Several hours have passed since I was last inside one. Yet I now feel as though something vast and indifferent—a Lovecraftian Old One—has gouged a deep wound in my heart.
Physically there is nothing wrong with me—aside from the twenty different coronavirus subvariants which must be cha-chaing back and forth along my blood-brain barrier and god knows where else in my body at this moment. I’m rested and have had a good breakfast and lunch. It’s afternoon, a gray and rainy Maine day outside. I’m in my home living a privileged life beyond the dreams of most of the people who have ever existed. I have a loving family, and some of my friends still talk with me. Even in America these days, few people have the time, money, or energy to compose self-indulgent writing pieces like this one.
And yet I feel a pervasive psychological malaise ensnaring me like a spiderweb, one which only seems to catch me on days when I am forced inside the nearest grocery store.
The grocery store is an abomination. Aside from the pandemic and climate change, it represents the most spectacular visible failure—at least within the horizon of my everyday existence—of human potential. On so many levels it is a monstrosity, a mockery of humanity, a juggernaut of grotesque vampirism, a siege of our collective futures, a destruction of brilliant universes so full of joy they are almost beyond comprehension. It is the moloch of capitalism boiling us alive inside its brass stomach.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
It’s hard to explain my grocery store hatred. I’ve been meaning to write about this for months, maybe years, but the grocery store malaise is usually so overwhelming that it stupefies me.
Many times while writing these words I stopped and doubted myself. I continued only because the grocery store is a dialectical experience, one bound to our entire society and cosmos, and I feel compelled to express my feelings about it, as a therapeutic exercise if nothing else. Billions of years from now the gravity waves seeping from these horrors will ripple through galaxies at the edge of spacetime.
The grocery store is a nexus of our societal collapse, what the reactionary writer Borges might call an Aleph, a point which contains all points.
ORGANIZING THIS ESSAY
I will act as Virgil, guiding you, the Dantesque reader, physically through the hellish grocery story, with many meandering comments along the way. The parking lot is the first effrontery which I encounter as I approach this place—
Ah, but wait. If America somehow became a workers’ state, everything about its towns and cities would change. Rather than being built around cars, they would be built around buses, subways, bicycles, and our own feet—with all the accessibility our disabled comrades could ask for.
Public transportation, after all, fights climate change and improves health as well as solidarity. In most cases it is better than private transportation. It also means eliminating most parking lots.
CARS
This particular grocery store’s parking lot is full of cars, which are physical avatars of capitalist alienation, neoliberal meritocracy, and especially the stagnant tide of boomer-ism which is drowning the world. They are massive loud disgusting metal boxes loaded with heated seats equipped with cupholders and eighty different comfort settings (“Which recliner says you?”) that at every moment of every day hurtle at ludicrous speeds along millions of miles of asphalt roads, driven almost entirely by people who are either plastered or incompetent, needlessly murdering or mutilating tens of thousands of Americans and countless animals every year, to say nothing of the poison they pump into the air which is slowly asphyxiating us all. Engels called this phenomenon social murder.
But don’t worry, you can personalize your four-wheeled nightmare machine by slapping on bumper stickers. These express whether you want polite or impolite fascists to be running the government on behalf of the bourgeoisie—or whether you consider yourself to be above this particular fray and prefer instead to show off how many national parks you’ve visited or which colleges you’ve attended.
Dozens of these cars greet me in the parking lot. All are virtually indistinguishable from one another despite the different brands and colors as well as the designs which are slightly modified every year and packed with ever more computer chips and ever more complicated and pointless technological apparatuses, each requiring entire African mountains or jungles to be dynamited and then filled with armies of child slaves who search for cobalt and lithium with their bare hands while crying for their parents beneath the cracking lashes of their masters.
Inside my own death mobile, which I drive because this is the only way I can get to the grocery store (public transportation is almost nonexistent where I live), I must put on my mask before I go inside in a vain effort to stave off the Swiss cheese-i-fication of my brain, lungs, or other vital organs via coronavirus, which has been brought under control in workers’ states like Cuba—with a longer life expectancy and a stronger and more resilient and environmentally sustainable economy and a more democratic society than the Christian Saudi Arabia, the white supremacist bourgeois dictatorship that is the USA—but which is still raging out of control and carrying off hundreds of mostly Black and Brown people every day in America.
I also live in a tourist trap. This means that there are plenty of out-of-state license plates in the parking lot as well as lots of anti-mask, anti-vaxx vacationers waddling about the grocery store aisles, spreading contamination and pestilence with every step, each like Mr. Hankie the Christmas Poo, who cannot move without smearing whatever he touches with excrement. A majority of Americans actually want mask mandates, but the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie does not care.
A few months ago at the grocery store I saw two white anti-maskers dragging their three small unmasked children along the aisles. Their little girl was coughing so loudly I could hear her from the other end of the store. There’s no way she was old enough to have been vaccinated. This was before coronavirus vaccines were approved for young children.
OUTSIDE THE LOBBY
I get out of my car, grab my reusable bags, and walk toward the grocery store. It resembles a huge cardboard box. My car is unlocked because I live in the whitest part of the whitest state in the country, segregation having been abolished in America only in name. Legally and politically it vanished; economically Jim Crow is stronger than ever. The ruling class tosses some Black and Brown actors our way via a few movies, TV shows, and political offices for the sake of appearances, but for the most part everything is worse than it was during the Civil Rights Movement for almost everyone living in the USA by pretty much every imaginable metric. For one, overall life expectancy in the USA was usually increasing in the 1960s, but it has been in decline for the last several years.
As I approach the store entrance, I make way for a Jamaican worker—who is married to one of my spouse’s coworkers—and we nod to each other. He is unmasked. He has the same first name as one of my children. We’ll call him T. He is here because Jamaica is ruled politically by Jamaicans but economically by the British and the Americans and other Europeans, who (as is the case for all countries in the Global South) refuse to allow its economy to develop in order to—among other benefits—ensure a steady flow of workers to shore up the reserve army of labor and deflate wages inside the imperial core. Almost half the Jamaican people on Earth live outside Jamaica—mostly in the USA, Canada, or the UK.
T works here at the grocery store. As soon as I see him, I ask myself why he is unmasked. My guess is: bourgeois cultural hegemony, imperialist super-profits being used to bribe the working class inside the imperial core, plus a lifetime of fascist psychological abuse which induces Stockholm Syndrome.
Whatever the answer is, T is getting something out of capitalism that I’m not. I used to believe that people were just brainwashed, but I now think this explanation is limited and simplistic. It’s no different from believing that a billion Chinese people are brainwashed—or that Jews control the world and have mystified the masses.
In reality, people brainwash themselves. Propaganda only works if it can connect with people’s material lives. (If propaganda always worked, the field of public relations would not exist.) With T, his lack of masking could be due to not wanting to be ridiculed every day by his chud coworkers. He might own land in Jamaica, or he might be expecting to inherit some.
For a lot of people in America, it’s easier to hope that capitalism will somehow get better than to declare, even inwardly, that you are against it. It might just be simpler to exist as a liberal in the grocery store—to find a way to live with your chains—rather than to embrace Marxism and despise them. Socialism is more popular than ever in America today, but the term is notoriously loosely defined.
Regardless, it’s probable that T is, like most people, not crazy about the overall situation in America today. For T, I strongly suspect this because the grocery store advertises its wages (currently $13/hr, $8 short of Maine’s cost of living assuming the work is year-round and full-time) in the lobby and is always begging people to apply for jobs there. Something like half of grocery store workers move on to a different job within a few months, which likewise leads one to suspect that working at these places sucks.
Beyond the mere problem of wages, the working day in the grocery store must be boring, depressing, and unrewarding, at least when business is slow. Customers also openly express contempt for workers here, a general societal problem of manners which has been worsening since before the pandemic, almost certainly caused by the fact that capitalism just ain’t capitalizing like it used to.
CAPITALISM AND THE DEATH OF MANNERS
It’s not just you. These days, TV shows, movies, video games, food, and experiences are all bland and boring and expensive because—due to capitalism’s inherent tendency to monopoly—it has become impossible to increase or even maintain the quality of consumer goods.
For instance, you can only produce a movie, according to a recent viral interview with Matt Damon, if you’re sure that it’s going to make back the initial investment, plus advertising costs, plus profit, which in this day and age can amount to risking hundreds of millions of dollars, meaning that film studios will collapse if they gamble on anything except a sure deal—which has turned out to be Marvel movies.
This wasn’t always the case with Hollywood. In the relatively recent past, film studios could rely on DVD or video cassette releases, which would take place months after a given film’s initial release and provide a second wave of funds. But DVDs aren’t really a thing anymore, so Hollywood needs to make its money either via movie theaters or streaming.
This latter prospect is also problematic because there are now too many streaming services and all of them are racing to the bottom in order to attract customers. The stock prices of major streamers—Netflix, Paramount, Disney, and Warner Bros (which owns HBO)—have all been declining for quite some time. The only streaming provider which seems to be doing relatively okay is Amazon, but they’ve been in trouble for the last year, and their stock price is certainly higher because they are literally the everything store and offer much more than just on-demand movies and TV shows.
An additional issue is the lack of time and money to enjoy the products that are being offered. Inflation, mostly caused by capitalist price gouging, means people have less money to spend on consumer products. There are only so many hours in a day, and if everyone is exhausted from working and being sick all the time, they will start to wonder why they are paying for streaming services (for instance) when they can’t even watch yet another mediocre, forgettable Marvel movie—about flying superheroes punching each other and leveling cities—without falling asleep during the opening credits.
Since the birth of modern consumerism following the second world war, the deal the haute bourgeoisie has made with basically everyone else in the imperial core has been: yes, your life might suck, you might feel alienated because we are literally alienating your labor from you, but we can provide some cool and cheap consumer goods to kind of smooth things over in the mean time.
In the fifties, sixties, and seventies this meant cars, houses, refrigerators and other kitchen appliances, but starting in the eighties and nineties it graduated to the internet, computers, video games, smartphones, and mass air and cruise travel—this last factor being a major contributor to the endlessness of the pandemic.
But now that capitalism has reached yet another crisis, there is—seemingly—nowhere to expand. Phones appear to be about as small and fast as they can get. (And do you really need to blow another thousand dollars on a new phone every year just so you can browse Instagram slightly faster?) Marvel movies have become challenging to tell apart. Food shortages are becoming more common. Video games either don’t work or aren’t fun. Travel has become more difficult, especially in the last few months, due to the pandemic killing or disabling airport workers, plus oil companies gouging prices, plus relentless government bailouts making CEOs and investors wonder why they should trouble about providing any kind of service to begin with—since they repeatedly get rewarded with golden parachutes regardless of whether their airplanes actually fly people to their destinations. It’s simpler (and cheaper) to just bribe a few government officials into bailing out your company.
And then if passengers manage to get somewhere, everything is on fire when they arrive, either because of climate change or protestors burning whole cities to the ground. If the US arms industry wants a war with Russia, they get one, but then inflation grows so severe in places like Europe that people there are no longer able to spend money on entertainment, which means less money for the entertainment industry and lower quality films and TV shows.
Capitalist society has grown so fragile and complex that if one faction of the bourgeoisie (those which own private prisons, for instance) wants to increase profits—which they must do in order to survive—another faction (industrial farm owners, which overwhelmingly employ the kind of people the police love to throw in prison) will suffer as a result.
The USA also has the largest per capita prison population in the world. Time Magazine recently argued that 39% of America’s prisoners don’t need to be in prison, and it is notoriously difficult for these people to find jobs once they are finally free—meaning that prisons make it generally harder for employers to find workers.
Let us also recall that millions of Americans cannot work because they have been disabled by long covid—in addition to the million or so who have died of covid (one of the highest covid per capita death rates on Earth and thousands of times higher than China’s) because the bourgeoisie thinks there are too many poor people around anyway.
There are many more examples of different factions of the bourgeoisie fighting with one another and inadvertently weakening the capitalist system—just as the kings of France and England weakened feudalism during the Hundred Years’ War—just as Ancient Rome’s slave mode of production was weakened by constant civil war after the empire expanded as far as it could go.
Another example: increasing cruise ship visits means more diseases and fewer workers—which means restaurant owners can’t find any workers to exploit. And another example: if you make a truly good video game, it could mean that huge numbers of people cancel their Netflix subscriptions. Mine more oil and coal, and climate change will burn down national parks or deluge entire cities—which hotel chains cannot exist without.
The haute bourgeoisie is doing far better than the petite bourgeoisie—they’re richer than ever—but it can’t increase profits—the oxygen of capitalism—without threatening to destroy the entire system. Under the capitalist mode of production—just like the feudal mode which preceded it—everybody wants a piece of the pie. But because the capitalist relations of production (the profit is private but the labor is social) are now strangling the capitalist forces of production (the urge for the capitalist economy to leap to socialism just as it once leaped from feudalism to capitalism), the pie can only grow so much.
Is it any wonder that the capitalists and their running dogs are obsessed with Elon Musk, who has been promising for years to help them escape Earth and find new worlds to exploit? It reminds me of Da Vinci imagining flying machines, or Heron of Alexandria desinging a steam engine. The feudal and slave modes of production were incapable of building the machines imagined by these inventors, just as capitalism is incapable of sending people to Mars. The initial investment required—hundreds of billions of dollars at least—makes any kind of immediate quarterly profit extremely unlikely. And besides, why invest in Mars when you can get rich right now by pumping money into private prisons?
Socialism will do much more than merely send people to Mars, however. It will turn the blue planet red, and the red planet blue.
CAPITALISM AND THE DEATH OF MANNERS (CONT’D)
All of this means that, in general, it’s become harder to find satisfying treats to make people forget that we live in a capitalist hellscape. Thus the general rudeness, thus—perhaps—T’s lack of interest in wearing a mask to his job at the grocery store.
There is no escape from this reality. If you, a white male, go golfing, the mountain next to the golf course is on fire. Either that, or you are attacked by samurai. If you go to a restaurant, the waitress will film you if you pinch her ass, the video might go viral, and then your business will be boycotted into oblivion. If you play a video game online, another richer player will defeat you because he can buy better loot crates.
Either that, or any Black trans woman character you encounter in the game will remind you of the fact that the world’s workers are growing stronger. Why else are capitalists being forced to make games that appeal to more than just the most reactionary white males? And actually, plenty of popular games, movies, and TV shows were “woke” in the ‘90s—Star Trek: The Next Generation is almost as woke as it gets—but nobody cared because labor aristocrats and the petite bourgeoisie did not feel, at the time, that the walls were closing in. The imperial core could enjoy a little liberalism, as a treat. Since then, the situation has obviously changed.
Why else is T possibly afraid of white folks yelling at him for masking in the grocery store? Immigration is down and millions of people have been deported over the last few years. At first glance, this might make white people happy, but then who is supposed to actually do all the hard work in America? These various factors make it harder to find workers, particularly for small business owners, whose outdated business model is incapable of competing with wages offered even by infamously draconian companies like Amazon. As I recently heard a white petite bourgeois boomer exclaim, upon exiting his pickup truck at the gas station: “Nobody wants to work anymore!” Restaurant owners, in particular, rely on immigrant labor for much of the work that takes place behind the scenes. Now they can’t find it.
And if you do actually manage to find workers for the restaurant you own, at this point they’re probably going to be American citizens rather than foreign nationals, which means they can engage in class warfare from a much stronger societal position—demanding higher wages while also working as little as possible. As a result, understaffing at restaurants is widespread, and the staff that shows up is not in the mood to tolerate the usual barbaric behavior. Thus the recent bourgeois complaints about quiet quitting. The unionization rate in the USA also appears to be increasing in 2022 for the first time since 1983.
This is the explanation for the general decline in manners. They’ve always been bad in the imperial core—since only objectively terrible people benefit from or make excuses for capitalism—but they definitely seem to have gotten worse. Either that, or phone cameras have allowed us to see how terrible they’ve been all this time. The omnipresence of surveillance technology is a sword that cuts both ways.
MASKS
Let us return now to our grocery store. Despite the fact that capitalists are fucking workers harder than almost anyone in history has ever been fucked, few workers inside the grocery store here—including T—are masked. Almost all the workers are either elderly, obese, or both. Roughly half are women; they tend to work the cash registers while the men work the meat section in the back. We are also in Maine, so nearly everyone is white. This particular grocery store chain is owned by Dutch billionaires, who keep the misery here going because of the few pennies they manage to squeeze out of every purchase. I assume that each of these Dutch billionaires looks, thinks, and acts exactly like Geert Wilders.
Profit margins for most grocery stores are between one and three percent. The average for restaurants is five percent. The most profitable companies on Earth (Apple or Aramco for instance) currently profit at about twenty-five percent. In earlier ages, profits could rise to several hundred percent in certain utterly barbaric industries. (The Dutch East India Company, a mercantile rather than a capitalist enterprise, recorded profits of 400%.)
After all, the more miserable the labor, the lower the wages, and the more profitable the enterprise. And yet profiting at Dutch East India levels has been unheard of for quite some time. Some of America’s most famous companies (Uber, for instance) lose money every year, though they have been around for over a decade. At this point they’re just casino chips for billionaires who cannot find another place to park their cash, and they’ll be shorted into oblivion the moment their existence becomes less useful than their nonexistence.
Profit margins are generally low, and getting lower. Yet here in Maine, aside from a nearby eugenics lab of colossal size as well as a handful of do-nothing nonprofits and prison-like public schools (whose liberal school boards rescinded their mask mandates and ended coronavirus testing months ago despite thousands of Mainers perishing of the disease), this grocery store is one of the few year-round employers in the area.
The local green friendly community family-owned hotels, restaurants, and AirBnBs only function in the summers. Their owners spend the majority of the year in Florida screaming at waitresses and giving themselves either coronavirus or skin cancer. They’re also notorious for stealing from their workers—above and beyond the surplus value that every capitalist (even the nice ones) must alienate from his work force in order to stave off his own inevitable proletarianization.
Sadly, we have only begun to explore the capitalist inferno that is the modern grocery store. The saga is far from over.
UP NEXT: MINOS