Call for Submissions — Orlando as a World Working Class City
“…as a world class city…”, any observer to an Orlando city council meeting should be forgiven for thinking that this is some sort of weird spiritual mantra repeated by the mayor and the city commissioners. For there does appear to be a belief on our city council, that the more this is said, the more likely it will be to becoming true. For a city so reliant on tourism as Orlando is, this needs to be true, at least from the city council’s perspective anyway.
What about from the perspective of the working class? Are those of us who trade our labor for wages really living in a “world class city”? When the city council uses the term, they are referring to cities like New York, Paris, or Tokyo; large, prosperous, and culturally rich cities. Like most official aspects of Orlando, it is not a thing of substance but rather, a tacky facade. Our public image is a plasticky and obviously hollow thing. Bright and fun for tourists, but empty on the inside.
To much of the working class, Orlando is “world class” in another, more disparaging way. Orlando is a city of low wages, shitty jobs, homelessness, foreclosure, bankruptcy, and sprawl. We may not be on the same level as the slums of Bangladesh or the favelas of Buenos Aires, but that is of no comfort to those living in motels or on the street, struggling to survive and raise families. Many of us are immigrants, refugees, and in the wake of hurricanes Irma and Maria, our Puerto Rican comrades, forced to flee the homeland our country claims to protect. We are a diverse city, but often divided on what should be meaningless lines of ‘race’, ethnicity, and national origin.
This is not to deny that Orlando is not a place of wealth and opportunity. Beyond the bourgeois, and the more successful petty strata of that class, there are members of what can be termed “professional working class”. The well-compensated doctors, lawyers, and administrators, who trade their labor for a wage, but a good one, often with health care and other benefits. To these so-called “white collar” workers, Orlando looks more like how our city council wishes to show it as: pleasant, prosperous, family friendly, and fun.
So again: what is Orlando from the perspective of the working class? Like quantum phenomena, it is both of these things at the same time, yet neither. In the United States, we often focus on the racial aspects of our history, at least from the Left, and we should. This country, our country, was born, raised, and still subsists on bigotry, slavery, and genocide. We cast these things into the color of the flesh of entire peoples, and had it forced upon us, and we should never forget this. However, we should also be conscious of that other pernicious barrier within the working class: the color of our collars.
Bigotry is born of hierarchical orderings. The very concept of race, so dubious in retrospect, was made ‘scientific’ in order to justify the oppression necessary to accumulate ‘new-world’ capital. The neoliberal order of the present seeks to divide us into the worthy-working class, read: educated, hard-working, and resilient; and the unworthy-working class, read: uneducated, lazy, and fragile. This framework easily encompasses both the racist vanguard of the MAGA movement, as well as the supposedly tolerant and piously ‘woke’ #resistance. That is to say, that worthy/unworthy distinction is just as prevalent among those who ascribe to racist genetics and ethnic isolationism, as for those who call for means-tested, yet racially and ethnically inclusive, social support.
If there is one lesson from the ancestry of our collective peoples that we should be most cognizant of, it is this: no one, absolutely no one, is unworthy. This is what the red banner stands for. It is the blood of every peasant, every serf, nomad, industrial worker, miner, and laborer, that has pooled in trenches, at the bottom of lynching trees, and is seeped into sacred lands across this planet. Many men and women across time have, in their various tongues and writings, come to understand the necessity of unity to achieve an end to exploitation.
In our era, in our region, this is the exploitation of the worker, by the parasite who claims their labor as their own, the boss. In Orlando, this is the tyranny of the theme park, of Disney, that delightful place whose workers have no say in “the magic”, how it is created and to whom the benefits are shared. It is in the defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, Lockhead Martin, and Boeing, who are responsible for providing the means of oppression to tyrants across the globe. This is not to disparage those who are forced, by capitalism, to work for these corporations. These companies rely upon our labor yet we, of present anyway, have no means of changing the terrible things they do.
This is why the Socialist/Communist movement exists. Only together do we have any hope of taking control of our societies, of our workplaces, of our cities, and our world. We are the Orlando Democratic Socialists of America, and this is our statement to the world, an online publication: The Orlando City Red Gazette. If you agree with us, then join our organization. We can be found online through Facebook and Twitter. Feel free to reach out to us there or via email at dsaoforlando@gmail.com.
We are also looking for submissions to this publication. We could use pieces on theory, personal perspectives, any aspect of working class struggle you may feel is relevant. Please send any manuscripts or proposals to dsaoforlando@gmail.com.
