The Intangible Fruits of Our Labor

Vladimir Serov, Worker (1960)

2,086 words

Dad: Son, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Son: I want to be a pool cleaner.

Dad: That’s a stupid answer. What else?

Son: I wanna be a pizza delivery boy.

Dad: No, no, no!

Son: A plumber, then.

Dad (turns to mom, whispers): He’s found the tapes.

Me and my zoomer friends have a fun game: We tell each other what we consider to be stupid old people jokes, such as the one above. We then laugh in exaggerated voices while explaining the jokes as if we’re retarded. So, if I were recounting this joke to my buddies, I’d probably say something like, “Haha, the father expects the son to seek money and prestige in his career, but get this, the minor has been exposed to pornography, which the mother and father enjoy, hohoooooh, spicy, and therefore he sees employment as a means of performing fornications and adulteries, huehuehue.”

It’s a testament to the overwrought and contrived way in which the younger generations interact with the world that even a crude joke cannot be enjoyed on its own merits. No, the real comedy has to come from the meta-analysis and adversarial generational politicking against the boomers and their elders, as well as a hyperdramatization of how the mouth-breathing caricature of someone earnestly enjoying the joke would respond — but that’s a story for another day. For now, let’s look at this crude boomer joke using the driest and most boring of economic lenses.

Young Johnny does not want to be a plumber, a pool cleaner, or a pizza boy, because those jobs have inadequate economic benefits. In the modern day, being a plumber might bring you a pretty penny (plumbers made more than me when I was a highfalutin attorney), but pool cleaners and pizza boys don’t make a lot of money, and besides, none of them constitute “glamorous” work. The father expects an answer like “doctor” or “lawyer,” because those professions bring money and prestige. The son, having watched the pornographic tapes, concludes that being a plumber, a pool boy, or a pizza delivery guy will get him laid. Being younger, he prioritizes access to sex over access to wealth. But classic conservative thinking on this is that women like money, and therefore as a doctor or lawyer he should have better access to women as well. Don’t we see the many doctors, lawyers, and successful businessmen with the blonde trophy wives and their enormous fake tits?

The reality is different. Women like money, but they don’t find money attractive. Female attraction to men ultimately derives from dominance and mastery, of which a man’s wealth and status are mere proxies. Women are adept at reading proxies of mastery because this eases their decision-making process about male attraction. Thus, a man’s position in the male hierarchy (which we called society at one point) will inform a woman’s attraction to him, but only insofar as this information is not overridden by more important information about the man’s dominance and mastery. A plumber demonstrates his direct mastery over things when he fixes them. The female hindbrain is very direct; she’ll find the man using heavy tools and machinery very attractive because it demonstrates direct mastery over things.

She’ll find the man demonstrating mastery over other men even more attractive, most of all if his mastery comes in the way of violence. She’ll even find the cad, the lothario, or even the serial rapist attractive because these are all aspects — legal or not — of mastery over women, and since other men have hitherto failed to stop him from practicing mastery over their women, then it is a sort of mastery over men as well. Mastery on loan, such as exists in the work hierarchy — for example, the authority the foreman has over the line worker –, has been given and can therefore be taken away. Mastery through violence or personal charisma (but more often than not only violence) cannot be taken away. Rich men marry trophy wives with big tits, but those wives find themselves inexplicably attracted to the working-class plumber who has mastery over the sprawling McMansion’s inner guts, or to the poor bodyguard whose potential for violence keeps their husbands safe.

We can go into the realm of male-female attraction some other time. It certainly is something to think about if we are to increase white fertility rates, but right now we will focus on economics. Let’s take the relationship between the successful businessman with the McMansion, the enormously-bosomed trophy wife, and the working-class plumber who’s come over to unclog his toilet and perform other duties (huehuehue) in the house. In the barest possible terms, the labor of the businessman — or more precisely, his earning capacity — is directly exchangeable for the plumber’s labor. Indeed, provided that the businessman is wealthier than the plumber, his economic capacity B can be expressed in multiples of P, where P represents the plumber’s economic capacity. Accordingly, the fruits of the plumber’s labor — the unclogged toilet and the properly installed pipes — are transferable.

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The plumber finishes — his work, I mean — and goes home, but the fruits of his labor remain in the businessman’s McMansion. The work performed by the plumber is also fungible to a certain degree; any other plumber of similar skillfulness can do it (although this kind of labor is scarce). What the businessman cannot attain from the labor of the plumber, or the bodyguard, or even the pool boy is the raw masculinity which comes from skillful mastery over things or violent mastery over men (or the potential to do so), even if he can enjoy other fruits of their labor. This is not to imply that being a businessman doesn’t come with its own forms of mastery. Indeed, mastery is the primary reason why people want to run their own business, even though they’d often make far more money as someone else’s well-paid employee.

With all that in mind, where are we going with this?

The modern, interconnected, neoliberal world depends on the transferability of value and fungibility of things. In theory, the value derived from everyone’s economic capacity can (or should) be transferred across borders and across cultures without problems. This is in many ways what the mission of the World Economic Forum is: to integrate the world’s many markets into one; the marketplace of the Global Village, which the Western neoliberal elite has strived for since sometime in the early 1990s. The value of countless people’s labor moves around the world effortlessly, as products and as financial instruments.

No longer do countries and corporations seek to have factories. Rather, they seek to have “IP portfolios” and proprietary rights on designs, processes, and blueprints. The computer I write this on was assembled in China out of parts made in Israel. Apple tells me it was “designed in California.” Apple at least owns the factories where its computers are assembled, inasmuch as anyone can own anything in China. Other companies merely repackage products made by other entities, selling their consumers the brand. Nothing is manufactured in-house; everything is outsourced, because everything is fungible and every form of value is transferable, i.e. it can be done somewhere else, by someone else, and then bought off the shelf and resold under the appropriate brand name.

Even the Dissident Right isn’t immune to this development. The value of my labor will be transferred throughout the world using Counter-Currents as a distribution mechanism. What I know, you will know, even though we’ve never met and likely never will — and it will happen instantly.

The problem with the neoliberal free-flowing value model is that it loses sight of the fundamentally nontransferable value lost by alienating transferable value. Having domestic factories doesn’t just mean jobs for the lads, but also means camaraderie for the lads, increased technical skill for the lads, and women observing the lads’ mastery over things as they construct computers, build bridges, make steel, mine coal, and manufacture goods. The lads themselves in turn feel masterful due to their labors, leading to confidence and increased success with women. It means the lads will spend their paychecks locally, creating even more jobs in the vicinity and invigorating local businesses.

But why should the neoliberals care? Their ledgers say that profits have been increased by moving the jobs to China, and that value now created in China is easily transferable here, so why are those lads moping around on the Internet and voting for that evil racist Cheeto? Can’t they see that Line Go Up on their ledgers?

It is not my intention to lament the loss of industrial jobs in the West. Too much has been written on that topic already. I would rather draw your attention to the non-transferable value of jobs, industry, and all the other things that neoliberalism tells us are completely transferable. Hence the example of my opening joke: Money can be made in many ways, but few jobs offer the unique combination of displaying mastery to women while there’s nobody else in the house as plumbing or pool-cleaning, hence little Johnny’s wish to become a plumber when he grows up. It is something that is intrinsic to plumbing and non-transferable even to those who are plumbing’s beneficiaries. It is therefore not what we have lost that intrigues me; it is what they have lost that does.

The problem of modernity starts with the problem of metaphysics — of conceiving of reality as that which can be seen, measured, and apprehended by the conscious mind. To the neoliberal elite, nothing exists outside their ledgers. They’d dismiss my arguments as nonsense. They’d dismiss my notions of sexual attraction as non-quantifiable and therefore unscientific — and therefore false. If it cannot be plotted on a graph, it’s not real, or at least it cannot be measured, which means we can’t account to it, and somewhere along the line they say that it is not a scientific category and therefore not real. They therefore literally cannot see the non-transferable value which follows those things they have transferred overseas. Some of it may be callous, because the loss of non-transferable value happens to other people, but I think their core reasoning is that they genuinely believe only in the measurable, the computable, the fungible, and the manipulable. And so they have lost a lot of their own non-transferable value.

Leaders don’t just pop into being. Sure, there is a genetic component to leadership, but leaders have to be bred, taught, trained, and finally, they have to be given starter leadership roles. One does not go from a university directly to running the Department of Transportation. One has to start small. In sending all the industry overseas and centralizing all productive and governing activities into the vast managerial bureaucracy, however, the neoliberal elite has left no small and middle-sized entities in which its junior members can train to become leaders before they’re given the reins of the big organizations.

Likewise, by destroying hierarchy, the elites have denied themselves the confidence of being an elite, substituting increased contempt for the proletariat (sublimated as extreme wokery) for it. Ironically, the neoliberal machine which provided them with immense power and wealth has shredded away the means by which leadership is perpetuated, thus ensuring that there’s not enough leadership or technical competence left to keep it running for much longer. This is why the system is increasingly relying on oldsters to keep everything running: They’re the only ones who know how to run things and how to be leaders.

Joe Biden might genuinely be the best the Democratic Party has to offer; everyone else might just be too inept, unschooled, and untrained in the ways of leadership to run things. The centralizing effects — local and subsidiary governments losing importance in favor of national governments, national governments losing importance in favor of global institutions — also mean that there’s no cursus honorum for the elite to go through so that they’ll be prepared for leadership. They’re all, as the Z Man of the Z blog would put it, hothouse flowers. And they’ve lost that through the system they created.

This is but one weakness of our enemies, I am certain they have many more, and I do not know them all. But I am sure that they can be found in the crevices and shadows of the non-transferable, the immeasurable, the difficult to comprehend, and the unscientific. If we at least become aware of this idea space, we can use it to further weaken them.

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