The Children Yearn for the Mines

The inevitable return of child labor in the West.

Jan 29, 2024

It was a sunny afternoon when the merchant loudly proclaimed, “The young ones yearn for the mines! Send your children, send your infants, your babes and your sucklings and your brats! Boys and girls! Send them all!” The astonished people looked at each other, digesting the bold man’s words, but none doubted his wisdom, for they knew it was true. The children did, indeed, desperately yearn for the educational valor of grueling, hazardous labor. They needed it. The corporations needed it. We needed it.

It would be quite the dull exercise to examine the recent trend toward relaxing child protection and labor laws in the US and other Western nations. It would be even more uninteresting (and useless, too) to mourn the humbling fact that so much of what we use and consume on a daily basis is made, assembled, mined, constructed, deconstructed by the feeble hands of the Global South’s youth.

The former exercise belongs to the métier of the kind of investigative journalists most often employed by The Guardian or The New York Times, and the latter is a well-known (albeit well-cognitive-dissonanced) fact that need not disturb us particularly here — we are unwilling to take meaningful action to change said fact, so why uselessly dwell on it?

Instead, what we will do is examine the reasons why something we thought belonged only to those plundered, ‘failed’ nations of the world will — if it hasn’t begun already — rather soon return to this, our developed, reasonable, benevolent, white, Barbie-esque, Marvellized world.

As everyone knows or at some point learns, capitalism is a socioeconomic order that does not particularly care about its incoherence. In the world of the economist — I’ve walked among them, trust me — infinite growth, violent greed, invisible hands, over-simplistic graphs, and pseudo-scientific theories on human nature and psychology are turned into ancient, infallible wisdom that need only be adapted every decade or two to suit current realities. To doubt this profound lore is to transgress the border between what is acceptable and what is not. A non-capitalist economist is most often a non-successful economist, condemned to prowling obscure Marxist book clubs or, God forbid, smoke weed with heavily tattooed anarchist punks (I like this option), until he or she (most often he, let’s be honest) eventually returns to the warm and cozy campfire of the reasonable, where soon politicians scramble out their dark crevices to lovingly caress his neck.

(Academia is a joke.)

Anyway, I mention all this because it is important. In some ways, it is the only thing that is important. Be it climate change, forever-war, the rise of fascism, or the return of child labor in the West — this thing is important!

Capitalism is a doctrine, a paradigm. It is not to be questioned or even thoroughly examined in its structural and ideological foundations. All who have done so have turned away white-faced, wide-eyed: “There is nothing there!”

Theories that build on untestable hypotheses that build on other theories built on other untestable hypotheses, leading to unfounded conclusions made from other unfounded conclusions, and so on. This all so messy, so complex as to be incomprehensible to the layman (by design) and the expert. The expert discovers this at some point, of course, whereas the layman most often does not, but when he does he is too deep in on it, his salary too comfortable, the respect toward his profession too great, the family and mortgage dependent on the illusion remaining an illusion. Lawyers might be familiar with all this.

Because capitalist economic theory is comparable in scientific value to the expertise of divining rod experts, it lies in no one’s particular interest to educate the public on its cheap conveyor belts and mechanisms. And so it happens that no one knows what banks do, what the fuck those derivatives of derivatives are supposed to represent, what happened in 2008 and why, and what they do with the money you invested.

No one knows how capitalism truly works — no economists, no experts, no professors, no Marxists, no invisible hands, and particularly no politicians — and hence we must wait and see what happens, with the marvelous guiding light of the State occasionally retrospectively (but never proactively) intervening when things become too abhorrent.

This time, the State will not intervene.

The children yearn for the mines.

Western societies are growing old, positively ancient, and we, the young, are not having children, do not want to work anymore, give our lives to the boss’s profits; we are spoiled, drug-addicted, depressed, tired anti-natalists and nihilists, irredeemable in our uselessness. The one thing we, the stinking working class, are supposed to do — reproduce — we somehow fail to do.

And so the whole goddamn Ponzi scheme begins swaying like the house of cards it always was, using debt and future debt and the debt after that in the place of cards. A social security system based on a generational contract that was broken anyway by the baby boomers, who are leaving behind an uninhabitable, empty, and lifeless dystopia, was, perhaps, not such a great idea after all.

The capitalists are running out of labor to burn in their mansions’ furnaces.

They turned to foreign labor first, of course, and those we exploited on their soil have been exploited on our soil for decades now. Usually as uneducated — where would they have gotten educated with everything bombed to oblivion? — expendable, easily replaceable labor.

But now the great controversy: the foreigners’ collars are increasingly turning white! There is not enough qualified labor, and so we attempt to attract those who, despite everything, managed, somehow, to get an education in their homelands. The moral issue of ‘stealing away’ this great human capital from purposefully underdeveloped nations aside, there are, unfortunately for the capitalist, never enough of them.

Status quo: a shrinking, disillusioned domestic populace and not enough qualified foreign labor to substitute the failure that are millennials such as myself and GenZ. Not even enough prison labor, meaning slave labor (and the US is working very hard on that).

What can be done?

Child labor has never fully disappeared. The helping hand on farms and homesteads, the gratis labor in family businesses, the domestic servant and babysitter that requires only food and bedding — children have always worked.

It is the revolutionary and often violent struggle of labor unions and radical civil rights groups that has prevented the capitalists from, well, capitalizing too much on our little ones. “Until they are eighteen, they are ours! Get your greedy hands away, merchant!”

Yet it is important to understand that your child is not truly your child, but first and foremost capital. As soon as the labor supply dwindles to a trickle, dried in the boiling heat of the climate catastrophe, this capital will be capitalized upon, be they eighteen or not. And most of us will willingly give our first-, second-, thirdborn, for until then we will be bombarded with nuclear propaganda from all then fascist sides, and, it will be said, the only way to prevent the collapse of all structure and order, is ‘for us all to pull together,’ meaning you giving your child to work in Elon’s Lithium mines.

Here is a prediction for you: by the 2028 US election cycle, no matter the candidates or winner, child labor will be heavily featured in public discourse (I can practically see the opinion pieces in The Guardian), and by 2032, your 14-year-old kid will be as likely as not to work in some factory, business, restaurant, military, whatever.

Only you can prevent fires.

Thanks for reading,

Antonio Melonio

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