Do You Deserve to Retire?
For too many taking part in the discussion of Social Security this morning, the concept of what retirement is in an industrial society seems to have gone completely from the minds of the Liberal pundits and talking-heads. If you ask them, retirement and other late-stage care for labor are like some sort of bank account, a pile of cash so that the elderly and enfeebled-by-labor can remove themselves from the working class,and therefor, from productive society in general. Indeed, the disgusting plethora of takes regarding our elder-laborers implies that they are seen as something to be discarded, their input to the demands of the great social machine, now expended, being all that they ever had to give of value.
Therein lies the poison of our current Democratic leadership and their psychotic adherence to liberal economic policy: they cannot refrain from dragging the population to the edge of neo-liberal capitalist ideology wherein the worker is no more than a meat machine meant to hold the gears of industry turning, an item to be discarded and replaced the moment their efficacy begins to fade. And they cannot help themselves. Beholden as they are to corporate interests and locked in a losing tariff-war with China, they, alongside the GOP, have long-since-failed to protect US industry and now attempt to do so years after they allowed the deindustrialization of our cities, padding their own pockets and reinforcing their own power while driving prices up for all and supplying increasingly inferior products than those of our international competitors. These people do not care about retirement, and the likes of Ben Shapiro are mouthing the desires of our entire political apparatus, even if it is only dressed in the language of the “deplorable” today.
Retirement, as a Leftist concept, is insurance and reciprocity; it is a recognition of the raw labor that you have input to the societal machine irrespective of what that labor looked like. It is our belief that all humans deserve dignity, all labor deserves recognition. If you have spent your life, your muscle and bones and blood, your time to build society, you deserve comfort at the end of your days. This is non-negotiable from a Left perspective. And this does not mean “give the old a bunch of money so they can f*** off somewhere without being a burden;” it does not mean that we pass off our responsibilities for these workers to the banks and a half-funded government, assuming their needs can be managed easily so long as they have a checkbook and a pen. We are beholden to these people, their inputs to our system are indispensable and cannot be boiled down to simple money as the Liberal seems to believe.
To “retire” from labor does not mean a removal from society, yet it is the norm to remove the elderly from our homes, places of work, and (now universally-absent) third-spaces as they become less-able to input directly into the demands of society. We are surrounded by multi-billion-dollar “retirement communities” and “homes” which isolate us from these workers and we act like that is normal. From a Progressive perspective, this is not only unacceptable, it is a betrayal of social values full-stop.
We do not believe that humans - like slaves - are simply the sum total of their physical ability to labor, they are intersectional workers who can apply their minds to problems long after the strength has fled their limbs; their experience is as valuable to their labor as their ability to physically apply it in life, yet we act as if only the latter makes a human a valuable worker.
When people talk about Social Security, they are only saying “retirement,” as one does with a favored old tool. When we say it, we mean “being secure in society,’ even, and especially, after your physical means have begun to fade. The elder laborer who has expended their timenergy/potential-labor to build society deserves security; yet in a Capitalist society, that can only mean one thing: money. Security means so much more, and one would not claim to be secure in their home simply because they have a stack of cash that they sleep on (quite the opposite); it is a word implying systems of support, not band-aid solutions. This means that “retirement” as a concept is, in itself, a Capitalist bastardization of socialist policy that demands recognition for life-long labor, a profane misunderstanding of what the value of the individual is relative to the labor-needs of society. One cannot truly retire from society, cannot stop providing labor in some way, because they must still exist at a most basic level, providing domestic labor free-of-charge now that they “have more time to relax” or doing all the little things that they “never had time for” before being forced to retire on a pittance.
And it is a pittance, the guarantees of at least financial security in old age having been stripped away slowly and tied to finance capital through 401k schemes and the like which make the entire, false, premise of retiring little more than a pipe dream. Indeed, many who “retire” from the workforce never truly do that, regardless of the non-recognized labor they must engage in, and are instead forced not out of the labor market, but further down the labor-ladder, their work now demanded in an industry deemed as less-valuable (fast food, retail, etc.) and their acceptance of this managed by the expectations set by their “social security” check’s ability to permit them “retire” from formal labor. Most don’t, finding the so-called benefit to be much less-than as inflation is driven perpetually higher by corporate greed and outrageous market manipulation by tech-bubble stocks; many work far beyond the point where society has said you should be able to take a step back and enjoy the fruits of your labors for all, dying on-line or one day just not showing up as they can no longer physically meet the demands of contemporary work.
Once again, you deserve to move through phases of labor as you age and your experience grows. Your benefit to society is not measured by your ability to drive a nail, drop off a letter, or run a checkout line; your value is not equivalent to moving boxes, driving trucks, planting seed, or cleaning rooms. You deserve to be secure in all stages of life irrespective of your ability to directly input in the most “valuable” forms of work in society, the current discussion around Social Security shows that Liberals of both party-designations can only see you through the lens of disposable parts.
These are things which the DNC and Joe Biden have promised to solve for years, and yet no solution has been implemented or even presented in the last 50-years. While they proclaim they can get nothing done, the oldest legislature in history is telling their younger siblings that there is nothing to be done while they invest in their own well-being with the funds we have all paid in. Our taxes are used for bombs and poisons and walls, yet when we ask for our personal, tangible, daily needs be addressed, “Vote Blue.”
Photo: US Government, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
