By Darius Mirshahi
Welcome to the rest of your life. Some of you just graduated from high school and have immediately launched yourselves into the poverty of student life. Others are returning to get new training, to work new jobs, to pay old debts, from previous schooling. Welcome to the trap.
We are led to believe that post-secondary education is our way out of impoverished existence, when in reality we are digging ourselves into deeper holes, and for what? So that we can be more efficient workers for our rulers? To become more dependable cogs in their machine?
So let’s get this straight, they want us to borrow money from them, so that we can pay them to be brainwashed and molded into obedient workers by their institutions, so that we can work for their corporations, so that we can pay them back (with interest of course). That’s right, we’re getting fucked, except it’s more like rape, because we never consented to any of this. We had no say in the world we would be born into. We never got to choose between a free joyful existence, and a life-sentence of servitude. The total domination of our lives by those who control capital was imposed on us before we were born.
We are not here to chart our own paths, develop our own skills, expand our minds, or ‘find ourselves’, we are here to work, because if we do not work here, they’ll find ways to put us to work in even more demeaning and unsatisfying positions elsewhere. Coercion is an apt way of putting it. “Go to college or you’ll end up working at McVomit your whole life”.
So yes, we are here to work, because for the moment it is a less depressing existence than the other options our rulers have made available to us. We are here to work in some twisted reverse paid training scheme that drains us of everything we’ve got.
We trade them all our money, all our time, all our mental and physical energy, the best years of our life, for some vague promise of a less miserable future where they might also be willing to lend us cars and houses to keep us passive, subservient, and most importantly indebted to them.
Debt is their most potent form of social control. This is why they’re constantly pushing you to get credit cards, student loans, car leases, and lines of credit. Once your in debt, it’s hard to get out, and you’ve got to work harder and harder just to pay the interest. The more we play by their rules the more entrenched their domination over us becomes. Freedom isn’t in the cards. Knowing this, and to a certain extent accepting it, we steal small portions of our lives back. We skip classes to learn through our own experiences in those stolen moments.
We call in sick to our part-time jobs in order to go to parties. We drink on the street and throw bottles at cops who raid our parties, even burn couches in the street to block traffic (see Fleming Dr. last year). We commit half-revolutions.
We never go far enough. We skip classes instead of dropping out of their institutions and exploiting them in return. We call in sick instead of organizing with our co-workers and taking over our workplaces from our bosses. We burn couches instead of banks and malls.
We break the law, but only on the surface, so as not to challenge the totality of our dominated existences. Half-revolutions allow this domination to stay in place and still dictate our actions as either obedient or reactionary, and are thus not considered a real threat.
But since we’re half-way there let’s step it up. We can start by asserting our desires, dreams and aspirations publicly and demand that the world find a place for them. Let’s steal back our lives openly and with pride.
Instead of fighting for stolen moments of freedom in secret, let’s shamelessly fight for total liberation from their traps and self-determination for our future.
Your future is in their hands, so lets start breaking their fingers.
