The worker is not some abstract byproduct that lives between the threads of a trim suit or coveralls. It is not some skinsuit that you hesitantly immerse yourself in, sticking your arms forwards into its arms, shrugging its shoulders onto yours and stepping your feet into its feet.
“Honey, can you zip up the back?”
You do not come home at night and slough it off, hanging it on the coat rack to air or quickly bundling it for the washer. The worker does not come off.
No, it sticks to you like layer upon layer of oil paint upon your skin; laid by the careful coordinated brushstrokes of your every social contact. A master forgery. And no matter how much you scrub, the paint remains, and new layers are added with every soul-sapping day. The worker does not come off.
No, the suit stays on. The coveralls cover all. And you are stuck inside until you caramelize, liquidate, and coagulate.
You even take on the mantle yourself and wrap it close—a disguise fading to reality—because let us be honest there is no space anymore that would tolerate a human being. This is a society of workers working on the making of more workers for the great making of the worker. It is only right to take on the shroud that makes up this new reality and let the old self, the human self, be forgotten.
“So it goes” you say, and that marks another day of the slow decline of resistance; if such was ever to be had. Layer upon layer and it becomes unsure where flesh stops and paint begins.
From the moment of birth, you were painted with a strong pink or blue stripe down your forehead, then whisked away to months and years of idle skin-sketching by your parents. They sent you to preschool and primary where experts filled in the lines and painted freestyle some scenes of their own. Growing up, you are gifted stencilings by friends, printings by mentors, and school comes with a great big brush to whitewash however much of you they can reach. You are tossed out a motley thing. Some parts of your skin are treasured art. The majority is carefully copied dogma and knowledge fit for a narrow array of purpose, given to you by fellow receivers who know not what they have or why they give. Yet they carefully copy the designs onto student upon student. You are somewhere underneath, but it quickly becomes hard to tell where. And when you move you make strokes and printings of your own, painting yourself onto the world, but do you paint yourself or copy the paint on your skin?
A new stage of portraiture begins. Have you found work, school, prison? The process that continues is quite the same: each is full of painters eager for your hide, looking to produce a grand portrait on it. Eager to determine your type. For there are so many things to be! And all sum to the same thing: a slave to wages, money and spending. There is no question of the type of human you are, no, only of what type of worker. Your place is laid out, and we will paint you into it until you fit, then chuck in a few buckets of color afterwards to even out the look of the overall portrait. For your painting is just one small part of an ever-moving tapestry of society.
Not a human society, of course, but a labor society; an economic society. And all your cultural and personal figments sum to this: the making and spending of hard currency. And the paint leaches into your skin, poisoning what is beneath until you are the worker. And from the reality of such an existence there is no escape.
The worker: the creature of doing, of usefulness, of economic responsibility. All for unclear purpose, yet all deep necessities of the soul. An anxious, achievement-dependent, fitful creature. Only believing in love as a reward for utility. Only believing in utility as economic. Believing in economics as a religion that has the firm advantage over all others in that its proponents get to eat. Eat and sleep and work so that you can eat and sleep and work. And these are your prayers: to finally be human not worker. Therefore you leap whole-heartedly into the life of the worker. Necessity and a society based on it make a mockery of human life.
Hear this: the worker is made. They are not a human, but the product of a human being run through a machine of great artistry until nothing recognizable—such as happiness or innocent joy—remains. And it is a great increase in pain that the machine gets better every year.
But come now, you live your life, and leave your mark. That, or at least the mark of the marks made on you. You raise up children and sketch beautiful designs on their skin, though you know not what they mean or where from. I just hope you remembered to copy those few special marks; the ones gifted by dear friends, parents and mentors. Or can you no longer tell them apart from the other ones, from the layers upon layers of paint and pencil laid upon your flesh? Surely it was that one or that one. Surely this mark was original from my birth. Surely this was part of the original me. What’s the matter, worker? Can’t you tell?
