the working class could be won without constraining the even larger mass of profits that accrued to the ruling class. In other words, even if these gains were often only won through aggressive tactics such as massive sit-down strikes and major riots in factory districts, the compact itself was ultimately non-antagonistic toward the underlying class system. For this same reason, at the global scale, substantial increases in wage rates tend to track periods of rapid growth in industry, and wage stagnation tends to emerge in an economy after the initial growth boom in manufacturing dries up and deindustrialization sets in. After this point, even if industrial output remains high in absolute terms, employment is shed from industry and unevenly split between two, increasingly distinct labor markets: a majority of low-wage, largely localized service occupations and a minority of high-wage occupations in largely international producer services or within the lead firms at the cutting-edge of technological innovation.⁸

As a result, the geography of intense workplace struggle, and particularly workplace struggle followed by economy-wide wage increases, has quite clearly followed waves of industrialization. Pulses of wage growth therefore follow the deposition of new industrial territories across the world: from the heyday of industrial unionism in the US in the mid-twentieth century to places like Japan and Italy in the postwar period, then to the entire series of “newly-industrializing countries” that emerged across East and Southeast Asia in the latter half of the decade. After the turn of the millennium, the trend reached China, where strikes, riots, blockades, and even factory occupations became increasingly concentrated in a few sunbelt industrial centers. In each case, industrial actions were followed by rising wages and then by waves of mechanization and offshoring. Today, as employment in China slowly deindustrializes, the same trend is emerging in new manufacturing complexes in places like Vietnam, Indonesia, and India.⁹

Though none of this indicates that subsistence struggles subsequently decline elsewhere, the expulsion of most of the labor force out of the manufacturing sector has tended to break the link between workplace organizing and the rise in the labor share of income enabled by rapid productivity growth. On the one hand, subsistence struggles proliferate elsewhere: in reproductive sectors, among tenants, in new labor campaigns among relatively atomized service workers, and of course as riotous uprisings that target the endpoints of circulation. On the other, victories become more limited because the space for something like a new version of the postwar compact has narrowed: given the “cost disease” suffered by low-productivity services, high wages can no longer form a virtuous circle with general economic growth in deindustrialized economies. Thus, any substantial or economy-wide gains won for the workers will increasingly come at the direct expense of the ruling class. Subsistence struggles therefore take on a sharper curve, passing more quickly from non-antagonistic compromises with those in power to antagonistic threats against them.

Already, the concrete gains available to subsistence struggles have tended to be geographically concentrated in the few areas where the administrative cores of accumulation are located. It is the excess value spilling from this global process of appropriation—visible as a concentration of higher-paying STEM and FIRE jobs and spillover into real estate, construction, etc., all contributing to a substantially larger local tax base—that then enables cities like Austin, for example, to institute a “living wage” of $21.63/hour for municipal employees while other big cities in the same state, like Houston, still struggle at 15 dollars. Meanwhile, areas further out are treated as sacrifice zones for the deadliest and dirtiest industries, not to mention the vast, and growing disasters associated with our ongoing environmental collapse. Populations subjected to the latter then generate chaotic new forms of feedback via the “great displacement” of population currently underway both within the US and globally, where the migrant crisis serves as the cutting edge of the knife currently dividing the world into different grades of habitability.¹⁰

These new forms of simultaneously inter- and intra-national spatial inequality are precisely what economic geographers have been documenting for years. As I argued in 2014, in the wake of the 15-dollar-an-hour campaign in Seattle:

Because of this placement near the top of the global supply chain … Seattle can in fact afford a broader social compact—so long as it is geographically confined … [the result] will be a continuing geographic concentration of wealth paired with the creation of selective bubbles of social democracy to help buffer these wealthy cores from the true severity of the gap between rich and poor. Social democracy on this miniature scale will be constructed by a revival of progressive, populist, and socialist parties, an increased role for the more entrepreneurial business unions like SEIU, and the continuing growth in the robust philanthrocapitalist network of social service NGOs.¹¹

And this is precisely what occurred over the subsequent years, as some of the richest municipalities and states raised their minimum wages, implemented local versions of semi-socialized healthcare for the poor, legalized marijuana, decriminalized psychedelics, and passed a raft of other progressive social programs. However, since such measures were often solely enabled through alliances with local tech, real estate, and financial interests, they did nothing to actually solve the underlying cost of living crises that they were ostensibly responding to. Now, as the basis of even this tenuous compromise begins to fracture, it is likely that the space for these local compromises will narrow further, and the geographic divergence currently underway will intensify. Meanwhile, the areas left out of this narrowing compact have already seen their healthcare systems stripped down to the blood-soaked bones, their remaining social services sold for scrap, child labor relegalized, environmental protections nullified, and increasingly militarized forms of surveillance and social control deployed against their local populations.

 

Negotiated Defeat

Ultimately, in the approach of those focused on “real gains,” the union is understood to be nothing more than a mediator representing the interests of the workers and making sure that various government regulations are followed. Many reading this today might find such a description to be merely commonsense. After all, what else would unions be? They have never, in our lifetimes, served as agents of social change. But this inherited notion of what a union is and even the idea that it is part of a larger “labor movement” composed of worker-friendly politicians and NGOs operating across a broader “civil society” is itself the result of a long and brutal defeat in which real working-class institutions aiming at far loftier goals were systematically broken apart, violently purged of the communists who had shaped them, and then decomposed. What we call “unions” today merely wear the flesh of the things that they helped kill. Thus, within the commonsense framework deployed by today’s “labor movement,” the basic functioning of the market and the divide between workers and owners—each in their own ways subordinate to the fundamental dictates of profitability, as enshrined in the very structure of the corporation—are never questioned. Unions are understood to be fighting for labor to receive its “fair share” of the total income and are therefore operating from the outset in an inferior, delimited position as mere negotiators or regulators within a framework that they have no power to change.¹² 

From this perspective, the consistent decline in the labor share of income is ultimately due to incidental political choices rather than economic necessity, class conflict, or any sort of long-run structural trends in the ongoing development of capitalist society. As explained by a typical account that adheres to this conservative logic: “while there has been a downward trend in labor’s share of income since the 1980s for forty-two out of fifty-nine countries, that does not necessarily indicate a lower demand for labor overall. It could simply mean that workers have weak bargaining power.”¹³ In other words, the viewpoint offers only an extremely narrow political horizon in which the socialistic goal of ending the tyranny of property is completely abandoned and replaced with moderate intervention in the administration of the unchangeable property system itself, slightly tilting the scales such that workers are apportioned a few more burgers by the very lords for whom they expend their lives in labor—and usually, only so long as they themselves produce these extra burgers. After all, conceiving the goal to be increased “bargaining power” already concedes the entire question of class conflict. Nor is this simply a theoretical position. The basic framework of profit-sharing was enshrined in the original “productivist bargain” struck in the 1950 Treaty of Detroit, “a watershed in the history of labor relations in the United States” which accepted “that collective bargaining would not seek to challenge the distribution of income” by establishing “the principle that annual wage gains would be tied to productivity growth.”¹⁴

Ultimately, this approach treats persistent poverty as some sort of aberration, rather than an outcome actively produced by the operation of our social system. In this narrative, low wages and high subsistence costs are not necessary features of market discipline—the things forcing workers to be workers in the first place—but are instead the incidental result of “corporate greed” metastasizing within the market. In some cases, they are even presented as a breakdown of efficient competition under the weight of monopoly. But the conservative undertones of this idea are easily demonstrated. In this view, there is nothing wrong with the domination wielded by the wealthy over the world, only a malfunction of the market that makes this domination overly onerous. Take, for example, the common talking point that arises in any contract negotiation, in which “record corporate profits” are contrasted to the miserly concessions offered by the company. This is, on its face, always true. And yet the same logic also cuts both ways, since companies use the dips in profitability that occur during periodic economic crises and in long stretches of slower growth as an excuse to eliminate pensions, refuse raises, reduce benefits, and systematically implement tier systems that result in a de facto pay cut for the average worker. Unions, having no response, often just retrench around their core constituency: older, full-time employees in legacy occupations, as well as their own staff, tasked with managing the steady flow of dues and the portfolios of often substantial pension funds.

What’s worse, the vast majority of unions in fact helped to enable the decades of working-class defeats that they now decry, since their basic framework of collective bargaining on the basis of profit-sharing compelled them to force through a series of poor contracts in the wake of frequent crises and an increasing number of “bad years,” as mandated by the dictates of the balance sheet. After the Great Recession in 2008, for example, the Teamsters, the UAW, and nearly every other major union in the country completely capitulated to the demands made by the companies, often working with employers to roll out new technologies and implement company-wide austerity measures justified in terms of “belt tightening.” In the name of protecting their existing constituents, these unions even allowed and, in many cases, advocated for the imposition of tiered wage systems within the company. In the logistics sector, this was visible in the divide between (usually full-time) drivers and (usually part-time) warehouse workers, with each group then further subdivided between older workers with full seniority and solid pensions retained from earlier deals and new “temp,” “seasonal,” “contract,” or otherwise denigrated workers not fully covered by most contract gains. It was as a result of these concessions that “public approval of unions … fell dramatically with the financial crisis, reaching an all-time low in 2009, when the Gallup Poll found that only 48 percent of Americans approved of labor unions, down from 75 percent in the mid-1950s.”¹⁵

 

The New Unionism

The gradual revival and reinvention of unionism in the US has, so far, only slowly begun to climb out of the hole dug by decades of collaborationist concessions. And, although recently expressed in major leadership changes within the UAW and Teamsters, this revival was in fact initiated outside the auspices of the formal labor relations system entirely. The rising popularity of working-class organization—visible not only in the growing popularity of unions, but also interest in tenant organizing, mass participation in anti-police riots and opinion polls clearly showing mass support for them, etc.—was in fact triggered by both tireless wildcat labor organizing within and against the union bureaucracy (already visible in the wave of teachers’ strikes in 2018) and the increasing threat of more explosive forms of class mobilization (as in the George Floyd rebellion of 2020). Similarly, while the politically naïve progressive believes that it was the failed Bernie Sanders campaign that “pushed Biden to the left,” it is hardly a coincidence that the “labor-friendly” policies pursued by the administration over the last four years were only adopted after the downtown core of nearly every major American city was looted hollow and set aflame in a long, hot summer of discontent. This is, in fact, exactly the pattern followed throughout the history of US labor relations: the violent strikes of the Gilded Age gave way to the reforms of the Progressive Era; massive, bloody labor wars in the 1920s and early 1930s were followed by the implementation of the current labor relations system; mass rioting and renewed labor mobilizations throughout the postwar US (and particularly in the South) resulted in the passage of Great Society anti-poverty and civil rights legislation.

The basic lesson—and one that simply cannot be parsed within the framework of unionism as a “good faith” negotiation—is that greater disruption of business as usual, more expansive threats to property, and more organized forms of self-defense against Pinkertons and police are the only path to securing greater gains, even if they also pose the risk of repression. In other words, building genuine working-class organization requires first acknowledging that class conflict exists and, after this, recognizing that this conflict is, inherently, violent. To fight a class war you must, in fact, fight. And yet, time and again, the gains won through class conflict have themselves served to secure the defeat of the conflictual organizations that made them possible in the first place. The very necessity of addressing basic questions of subsistence within the struggle—winning real, material gains that have an immediate impact—soon becomes a cage restraining and eventually starving that struggle itself. Jasper Bernes explains the same basic conundrum in game-theoretical terms. In this model, class conflict is reduced to:

a pair of simultaneous equations for labour and capital, where labour chooses the wage rate (by its degree of militancy) and capital determines the rate of investment (by virtue of its property rights) … While workers in this scenario are naturally inclined to increase militancy as much as possible and therefore increase their consumption, doing so will provoke disinvestment, and thus, counter-productively, lower future wages.¹⁶

And the ultimate result is an aporia in which socialism can never be reached through “a gradual process of socialisation mediated by trade unions and workers’ parties” because, under these constraints (which are precisely those found in the logic of profit-sharing described above), “workers will never choose to move in the direction of total expropriation and seizure of the whole sum of the social product, because any steps in that direction will produce capital flight that will immediately lower workers’ future consumption.”¹⁷ Precisely in order to be “real,” any gains must always be restrained.

These are the same contradictions visible in the glistening meat of the hamburger. Despite the misery of work, the problem is not one of immiseration, per se. Overall, the social system produces enough burgers for enough workers to scrape by on at roughly feudal levels. Every time gains are won, inflation resets the scales and the strikes start again. The entire process is, of course, marked by deep geographic inequity and a certain political contingency, but the basic pattern holds with a surprising consistency throughout the history of capitalism. Even aggressive subsistence struggles pursued to their natural end always lead back to the same losing game. In other words, the true horror of the burger is not that capitalism ensures mass starvation (though it does do this, selectively), that workers’ demands are never met (though often they are not), or that you can’t make a living on two or three burgers an hour (though sometimes you cannot).¹⁸ On the contrary, capitalism is also quite obviously a developmental force, capable of producing hamburgers in historically unprecedented quantities and distributing at least a sufficient amount to the global population, on average. The real horror is not that the system produces absolute immiseration, but precisely the opposite: that it produces an immense material abundance, the scale of which is entirely unprecedented in the history of humankind, and that, despite this, it also reproduces the worst medieval horrors at larger and larger scales. It produces just enough for most workers, all while producing far too much for a small sliver of people at the top of the social hierarchy and far too little for the poorest third of the species. In other words, it is a tantalizing torture. Within capitalist society, abundance can only be secured by simultaneously imposing an artificial scarcity: rather than the workers having access to the total surplus of burgers that they all, collectively, produce, that surplus is held in the hands of the burger billionaires, who own the vast bulk of the meat coursing across the planet.

As of 2023, the richest 1% of the human population, located predominantly in the US, Europe and East Asia, owned as much wealth as the bottom 95% combined. The world itself is therefore already divided between zones of caloric surplus and caloric deficit. But, at the deeper level, this division is also literally what makes you into a worker in the first place, subjecting you every day to the dictatorship of your immediate boss, inset within the grander dictatorship of the company, which is itself subject to the ultimate suzerain: the global market. This series of dictatorships commands the bulk of your waking hours and therefore the bulk of your life. Unless you already occupy the upper echelons, sitting in boardrooms rather than toiling on the lower floors, you have absolutely no economic suffrage. You get no vote in and have no influence over the institutions within which you spend most of your life. At most, you can quit and move to another job that is exactly the same in every major respect. This is the rule of the hamburger. And to topple this tyranny requires more than simply winning more burgers. Even if more burgers for less work may be a necessary initial step, proceeding from subsistence to subsistence eventually leads down into the abyss. Sooner or later, ascending further than subsistence requires a leap: from economic organization to organized partisan conflict or, in other words, from mere survival and self-defense to a holy war against the hamburger and all that it represents.

 

The Meat Inside the Skin

In abstract terms, we can say that the partisan project is always focused on the question of property or, more specifically, the wedging of the property relationship into the metabolic gap separating the species from its subsistence. The hamburger is not simply a mundane symbol of food. It is instead a symbol of the system that has processed mere food into property that can be (in fact, must be) withheld from us until we submit to the social domination of the owners. And you and I are not owners. The sum of our personal possessions is, statistically, nothing at all when compared to the grand mass of meat commanded by the companies, pulsing through the grid. What is needed, then, is not so much a “new” unionism as a return to much older principles of working-class organization, in which any individual union or other form of sustained mobilization around issues of subsistence operates within a partisan ecosystem composed of formal and informal aspects, all committed to the broader political project of annihilating the very conditions that force workers to be workers in the first place. Exactly what this might look like today depends entirely on the local situation, and that larger ecosystem is only in the very earliest stages of development, if at all. Nonetheless, although day-to-day battles over the burger are the starting point of such a conflict, it is absolutely essential that these subsistence struggles be, from the outset, used to construct forms of organization aiming at more than mere subsistence. Anything else is already a failure. The holy war against the hamburger therefore has two aspects, equally necessary: While it begins with a literal war fought to secure and defend specific gains and must retain this pragmatic dimension (especially as repression intensifies, taking on a more explicitly military character), it can only proceed as a social war against the very world that birthed it.

And this world is founded on quarter-pounds of flesh: bodies toiling under the grid, hungry and tired, just to afford a spare few hamburgers before the minor blessing of a fitful sleep in the early hours of morning, woken here and there by the maddened screams of the people forced to live outside, and then by the great grind of construction equipment churning across the asphalt as other workers fueled by other burgers build some new luxury apartment complex across the street, clean and cold and empty. Look into the hamburger. Glimpse the many cows melded into a single, eldritch abomination. See the jungle burned in that same maddened ritual, a seething tumult of green razed to charred black soil, followed by neat rows of soy that stretch like city blocks as far as the eye can see, all destined for feedlot. See the meatpacker clocking out from her twelve-hour shift robed in blood, the farmworker with lungs scarred by a lifetime of fungal infections, the delivery driver who is legally not an employee but an “independent contractor” making less than minimum wage on a bad night, driving a personal vehicle that has its windows smashed out every week by people even more broken and desperate. Imagine the things that you yourself have done to obtain the burger and imagine the things that you will be made to do as the wars kindle in the distance and the oceans rise and anyone fleeing these horrors is left to drown in the wine dark sea or deported en masse back to the ruin that they fled, where they will be forced to suffer the appetites of the corporations that rove across the warming world like monsters through the rubble.

The burger reveals that there are two types of people, in the end: First are those who believe that a technologically complex society is impossible without these horrors or, at the very least, without the continual threat of starvation imposed by the artificial scarcity of basic necessities. In other words, they earnestly believe that people will not work at all unless compelled to on threat of death, and that this alone justifies social domination as the necessary stimulus for the creation of any social surplus whatsoever. Second are those who know that the entire history of humanity demonstrates the exact opposite to be true—that domination is not a necessity but is instead a vast and violent social ritual imposed on people by people and that it can therefore also be overthrown by people. The rule of the burger is, in the end, just as natural or necessary as the divine right of kings. In other words, a technologically complex society capable of producing material abundance (in fact, luxury) for all is perfectly possible and it can be administered deliberatively by all the members of this society without threatening the majority of the world’s population with starvation, and without subjecting millions across the planet to medieval horrors in order to secure the comfort of a chosen few. Moreover, all of this can be done with less energy than we use now, with a smaller material footprint, and on less land put to better use rehabilitating the metabolism of the human species with its environment.¹⁹ But creating such a future requires first recognizing that the point of social struggle is not to work for the burger, to eat the burger, to strike to increase the labor share of income and guarantee more burgers for more workers, or even to seize all the burgers and place them under the control of the workers. The point is to unmake the very way that the burger itself is made. And this future can only be secured through a protracted war waged against the hamburger as it currently exists, against its defenders, and against its false critics.

Now, return to the restaurant along the freeway. Imagine the scene, perfectly American: the smell of grease, the shine of chrome, the glass windows mirrored to obscure the outer dark but somewhere in that darkness you know there is a freeway—you can sense it, like any American can, the asphalt stretched from the Permian forests out to the infinite abyss beyond and the machines shooting across it like comets—imagine it. Notes scrawled across the burger wrappers, the jottings of some madman. I slump back, my limbs slack with sudden exhaustion as if the spirit had, at last, been pulled from me to join those other ghosts wandering there on the plains behind the glass mirrored by the white burn of the fluorescents. These numbers cannot be real, you say to yourself. Hamburgers don’t cost this much. If forty hours a week isn’t enough, these lazy workers should try sixty. You stare out the window into that same darkness, seeing only your own face reflected and, behind you, the hamburgers filing out of the kitchen in their slow procession. How did you get here? You ponder the question. And you cannot remember. You were at work, you think. Or maybe you are about to go to work. The ink on the wrappers bleeds into the grease and when your hands brush up against them the waxy paper is startlingly loud, like leaves crunching behind you in the forest at night.

Inside your stomach, you feel the burgers writhing, as if the ground beef extruded from the meat grinder were so many quarter-pounds of hungry pink worms. They inhabit you as you inhabit the world, recklessly, hungry: “the infinite self that has eaten / Environment, and lives / Alone, unencroached on, perfectly gorged, one God.”²⁰ You feel them pressing up from underneath the skin, insatiably seeking your every extremity. They compel your muscles like strings pulling the limbs of the puppet. Perhaps you have always been here. The worms weave themselves into the diaphanous web of nerves inside the meat. Your touch is their touch, your spine is an obelisk around which they twist in mystical ecstasy, your pain a thing that they can drink. Gaze into your body and you will find the motions of your work encoded by the worms. Muscle memories of lifting, typing, the feel of the machines beneath your fingers. I look up at you like a ghost peering back through that window. There is no traffic on the interstate. But are there shapes moving out there in the darkness beyond the highway? Can you hear feet pounding there through the rows of grain that were once an ocean of root and grass over which the great beasts lumbered forward to extinction? When the worms in your body reach your eyes, you know that they will unveil to you the truth of the hamburger, vulgar and raw and terrible. You do not want to see it. The grill sputters like a dying animal and you look at your phone. Your shift starts soon. Time to go to work.