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Jose Luis Coraggio: Another Economy is Happening |
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Page 6 of 27
By analogy, the relationship of capital to labor is social structure. Seen from the point of view of a worker, who has nothing to sell but labor power, and who has nobody to sell it to but an employer (capital personified), what comes first is getting a job. Once the worker has a job, the worker has money. Then the worker can have a life. He or she can buy food and clothing, cough drops and tea; she or he can rent an apartment and perhaps buy a house, ride the bus and perhaps buy a car. The worker can marry and have children.
The analogy with the building also brings out a point Coraggio makes in his discussions of social structure. When the building is finished, the steel girders are no longer visible. They do not meet the eye of an untrained observer. By analogy, the task of the organic intellectual who works in social movements, who understands social structure and whose heart beats with the hearts of the people, is to coordinate the objective with the subjective, where the objective is the seldom visible social structure, and the subjective is the daily experience of the people.
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