The Bedrock of Truth: Why Labor Precedes Everything
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
I look around the 7000-series train car and the bedrock of truth reveals itself…EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
— Abraham Lincoln, First Annual Message to Congress, 1861
Life cycles. You blink, and suddenly you are standing on a bridge, looking toward a horizon where the afternoon sun casts long, contemplative shadows.
With just a few more solar merry-go-rounds, a golden anniversary will be upon me. By the grace of God, I am what I am where I am.
On this day, I am a passenger riding a south-bound Yellow Line Metro train from College Park, Maryland, toward National Airport. My ultimate destination is Chicago, for Labor Notes—a gathering of unbowed rank-and-file union activists, union reformers, and all-around troublemakers.
As the train clatters along the tracks, I find myself looking backward through the tunnel of my own years. Many wrong turns have been taken. Many blind alleys stumbled upon.
Like so many, I have awoken from a faint, hopeful dream to find a nightmare world of despair, with forever wars, homelessness, hunger, poverty and genocide.
I have walked dark tunnels in search of freedom and community, seeing a glimmer of light approaching, only to realize it was a train barreling in the opposite direction. But toward where?
Where is the train bound for freedom?
Where is the train bound for glory?
As I contemplate these questions, I look around the 7000-series train car and the bedrock of truth reveals itself…EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
This train was built by the blood, sweat, and tears of everyone laboring before me and around me. This train has a history of countless hands and nameless faces. It was not conjured up by a billionaire who will never ride it. Nor was it birthed by the mere movement of money in a digital bank account.
Every single hexagon bolt was placed by a human hand. Every train car was assembled with fabricated parts laid in perfect, intentional alignment. Every sheet of glass was pressed in a scorching factory. Every strip of rubber and plastic was synthesized and installed by skilled labor with a story of a person selling their hours to live a dignified life. Every mountain mined for ore by a miner, every ounce of metal smelted in the fury of a furnace by a factory worker, all organized through the hands of a laboring class.
And yet, the tragedy of our modern political economy is that the people who built the world are the ones most locked out of its wealth. The vast majority of these hands are unorganized and ununionized. They are underpaid, precarious, and exploited by a financial class living off the labor of others.
The narrative magicians create algorithms to worship the usurers controlling the fruit (capital) while confounding the masses with circuses that obscure how we are starving the root (labor).
Lincoln understood the natural law of political economy over 160 years ago: Labor is prior to capital.
Labor creates all value. Fiat money’s value is anchored to the worker who must first harvest, dig, build, and create before the exchange.
Staring out the train window looking upon different build sites as it passed over the Potomac River, a heavy question once again repeated itself. What am I contributing? What am taking?
My life debt is severe. I am deep in the red, carrying the deepest of debts from all the collective labor that has come before, that keeps me and everyone I love alive, fed, and moving every single day.
Perhaps I can still do my little part and move out of the red by promoting the work that helps us live and preaching a bedrock truth that should be centered in every policy and political campaign, and every economic theory we discuss.
To survive and thrive, policy must support the workers. And we, the working class, must frame politics as the lever to catapult the billionaire class from their devil’s playground pulling society down toward hell.
It is time to return to this bedrock and honor the hands that built the track, the car, and the world. This is the opening note of a series dedicated to putting labor back where it belongs—at the absolute center of our society.
Because our train is bound for glory. And we will build it together.
You can also join the discussion on Substack: https://substack.com/@politicaleconomyproject/p-202330374
