alittlepoison

I have had an idea. It starts from a simple premise: Some jobs really suck shit.

Crap job number one: being a squaddie. Putting yourself in clear material breech of Commandment Number 6 (don’t kill people) and suffering the serious consequences (eternal torture, no less) in the name of national defence is a crap job. Other crap jobs include: working in Toys R Us at Christmas; stitching garments in an underground sweatshop in East London; cleaning toilets on Virgin Trains in the middle of the night; phoning people up on a Saturday afternoon trying to sell angry people things they don’t want.

Badly paid, badly treated, unappreciated: these are the essential workers who actually make society work. This is a difficult fact to come to terms with if you’re one of the liberal elite trying to dream up ways of making everyone equal. You’re secretly, guiltily, glad it’s ‘them’ who have to do these jobs and not you or your kids.

Progressives try to assuage their guilt by trying to make the work a bit more bearable for the underclass, setting minimum wages and working conditions and so on, and farming out the very crappest jobs to poor countries far across the sea.

But if there was any possibility that they, or their next door neighbour, or their daughter, or someone they might like to invite over for a Martini, might actually have to do a crap job for the rest their lives, they’d run a mile.

For every one person pursuing a life of lofty goals and personal fulfilment there is another one doing a crap job. No-one should have to do a crap job for their entire life: it’s just not fair.

Here’s my idea.

I propose is a kind of conscription where you don’t have to kill people. It’s called a ‘Crap Year’. You do it at the age of 18. Everyone from the duke to the puke has to do a year, maybe two, of the crappest jobs. You work for a pittance doing the things that society desperately needs to have done, but no-one really wants to do. We would have well-staffed nursing homes. Toilets across the country would be spotless. Burgers would be flipped by the big-boned oafish offspring of royalty.

The benefits would be enormous for all concerned. It would mean that the burden for society’s most menial jobs would be shared across all classes and races. It would be the best work experience imaginable. It would be like a proper qualification. It would give employers something by which to actually judge your ability to work.

There could be a whole load of ‘Crap Year Organisations’, devoted to finding fresh-faced young people the crappest employment possible. I’m going to run one, it’s just going to be called ‘CRAP’. I’m going to trademark it tomorrow. New university students could be spared those dire freshers’ anecdotes about yak-milking in the Himalayas. Never again would a blurred photo of a sunset be introduced with the words ‘? and this is when I found myself in Goa’. Everything that needed to be said about the Crap Year could be communicated with a hollow-eyed nod of recognition.

Marx posited a future where the labour-saving devices had reached such efficiency that everyone would have to do very little work in order merely to survive: work would be become something that the individual did for his or her own personal fulfilment, in which ?
“nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in an branch he wishes… to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as the have to mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

Marx knew a thing or two about a thing or two. I love him.

Is it a bit like slavery? Some nasty libertarians argue that income tax is a form of slavery. In a sense they’re right. But I draw the opposite conclusion to theirs. We live in a state: get used to it.

Is it conscription? Who cares? I like the idea of conscription. Apart from the fact that the army’s the grisly avatar of our state’s imperialist bent conscription is OK by me. If I thought the army was useful or necessary, I’d be very happy to be conscripted myself. This is a serious idea. I am serious person. Just call me Mao. In the words of a dude with silly facial hair and a devoted fanbase: “Serve the servants.”