After watching The Big Short, I decided that it would be worthy to focus our attention to the people on Wall Street. Regardless of how you see them, no one can deny the absolutely ridiculous amount of money they leave with a day. I mean, Forbes magazine reported that just a Wall Street intern can make $71,300. For those wanting perspective, a semester at CBU costs $15,500, not including other fees. Basically, these summer interns could buy two years of our tuition. If we went to a public college, like Memphis (average semester can be up to 5,000), they could pay off our entire four years there. Honestly, I could keep going on with this comparison. My point is, these are people making a gross amount of money.
Can we say that they are just like us in a sense, though? Most of these people are merely pawns in a game. They still have CEOs to answer to at the end of the day. They are still struggling, just like us, to make a living, even if their wage is extremely higher than ours. In Marx's writings, Alienated Labor, he mentions specifically, "the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker." To me, this is the ultimate quote that can be used to connect Wall Street wolves to us. They work hard to produce things they do not necessarily own themselves. They are alienated from their work. They become a pawn to someone else. The power in their work, literally holding the economy together, makes them powerless. In a sense, they are still answering someone else, and they do not have the power they necessarily thought they were. So, in the case of the summer intern, sure they are making enough to pay off two years of my college, but their work is too powerful. They cannot maintain the balance between the two, they have to keep working and pumping out more money for their investors or whatever they do. They become powerless in their own field.
For me, this was pointed out in The Big Short when the Wall Street workers realized the loophole in the housing market. Essentially, though each man profited from it in some way, they were powerless to stop this. They knew the consequences it spelled out for everyone else, but they literally could not stop it. They had to keep up their same pace and no one would believe them. They became powerless to stop their own world from collapsing, so they decided to make a profit from it instead. Still a weird way, but I think this really showed how powerless they truly were.
Another argument Marx points at is the "alienation of man-to-man." When workers get invested in their product, they put their whole life into it, and lose a sense of being human. This is the easiest thing to see in Wall Street workers, I think. They become so detached to others that they do not see the harm in what they are doing. Many people claim that Wall Street rips them off, makes them go broke. The workers pay no mind to that. To them, they must keep going, and keep producing the money that they aim to seek for their employers or for personal greed. They no longer see themselves or the way they are treating other people. I think this could potentially be why they are so ruthless in their ways.
For The Big Short, this came to me in the way Jamie and Charlie cheer when they realize how much money they had just gotten from their deal. All they see are promotions and fame, but then Rickert reminds them of the grim situation – that people will suffer from their gain. Their lack of humanism is astounding, but it points to what Marx is talking about.
All-in-all, as much as I want to criticize Wall Street workers, I think they might fall underneath the same harsh system that we do. We all want to see the bad side of them, but they are also a worker, used by the few rich people in the world for products. They have the same struggles as we do, just on a way more privileged level. They're bad guys, but they're bad because the system helped develop their habits. After watching The Big Short and reading Marx, I am a tad more sympathetic to them.... now if only they'd be sympathetic to me and pay off some of my student loans.
Enjoyed reading your post Destiny.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that one of the more powerful quotes Marx says is "the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker." I also like your subsequent thought behind that quote in relation to the Wall Street workers. Like you say, many times these workers become a pawn to someone else. They lose their human identity. Often times, their bosses and the big corporations just view their workers in relation to the money they make. They views their subordinate workers as instruments for money, not human beings.