The poss!ble

The Poss!bleOK

#essay, #capitalism, #freedomofchoice, #illusion

I am standing in the kitchen of KFC, where I work, and I am looking at the customers on the other side of the counter. A wellbuilt young man is standing in front of the counter and complaining to my colleagues about his order. I guess, maybe one piece of chicken was missing, or his food was not as warm as he wanted it to be. That is not important to me, nor interesting. It is interesting to me that he is wearing a short sleeve, dark brown Nike T-shirt with bold white letters saying: ‘JUST DO IT’.

I stop looking at him and continue doing my job. I put the chicken pieces in the flour, then in the water, then again in the flour, and then bread them on the cooking racks: ready to be fried. According to Marx, I am alienated from the chicken I am making, my product is not mine, I am not using my creativity, I feel detached from what I am making, emasculated, just doing a repetitive task, making profit and a commodity for my boss, whilst I myself am a commodity to the system I am working in. By silently preparing and frying chicken I am complying with the conditions that are set for me within KFC.

The object that I am making, the chicken, enters the commodified world, engendering my ego-weakness, making me more vulnerable in my existence in society, whilst promising the customers a ‘more’ happy evening, a ‘more’ happy life, and trying to gratify them. (Marx 69-84) The same happens with Nike. ‘JUST DO IT’ is an oral gratification, an empty piece of informative order, a bag of deficit packed in a nice package presented to us, from a God, Nike, made by people just like us, miserable, and weak. It tries to remind us

to enjoy our lives, to be our best, to break all the rules, to make the impossible possible.

Is it ‘possible’ for me to do otherwise? What is the other way of doing what I am doing? What happens if I want to be a fugitive, recalcitrant, anarchic, willful, reckless, troublesome, riotous, tumultuous, rebellious, and wild man? Yes, I’d be fired. One might say you can choose another occupation, be a freelancer, work on what you love, love what you do, be one with nature, the universe. I would say that I don’t have that luxury in my life now. Time is running out and my landlord and school, amongst others, are waiting to pick up their monthly payments. They are thirsty. Sometimes ‘possible’ is far away, no one, of course, forces one to do such things, but we are not as ‘free’ to choose as we think we are. In this world the man who is wearing the Nike T-shirt reminds us where we are and what we should do. ‘JUST DO IT’. To do ‘it’—to do ‘what’?—I asked myself.

The first possibility

Imagine you are born in Texas in 1940 among another three sons of a family who is using a pseudonym to avoid the law. Your father is an alcoholic conman who had other wives and families whom he doesn’t support. Your mom is an outcast Mormon from Utah. Your father is a strict man who would often whip his sons, and your mom constantly threatens to murder your father because he’s offending her religion.

During your childhood, your family frequently relocated throughout the United States, with your dad supporting you by selling fake magazine subscriptions. You are first arrested at the age of 14 for a car theft, and later for more serious crimes and you will spend many years in different prisons. You will be arrested in 1964 for an armed robbery, and will be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder at that prison. Finally, when you are conditionally paroled in 1976, you will rob a gas station and kill its employee, and the next morning you will rob a motel and kill its manager, although both of them complied with your demands.

You are Gary Gilmore, accused of a double-murder, sentenced to death, and the year is 1976. What do you think was possible for Gary? When you know what he went through during his life. He lived the life of an outlaw, did so many things against the norms, and when he faced the firing squad in his last moments, he said: ‘Let’s do it.’ That’s where Nike’s inspiration for their slogan campaign comes from, and the irony of this is that Gilmore did not ask for forgiveness, nor showed any regret, his wayward life ended ‘heroically’. ‘Let’s do it’ means that he died believing in himself, in the way he lived and was. Was it possible to be otherwise?

Another possibility

Imagine you are a girl from a poor family in rural areas in Bangladesh, then not much is possible for you. You will be sent by your family to work in textile production factories, deprived of basic education. Working in the worst work conditions, sleeping in rooms shared with 35 people, not allowed to leave the hostels and meeting your family, working more than 60 hours a week, all year round, in unpleasant highly humid rooms, lacking fresh air, not entitled for paid sick leave, ending up with around 35 dollar per month; not even paid a fair wage. (SOMO 5-7)

‘There is no supervision or social control mechanisms, no unions that can help you to bargain for better working conditions. You are a very low-skilled worker without a voice, so an easy target.’ (Ovaa) But, you should remember that you are still one of the lucky ones, because you are not among the dead ones (yet). Buried under a collapsed factory building which is a ‘really, really regular occurrence’ (Bangladesh, 2013)

The factory owners, of the one you work in, built three additional floors on top of the

five that were already existing to be able to produce more, because they only think about the profit; why not? The foundation was not meant to support this extra weight. You among other workers noticed cracks in the building on Tuesday but were forced to show up for work on Wednesday anyway. What is possible then? Freedom of choice is a luxury, it is an illusion.

The last possibility

Imagine you are born in a Uyghur family in Xinjiang, China. You and ‘80,000 other people are transferred out of Xinjiang and assigned to factories in a range of supply chains, including electronics, textiles, and automotives, under a central government policy known as ‘Xinjiang Aid’.

You make Nike shoes during the day, and in the evening you attend a night school where they teach you Mandarin, because you have your own language and never learned Mandarin. You also learn how to sing the Chinese national anthem, and will later receive ‘vocational training’ and ‘patriotic education’, all because you are from a region which is described by your government as ‘backward’ and ‘disturbed’ by religious extremism. With the help of other workers, you are producing more than seven million pairs for the American God annually, while being kept in a camp equipped with watchtowers, razor wire, and inward-facing barbed-wire fences. You are free to walk in the streets around the factory compound, but all comings and goings are closely monitored by a police station at the side gate equipped with facial recognition cameras (Xiuzhong Xu 3-13). How can you choose not to be part of this system here? Your only possibility is not having a choice.

Poss!ble overcoming difficulties. It is about comparing ‘ourselves’ to successful athletes and stars in the despair of becoming like them. It is about getting to the point ‘we’ want to be at without killing more time. It is about the act of doing and not thinking, you don’t need to think, you don’t need to pay attention to your life, just do it, just buy it, just consume, just work for us in horrible working conditions. Just accept your slavery. Just accept all the oppressive traditions of your society. Just accept whatever bullshit WE give you. Just be and do whatever that makes you not realize what’s going on. Just do it. ‘JUST DO IT’ is not about the possibility of swimming against the stream, the existentialist argument of choice seems like a joke here. There is no freedom of choice according to Nike, much has been determined for you, you should just do it; an imperative order which is eliminating the chance of making a choice for the individual.

Now, the irony becomes even more clear. ‘JUST DO IT’, represents a world of possibilities in front of us. It suggests that there has never been a time with more freedom of choice than now, everything is possible, but we shouldn’t forget, it only applies to the ones who are born in the right place, in the right family, and at the right time. The ‘possible’ is not really possible as long as there is inequality in the opportunities. ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ In the world of ‘JUST DO IT’, the situations determine what our lives will look like more than we think. We can only think that we have control over ‘our’ lives. The world is changing and is getting more complex than it ever was, the spider webs of capitalism are getting more invisible than ever, keeping us down from reaching the ‘possible’, suffocating many opportunities.

‘JUST DO IT’ is about the possible, but it is more about the opposite of what it tries to represent. It seems to me that it is about encouraging ‘us’ to achieve our goals. It is about success, victory, championship, and Let’s just don’t do it for once.

SOMO - Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, ICN - The abuse of girls and women workers in the South Indian textile industry, Flawed Fabrics, India Committee of the Netherlands, October 2014. pp5-7. Based on: Ovaa, Sofie. Global campaign coordinator of Stop Child Labour, Child labour in the fashion supply chain, interview with The Guardian.

[3] From Business Insider: Bangladesh Factory Disasters Will Become ‘More And More’ Common Based on: Xiuzhong Xu, Vicky. Uyghurs for sale, ‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang. Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), March 2020. pp3-13.