Do yourself a favor and give five minutes of any of your 250 or so labor days this year to El Empleo (”Employment”), an extraordinary award-winning 2008 animation by Argentine illustrators Santiago Grasso and Patricio Gabriel Plaza.
You won’t need any help interpreting the film’s conceit, which makes visible the complex web of relationships in capitalist production: of workers to consumers, employers, and each other; between wage workers and those who transport, educate, and feed them, etc.
Enjoying that computer? A young Chinese woman poisoned herself and her future children while assembling it. Proud of your college degree? A male administrator got rich while degrading nontenurable women faculty to produce it, and a whole bunch of other folks who didn’t have your advantages have been labeled “failures” to legitimate your success.
Further study: Marx’s concept of reification, the way that human relations are mystified in market society, so that “a definite social relation between men…assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”
h/t Ali Zaidi
x-posted: Chronicle of Higher Education
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