An opera singer gives up

responding to this smart piece:

Why I'm Retiring from Staged Opera at 43 - OperaWire (read this first then come back)

so the dynamic clearly is, a culturally valuable practice cannot be sustained by wage labor under our capitalist mode of production. we have alternative means of deciding it is worth doing, like the way the music makes us feel. that feeling exists outside of the verdict of the market of ticket sales, etc, whether it can generate sufficient revenue from sufficient numbers of patrons, to allow for a laboring class that can have adequate living conditions and flourishing for themselves and their families. what can an opera company do? it can’t force the patrons to have more disposable income. it can’t pay the staff more than it can afford just because it’s the right thing to do or because the workers need the money; even if the boss wants to, the numbers don’t add up. if they increase prices too much, they could fail to sell and lead to lower revenue than before. they could try to yield more sales, but many are operating at a loss even with full houses and making up the difference with donations. so rather than courting more attendees you focus on upgrading attendees into donors, individual and institutional. maybe you can balance the budget if you get enough donations. maybe you can have some left over to make a rainy day fund or give raises or staff up or come up with new ways to spend it. you likely have to skew your productions in various subtle ways to match the interests of the donors to the possible exclusion of the preferences of the general audience. but donations can never be assumed as an ongoing operational budget, and an accountant wouldnt want to have fixed payroll expenses relying on unpredictable donations (what if they all go away during a recession, etc). the workers need more every year because the costs of living increase: housing, food, clothing, which the worker has to use currency to obtain, earned from working, as subtracted from the surplus value of the service they performed or thing or experience they created. the exchange value of the currency is meant to remain stable as costs relate to wages. i can make $10 an hour if a sandwich costs $5 or $100 an hour if it costs $50, as long as i can work for an hour, eat a sandwich using a half hours wages, keep my body alive to keep working, and have enough on the side for whatever else i want or need so that i can keep living and working, without stopping my work by dying because i can’t pay to keep myself alive. if i make $1000 an hour and sandwiches are $5, etc, maybe i’m doing great, i can put aside a lot to save. or i can come up with more ways to spend it, a bigger house, nicer meals, whatever. but for the sandwich to still be $5 the sandwich maker is getting a lot less than me. maybe they can’t keep doing their job without dying. now i can’t enjoy being a highly paid singer because my favorite sandwich shop closed. i would rather pay more since i can, so that we can live together in a better place, i sing and you enjoy my songs, you cook and i enjoy your food. why are we living together in a place that is killing us both and making it so singers can’t sing and chefs can’t cook? why are we for example working instead as a claims denier for a big health insurance company. a job that person 1 does, and hates his life, and feels bad that he is hurting person 2 every day, just to try to keep himself alive, so he can go back to work and keep hurting more people. the company and worker (person 2) pay the insurance premium, the insurance company denies the claim, the surgery is not performed by the doctor, the “economic activity” of the medical procedure does not take place; the company takes the funds it has made vs the medical expenses it has covered that year after administrative costs and adds up the difference as profit. this is done on behalf of the shareholder, person 3, for whom the numbers on a page go up, and an abstract process determines that person 3 now has more power over some amount of resources and materials, the ability to direct the productive capacity of others on his (person 3’s) behalf, to fulfill various desires or even just to keep pushing the numbers up higher to have control over even more tomorrow.

can anyone refuse to participate in this process? as an individual, a person can try to live without it, as a beggar (relying on the generosity of others who stay in the system) or as a self-sustaining hunter gatherer and/or farmer. or you can choose not to participate by choosing not to try to keep yourself alive, by dying. but generally a refusal must be collective. labor struggles provide a glimpse of this when organized groups refuse to work under certain conditions, those imperiling their physical safety, etc. but workers could refuse to work for wages entirely. could refuse to participate in the system where their production is exploited for the profit of another person, the capitalist, who is performing a kind of mirage by successfully pretending to be in charge of the system, lying his way into creating the truth, if it is a “lie agreed upon,” if the other actors in the system respect his invented position. one line of argument would focus on the undercurrent of violence upholding the system, that police and militaries exist to prevent the self determination of the working class. in a limited sense the cops and soldiers are also workers trapped inside the same system, with some special nasty twists (they shouldn’t really be said to have unions, eg) but still even so they’re in a version of the same place. rather than hate themselves, they may come to feel esteem for the special position they have and the power they get to exert over others, the harm they can cause, even on the behalf of capital instead of what might be said perhaps naively to be their truer interests in liberation.

but let’s imagine all the workers get together, cops included, and say, we’re not playing this wage labor game anymore. we’re doing our own thing together, and you, the capitalist/owner, have no part in it unless you do some real work. you can’t just pay anyone to commit violence to get your way. if you commit violence yourself we’ll stop you. what you’ve pretended was yours is not. you can’t stop us from “taking” from you what was never yours and already belonged to all of us. the land, the food and water, our own time to do what we want with our lives.

but now we need to come up with something else we can structure so we get what we need from life. how to harness our productive capacities and creativity and responsible use of our resources, so everyone can live well, can flourish. not every job is equally desirable to perform, but some still must occur. “health insurance claim denier” could be abolished, but the trash has to go out, the dishes have to be washed. from each according to ability and to each according to need, sure, but what apparatus picks Jimmy to be the garbage man, and what gets him to do it without staking his life on it by force? and to this there are all kinds of interesting suggestions. (make it a shared part time thing! offer extra rewards! the sense of collective responsibility will be so strong that he’ll volunteer!) i want to think more about all the ideas. the “social solidarity economy” is one guise i’ve thought abstractly about. how can it balance a comprehensive philosophical vision, likely the product of limited individuals, with its need to be democratic, to be both agreed upon by all (or close enough to be better than anything else), while also balancing a conflicted array of interests, and also capable of enough long term stability to not fall apart from minor changes in leadership, in strategy. but overall the vision can be clear. the singers should sing, and flourish. if they can’t, what value is the system, why should we persist in maintaining it? If life's for livin' what's livin' for? the effort of our lives today should be figuring it out, in as many little ways as possible, where we can chip away at it.

My company is trying to solve an environmental crisis by building greenhouses on the waste heat of data centers instead of the heat polluting the earth. That means growing fresh food for the communities that host them.