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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

In my View [11]

In my View [11]

Five men are sitting in a cubicle between a doorway and another closed door that leads to an inner office. The palms of their hands are sweating. They grunt and light cigarettes and twist this way and that as if the wooden bench on which they are sitting were not only hard but red hot. The first man is old and thin and scraggy. The second man is a heavily built Samoan. The third is a schoolteacher who has got tired of teaching. The fourth is a robust, energetic, stocky man in his thirties. The fifth is a teenager in jeans looking for his first job.

One by one they rise and go inside. One by one they come out again. The first man has not got a job. The reason is plain enough. He drinks too much. He has shambled in and out of a hundred jobs. He is like a cog that has lost its teeth and can be dispensed with. The industrial system has used him and finished with him.

It is not so plain why the second man has not been employed. He is capable and healthy and literate. It may be because he is a Samoan. But if that is the reason, nobody will ever tell him so directly. He can spend a lifetime wondering about that kind of thing. New Zealand, as we know, is a country without race prejudice.

The third man did not get a job because he had acted suspiciously in abandoning schoolteaching to take up manual work. The employers very reasonably felt that he might be some kind of Leftist crank who’d stir up trouble in the union. The back of this union had been broken very nicely by the Government some time ago; and what remained of it never had any problem in getting on with the bosses.

The fourth man got a job. He had no ideas apart from his trade. He was page 60 of Anglo-Saxon descent. He was also a friend of a friend of one of the men doing the interviewing.

The fifth man (the one who is not yet a man) did not get a job. But the palms of his hands sweated and the cramps began in his stomach and he shifted from one haunch to the other just like the other men. He was just beginning to learn the humiliation of being a man with only his labour to sell, when the employers don’t particularly need that labour. Inside the office one of the interviewers said to him:

‘Why do you grow your hair long?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s our business. It’s us who decide whether you get a job or not. You’d better learn to keep a civil tongue in your head.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

He was not sorry; but he wanted the job. After he came out, it occurred to him that it had been a waste of time saying he was sorry, because he didn’t get the job after all. And he picked up a lump of concrete from a building site, a lump as big as his two fists, and heaved it suddenly across the road so that it hit the kerb on the other side. He remembered the old, burnt-out man, the Samoan, the schoolteacher (he remembered him as the man with glasses) and the stocky man in his thirties who got the job. He knew something peculiar had been done to him, something that had hacked away part of the roots of his self-confidence, very deep down.

Karl Marx could have told him that he had just been regarded by others as a commodity. A slave on the auction block whom nobody even wanted to buy. Marx would have called his state of mind alienation. Marx’s explanation would have been narrow and imperfect. But it would have been the beginning of an explanation. Marx’s solutions would have been violent and inadequate. But they would at least have offered something to do.

The boy got drunk that night and was run in for swearing at a policeman. He didn’t know why he swore at the policeman. The policeman put his private social theory into action by thumping him when they got down to the cells.

Though I am not myself a Marxist-Leninist, I find that the best lens for looking at modern industrial society has been given us by old Karl Marx. Perhaps because he was Jewish, he knew the exact place where the hammer hits the anvil.

1969 (588)