It weirds me out when people talk about saving small businesses. I’m 34, and I’ve been working since I was a teenager. Almost every small business I’ve worked for has stolen from me—and I’m not just talking about surplus value. I mean that these businesses agreed in writing to pay a certain wage and then, after I worked for them, didn’t pay it. Working for the government or big business or nonprofits is also obviously exploitative, but at least they tend to pay what they say they will. Small businesses—local green family-friendly pillars of the community—can’t even manage that. So, fuck ‘em.
RESTAURANTS
The first job I ever had was as a bus boy at a local restaurant. I think I was 14. This was in a touristy part of coastal New England where billionaires and millionaires owned (and still own) a shitload of empty mansions on one side of town. The other side of town used to house the bootlickers who served these billionaires (and who almost certainly had klan robes in their closets), but now most of those people are either a million years old or they’ve moved away or are burning in hell. Nearly every house around here has since become an AirBnb that’s unoccupied for at least nine months out of the year.
The restaurant in question was (and still is) owned by a woman everyone calls “the dragon lady.” Nobody who lives within a hundred miles of this place will eat there. They must have some kind of a deal with the local hospital, because if you even look at the food in this restaurant you’re guaranteed to start puking and shitting everywhere.
Not even many tourists bother with it, and yet the owner never really seems to do much. She drives a red corvette and spends her winters screaming at waitresses in Florida, so my suspicion is that she’s using her restaurant to launder mafia money. Fourteen-year-old me lasted there two days. On my first payday, she told me that those two days had been an unpaid training period. Strangely enough, she had never mentioned this before! I walked out and never went back.
Her relatives have lived in the area probably since the first whites came to steal the land from its indigenous inhabitants about two hundred and fifty years ago. Half the people who live here year-round are New Yorkers who left the city a few decades ago; the other half are all related and have been around since the late 18th century.
This latter group of problematic white folks are all over the place, and most of them are not okay. I’m not sure what the dragon lady’s boomer kids are up to, aside from bowing and scraping whenever the billionaires and other people in Epstein’s notebook snap their fingers, but one of her millennial grandkids ended up in prison a few years ago after he led the local police on a crazy chase around town following some kind of domestic dispute with his spouse. He hid inside his home, and fifty cops surrounded him and were about to pull a Ruby Ridge on his ass, but his mom showed up and actually ignored their demands to stay away. She rushed inside the house and convinced her son to come out with his hands up. After two or three years the good old boys released him from prison, and I run into him every now and then around town. When we were teenagers he was one of the kids you could never get near or be alone with since everyone knew he would beat the shit out of you.
His kids, who are in elementary school, are “keeping special ed teachers in business,” to quote a teacher who has been working in special ed for decades. We had been talking about how the local white fuckups can’t make ends meet, are addicted to fifty different kinds of drugs, and are abusing the shit out of their kids. I’ve seen the dragon lady’s great-grandchildren wearing aprons and working at her restaurant, and an acquaintance who worked as an ed tech for one at the local school told me she had quit because this girl was impossible to deal with. Lest I sound callous in discussing this family, I should make clear that capitalism—and not some vague idealistic concept like “personal responsibility”—has destroyed them. There is little hope for them outside of re-education.
As a teenager I washed dishes at a few more restaurants in the area. One paid on time and in full; another did that and even threw in free dinners for workers. The first place is owned by a mom and pop couple of Never-Trump Republicans, now Democrats who have gotten rich by exploiting mostly Jamaican labor and ramming as many gargantuan cruise ships into the town harbor as possible. The wife is in charge of the local Indivisible chapter and is obsessed with civility and reaching across the aisle to work with fascists. Her Indivisible chapter consists of a few retirees who supported the Iraq War but are now very upset about the diabolical Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Biden’s lifelong opposition to abortion isn’t an issue for them, but when the Supreme Court—oh, forget it, you know what I’m going to say.
The second restaurant I mentioned in the last paragraph, the one which gave us free dinners, went out of business after one or two seasons. The more humane the owner, the less the chance the small business will turn a profit. A former bar owner once told me that her business had failed—and it’s not easy to fail when you’re selling alcohol—because she had given away too many free drinks to her friends.
THE KENNEL
As a teenager I also worked at a local kennel. The owner paid me on time and in full. Yet shoveling frozen dog shit over my shoulder and into the woods got old fast, and the place seemed like a prison for animals, so I only lasted a few months.
A fellow worker there once told me about her idea for a children’s book. It was going to be about a farmer taking a new chicken on a tour of his farm and showing her how every animal has a purpose there—the horses, cows, sheep, dogs, cats, whatever. At the end, the farmer grabs the chicken, heaves an ax into the air, and gets ready to chop her head off. But then at the last moment he puts the ax away, releases the chicken, and says that she has a purpose here too—making eggs. I’m thinking now of the meme with Lord Farquad pointing, laughing, and saying: “The worker has fallen in love with the system that exploits her!”
The kennel owner also had this bizarre habit of talking for the animals. Whenever she met a dog or a cat, she would say something like: “She says she’s hungry!” Or: “She says she’s excited for you to go on vacation!” The owner did this constantly. It was unbearable. Back when I was on Facebook a few years ago I would sometimes see her on community forums complaining that the local schools were too expensive and the school buses were always deserted. This, in an area which sees millions of tourists arriving in half-empty gas-guzzling SUVs and cruise ships every summer. “She says she’s full of shit!”
I’m guessing the haute bourgeoisie (people like Jeff Bezos) also have incredibly annoying habits like this, but we never interact with them in person and they own the corporate media, so we rarely hear about any of it, with the notable exception of E~L~O~N showing off his various mental illnesses on Twitter. Workers, however, are forced to interact in person with the petite bourgeoisie all the time, so we have lots of stories about their bizarre methods of existing.
COLLEGE
In college I was so privileged I didn’t need a job. In the summers my sister and I helped our mom with her gardening business. We were almost always her only employees. She’d spent her entire career fundraising for nonprofits, but after a local Christian charity fired her because she was a woman, she launched a sexual discrimination lawsuit which resulted in her being blacklisted from her profession—forcing her to take up gardening to make ends meet. That lawsuit began when I was in high school and only ended when I was in college, but thankfully she found a good labor lawyer, and we won. Gardening with her was probably the easiest job I’ve ever had. We didn’t make much money, though. I once asked how much she made, and she told me she never brought home more than $11,000 per summer.
MY DAD - AN IMPORTANT INTERLUDE
My dad is a guitar player who has worked as a professional chef in kitchens for decades. All of his bosses—every one—lied to him and stole from him, sometimes to the tune of thousands of dollars. At the last place he worked at, the owner promised my dad health care if he joined, then immediately reneged on the promise after my dad fulfilled his end of the bargain, explaining that it was too expensive. This small business owner was also, by the way, kind of strange. Although he owned a restaurant and worked in the kitchen, touching things like raw meat and eggs all the time, he never washed his hands out of an apparent fear of encouraging antibiotic resistance. And yes, this guy was a libertarian and almost certainly an anti-vaxxer.
When I was in high school in the 2000s, my dad complained about these owners all the time. Nobody hated George W. Bush more than my dad, who also despised the corporations which run the country. Yet when Obama took over, my dad ceased to complain about these problems, and by the time Trump rolled around, my dad was complaining about his fellow workers most of the time, without ever mentioning who had hired them in the first place or the possible systemic causes of their laziness, incompetence, hostility, or video game addictions.
It was a major disappointment for me when my dad told me a few years ago that unlike Trump, George W. Bush had achieved positive things. (What those were, he didn’t explain.)
While my dad has spent his life as a worker, he comes from a petite bourgeois background. Many family members are doctors who own their practices. He also recently inherited a big chunk of change and retired just before the pandemic began. Had he been forced to continue working in restaurants, I think he would either be dead, disabled, or radicalized by now. But due to his ascension to millionaire status, he has spent the last few years isolating at home while making excuses for the Democrats. When I ask what they’ve done for him, he brings up Obamacare. When I then ask him to show me how to sign up for health insurance—something my mom always handles—my dad, who can barely turn on his own iPad without nearly giving himself a heart attack, refuses. (In South Korea, where I lived for years and which we will discuss later in this essay, everyone automatically has health insurance, no signup required.)
In our conversations my dad and I can go on and on about how slavery is legalized in America thanks to the thirteenth amendment and how more people have died of covid under Biden than Trump and how Operation Paperclip was and is a thing and how all American presidents are mass-murdering war criminals, etc,. etc. If he talks with me for long enough, he ends up agreeing with everything; if I bring up these topics a week later, he seems to have totally forgotten them. Both of my parents likewise watch CNN and read The New York Times every day despite my repeatedly begging them to stop.
The funny thing is, my dad has been a musician all his life, and has even achieved some success, performing in front of crowds of thousands. No one has ever disputed the fact that he is a truly great guitar player. His bands always follow a democratic (communist) model—all the workers make decisions together and split the profits evenly. But the idea that this should be the case for all workers everywhere horrifies him—because the racist gamers he was forced to work with in various kitchens should never have any kind of power over anyone. He is unaware of the fact that after the revolution succeeds, all gamers will be forced to mine rare earth metals with their bare hands in Africa until they die of exhaustion. The enslaved African children who are currently doing this unpleasant task will be brought to America with their families (if they want) and given the gamers’ homes and possessions.
SOUTH KOREA
I graduated from college during the Great Recession, and ended up teaching English in a public elementary school in South Korea. This is an example of how neo-colonialism provides a safety valve for white workers in the imperial core. Instead of working shitty jobs in unaffordable American cities and joining Occupy Wall Street—which is what I almost certainly would have been doing if I hadn’t gone abroad—I was working a job that paid a few thousand bucks per month. It came with a free apartment, lengthy paid vacations, and great health care; it also allowed me to pay down my student loans. This situation was far from perfect—since I needed to spend about twenty hours per week among screaming children in classrooms where the decibel level exceeded that of jackhammers at close range—but it slowed my radicalization for years. I was a liberal for every moment I lived in South Korea. I remember that while I was there, someone online even mentioned that foreign English teachers in South Korea are an example of neo-colonialism; I dismissed that claim out of hand and refused to investigate further (since doing so would have established that the claim was correct). As imperfect as South Korea is—more about that later—it did a far better job of providing for my material livelihood than the USA ever has.
After two years I found myself married to a Korean nurse and doing private tutoring. To facilitate this tutoring my spouse got a business license as well as access to government wholesale retailers. This meant that she was able to buy clothes, for instance, that would have sold for hundreds of dollars for like, twenty bucks each. We just bought some of these clothes for ourselves, but we were supposed to resell them in a shop for ten times what we had paid. It was ridiculous.
In many ways both the South Korean and American governments bend over backwards to make small business work—and not just for small business owners themselves, but also for workers who aspire to betray their class and ascend to the hallowed rank of the petite bourgeoisie. Although apologists for capitalism make the ridiculous claim that business owners have a right to expropriate workers’ surplus labor because the capitalist class is the one that takes the risk of opening businesses in the first place, in reality there are countless forms of corporate welfare which capitalist governments provide in order to make opening a small business as easy as possible. LLCs, insurance, and bankruptcy laws (to say nothing of interest-free and soon-forgiven PPP loans and many other kinds of bailouts) mean that you can’t lose more than your initial investment, while the police keep your workers in line and the corporate media labors obsessively alongside both public and private education to convince the working class that capitalism is human nature and if they haven’t become billionaires, they have no one to blame but themselves.
The reality is that the bourgeoisie takes virtually no risk by opening businesses while workers take enormous risks to their physical health alone just by showing up to work during a pandemic. And besides, if it really was so risky and scary to be a business owner, why become one at all? Who is forcing people to be business owners? Is there something wrong with being a worker in an exploitative mode of production like capitalism?
Despite griping endlessly about how difficult it is to run a business and how many agonizingly difficult executive decisions they need to make for every second of every day, no business owner has ever willingly given up his capital in order to become a worker. If business owners fail and are proletarianized and become workers—which shouldn’t be a problem for them, since the system is always totally fair to everyone, right?—this is only because capitalism (and its inherent monopolistic tendency) forces them out.
Capitalism’s monopolistic tendencies also explain why, if you come from a petite bourgeois background and want to start a business of your own, your options are limited, at this point in history, to opening a restaurant, taking out twenty loans to buy twenty houses in order to turn them into AirBnBs, or getting involved in the wonderful world of cryptocurrency.
That’s pretty much it. There’s nowhere else to go. Although now that I think about it, I guess you could also deal drugs? A few people also make a living these days through OnlyFans, Patreon, YouTube, or Twitch, although they probably qualify as workers or labor aristocrats rather than small business owners because they don’t own their means of production and can be forced off of those various platforms at any time. Am I missing anything else? Maybe you could open a car dealership or a McDonald’s somewhere? That sounds exciting, doesn’t it?
If something makes money, millions of people are already doing it. Virtually every aspect of American life is already dominated by monopolies or cartels which will crush any competition long before it becomes an issue. If you manage to invent some kind of useful machine, for instance, there’s nothing stopping vast conglomerates from either stealing your idea, buying you out, or bankrupting you with their armies of corporate lawyers. Silicon Valley—one of the few places where petite bourgeois entrepreneurs might be able to vault into the ranks of the haute bourgeoisie—has not had a success story like Facebook or Amazon or AirBnB for over ten years. Our food comes from Amazon or Wal Mart or other chains; fuel, transportation, internet, medicine, and media are all dominated by a handful of private companies.
And yet—forgive me for quoting a Batman movie—“the night is darkest just before the dawn.” Engels once wrote somewhere that the American proletariat will only radicalize when it realizes that it is no longer possible to make money from buying up land. That land, after all, is what attracted their ancestors to America in the first place.
My spouse, sadly, is a liberal—admittedly a Bernie Sanders liberal—who has always aspired to become a landlord, but she has been forced to admit lately that the excellent wages she receives as a unionized RN here in America will, nonetheless, never allow her to buy a house to rent out, since housing prices are rising much faster than wages. Eventually prices will collapse—history has shown repeatedly that they cannot rise forever—but then BlackRock or some other conglomerate will snap up every foreclosed house in the country. If they themselves go bankrupt, the government they own will bail them out, and pay for this by printing money, which is itself paid for via imperialism—the fact that, for every $2.50 cup of coffee you buy at the local café, only a penny goes to the Central American farmer who actually farmed that coffee in the first place. The rest of the money goes to capitalist-imperialist middlemen in the USA. If the Central American farmer complains about this arrangement, CIA-backed death squads will exterminate him and his entire family.
And so like the vast majority of workers around the world, my spouse has nowhere to go, and no one she can depend on save members of her own class. As a result, in her better and more open-minded moods, she will sometimes express Marxist opinions without even being aware that she is doing so, decent human being that she is.
[END OF PART 1]