Transit for the Masses: Rubbing Shoulders with Giants on the Bus Benjamin Russak

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I I took public transportation to school with Karl Marx last week. It was quite an interesting experience. He is one smart cookie, let me tell you, but he has a strange way of expressing himself. We get on the bus and he immediately starts going off on everybody, calling us all proletariats, telling us how exploited we all are, and grabbing everyones iPods, screaming Wachet auf! Wachet auf! or some such nonsense. I guess he was pretty pissed, because he was expecting things to be a little different today, he was muttering something about overthrowing the bourgeois capitalists. . . .cant believe its been 150 years. . . . After his little mini-meltdown he did, however, calm down and apologized for his outburst. As he sheepishly started giving everyone back their iPods, I began to explain to him how precious personal property was to everyone around these parts, but he cut me off saying that part of his social theory1 has been way too overstated and that wasnt why he grabbed them anyway. He grabbed them because of how they alienated everyone from each other. Mans nature is creative, he explained, and that creativity is triggered by social contact2, but these devices kept us all separated in our own cocoons. He further stated that the bus was a potential place for revolution, as workers were gathered together in one placeif only they would connect, and communicatethey would see their common bonds of exploitation, and would begin to understand the true nature of the economic structure of society. As he further explained the nature of workforce exploitation and how the processes of capitalism estrange the workers by devaluing their labor and ultimately themselves3, he also connected the dots between this relationship to their own work and their own life, to the thoughts in their head.4 Once again chastising himself for his initial reactions upon boarding the bus, Karl

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exclaimed that such withdrawal behind the headphones of musical fantasy was not only an understandable state, but to be expected after 150 years of economic submission. He started to get everyone pretty riled up on the bus, they started yelling at all the BMWs and Mercedes Benzs driving by, but he stopped everybody, saying they were petty bourgeois at best, and most likely just a more decorative proletariat. With all his talk of the economy influencing our minds, I began to see the connections myself. People not moving their bags to offer a seat to someone standing, averting their eyes as if daring someone to ask them to move them; elderly people standing with nobody offering to get up. How could people value each other if they didnt even have a sense of their own worth? The iPods, the social wall, the I got mine arrogance, inverting the reality that the only people who truly got mine are the titans of industry, not the brash urban youth, not their parents, their teachers, the managers at their retail stores, not even those in the fancy cars driving by, who now seemed even more alienated in their automotive cubicles. So what do we do, I asked. Karl got up and said it was his stop. I protested, but he looked back at me and recommended, now that the image in my head was right-side up, that perhaps I should work to change society based what I now saw. He said that we are reasonable people once we see the truth5. As he walked out the doorwith a quick glance at the headphoned masseshe further suggested, Dont keep it to yourself. Play the music so that everyone can hear. II The next day I brought Max Weber along for the ride. I told him all about Marxs little breakdown, and he said he wasnt surprised. He said he kind of predicted that we would be in this sort of double bind; riding to our specialized vocations, driven by a sense of purpose, or a

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calling as he put it, but yet at the same time, feeling trapped by the whole daily grind and wondering whether life had any meaning at all.6 He said the economic structure of society was surely a factor for our predicament, but it was inadequate to explain what kept us there. I asked him what he thought the cause was. Verstehen, he said. Gezundheit, I replied. After a little chuckle, he explained that what he meant was that while we are affected by our political and economic organization, what is most indicative of the enduring nature of our struggle is our own subjective understanding. Objective reality leads us to reasonable concepts, but our social psychology is built on rationalization which in itself is illogical and contradictory. He asked if Marx had given me the whole be reasonable speech. I said he had. Max just sighed. He said he understood why everyone was wearing an iPod, it was a difficult world to live in. How else were we to maintain the fallacy of our civility, and the notion that our societies progress was really a progression into a spiritual void, a vacuum without meaning? The iPods he said enabled us to carry this contradiction in our heads, much as the bus itself carried the contradiction of taking us to our vocation, while at the same time robbing us of any true purpose. An iron cage, he called it, of pre-ordained stops and schedules, promising us mobility, promising us God but delivering only bureaucratic efficiency. I told him nobody expects to find God on the bus, and actually it was made of steel not iron. He noted my struggle with metaphor, and went on to explain that it was precisely the fact that nobody expected to find God on the bus that was the problem. God, he said had been systematically removed through the mania of efficiency produced by material pursuits7. As far as the iron cage metaphor, his voice began to rise as he railed against the rigidity of the stops and our lack of freedom to truly choose our path. We had lost the value of the journey in favor of the

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operations of the schedule. Tears streamed down his face as he bemoaned the sad state of affairs, and in quiet agony cried, I dont know what to do, I dont know what to do. Noticing a nearby hospital, he got up and demanded to be let out immediately by the bus driver, who explained that he would have to wait for the next stop to disembark; he couldnt just get off anywhere he pleased. He pleaded with the driver that he was feeling ill and it was a medical emergency, but the driver said she couldnt make an exception for him and he would just have to wait. He looked back at me and shrieked, You see what I mean? There is no God here! As the bus finally reached the next stop, Max ran off the bus hysterical, and I thought, boy, you really cant judge a book by its cover. Compared to Karl, this guy seemed so composed, so well reasonable, but in the end, it was Max who felt hopeless and who became so unhinged, while Karl seemed to really believe that everything was going to work out in the long run. However, there was a lot of truth to what Max had said. Where was God in all of this? To what purpose was this bus hurtling? A growing sense of unease was creeping over me. I looked around to see if anyone else was feeling the same way that I was. If they were, they were hiding it pretty well. III Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and W.E.B. Du Bois were scheduled to join me yesterday. Charlotte and I arrived at the bus stop at our scheduled meet time of 9am, but when it got close 10am we realized that W.E.B. wasnt coming, so we got on the next bus, where everybody was looking at us, like okay, whats going to happen now, but she got so suddenly happy when she boarded the bus, she just started chatting with the lady bus driver right off the bat, asking her if she liked the work, marveling at all of the contraptions and steering mechanisms she had to

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operate, asking her about salary, benefits, vacation time, the wonderful pants she was wearing, and on and on. I think the bus driver thought she was a little loopy. Anyway, upon taking our seats Charlotte noticed another woman with a briefcase having an apparently crucial conversation on her cell phone. She immediately started grilling me about women in the workplace, in politics and in society in general. The conversation started off really well, but the deeper we got into itthe more we talked about glass ceilings, domestic labor, soccer moms, real housewives on TV, the more distraught she became. She pointed out, through clenched teeth, that apparently womens wages and the workloads still move in opposite directions.8 Perhaps thats why, when an apologetic and huffing W.E.B. Du Bois boarded the bus, she was rude enough to point out all of the empty seats in the back of the bus when he attempted to sit down next to us. I explained to her that we didnt roll like that anymore, and he graciously sat down, even as Charlotte got up and made a hasty exit, saying she needed to look into getting some new wallpaper, and perhaps some pants as well. So there I was with W.E.B., and let me tell you, he was pretty cool. Just sort of sat there, taking it all in, commenting on how quickly the bus came, how clean it was, and marveling at all of the available seating as well as the dedicated street for buses only. He apologized again for being late, and quickly dismissed the impertinence of Ms. Gilman, as he called her. It wasnt until a few stops later that he let on what he was really thinking. He explained the journey he took from his neighborhood to my neighborhood, and boy was I surprised. It involved four jam-packed, smelly, dilapidated buses; being jostled, prodded, and shoved by fellow passengers, and yelled at by the bus driver to make more room; over an hour and a half of waiting at uncovered busy street-corners in the rain; cars honking, exhaust

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fumes, crying babies, and unwashed vagrants. He would have had to have gotten up at 4:00 am just to make it to my neighborhood by 9:00, hence the reason he was late. I told him that I felt awful, that I had no idea. He said that I wasnt supposed to have any idea, that society itself had constructed itself with the purpose of hiding this other reality from me, behind some sort of veil, I believe. He said that it was the same veil that enabled Ms. Gilman (who was a product of a different time) to construct an elaborately fictitious reality about what kinds of people black folk were. In such a society he is not supposed to be seen truly as a human being. As with Ms. Gilman, he is seen in dominant, mainstream society only in the capacity of an other; and while, to his perspective, it was obvious that todays society was not the same as the one he and Ms. Gilman came from, how it had changed was mostly on the surface. The integration on the bus was a sure sign of progress, but the different reality between the neighborhoods and the lack of awareness that I had of what it was like to ride the 108 line down Slauson Ave., illustrated how intact the veil still was. Ultimately, he explained, society was still so busy proclaiming itself to be enlightened, compassionate and tolerant, but at the same time the social differences produced by society were as real as ever. At least in his day, he said, they were more visible and acknowledged. Today, he said we were hiding behind the fantasy of colorblindness while tightening the exclusionary noose in the shadows of social monuments. I could see the sadness in his eyes; the sadness of one who had lived so long, seen so much, and fought so hard. Yet here he was speaking to me, opening my eyes, and lifting the veil to my own double-consciousness cleaved by undeserved benefit and ill-gotten dominance9. Helping me to see that, in spite of my apparent spatial and economic mobility, my soul was as equally constrained as the marginalized members of society who were buried from my

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experience, not only in remote sweatshops and toxic industrial processing centers, but right in my own backyard.10 I really need to get out more, I thought. I looked around at my surroundings, now indelibly altered by this new wakefulness; keenly aware of the isolation produced by this dedicated road of passage and privilege, the gleaming bus suddenly cold. What had only moments ago felt like a healthy pace was abruptly transformed into the unease of artificial progress, the inverted image of the camera obscura suddenly right side up, the steel vehicle unmistakably an iron cage. W.E.B. looked over at me and smiled. It was not a smile of happiness, but one of recognition and of resolution. He said it was time for him to leave, as he had a long journey home, and as he rose I rose with him. I said it looked like he could use some company. He nodded almost imperceptibly and I suddenly felt a stirring in my heart of a strange mixture of hope and fear. I looked around at our fellow passengers, some smiling, some crying, some still oblivious behind their iPods. I took a deep breath, and shedding my safety net of ignorance, I shouldered my bag, thanked the driver, and descended into the world.

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Footnotes
1

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. [1848] 2005. The Communist Manifesto. Minneapolis, MN: Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.
2

Marx, Karl. [1848] 2011. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Eastford, CT: Martino Publishing.
3

Ibid.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. [1845-6] 1970. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers.
5

Ibid. 1.

Weber. Max. [1904-5] 2003. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Dover.
7

Ibid.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1898. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston: Small, Maynard and Company.
9

Du Bois, W.E.B.. [1903] 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Oxford University Press.

10

Du Bois, W.E.B.. [1945] 1975. Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization.