Conversing with Marvin about the world situation, U.S. politics and U.S. society, while we both were spending our days chained to the same Council on International Education Exchange [C.I.E.E.] 9-to-5 workplace cage, did make the time at the job pass by faster; despite our particular political differences over what kind of revolutionary left strategy or revolutionary left political groups had the best chance to take political and economic power away from the imperialist U.S. capitalist ruling class, whose policies we both regarded as morally wrong, anti-humanistic and anti-democratic.
And, as a result, despite his Labor Committee/Labor Party membership, Marvin became an ally in attempting to raise the political consciousness of the other co-workers in the C.I.E.E. student travel office room in which we both worked.
When one of the other office workers in his early 20's, Glen, for example, expressed some irritation at the way Carol--who was his immediate supervisor--kept piling her work onto him in her bullying, authoritarian way, both Marvin and I laughed and reminded Glen that "that's how capitalism works." And by the end of the summer travel season in late August, all the C.I.E.E. office workers in our office cage pretty much agreed that the kind of 9-to-5 clerical jobs which the older generation of bosses were offering the baby boom generation in their 20's once they left high school or college were totally unsatisfying and a waste of our lives.
One of the white office workers in his 20's who began his seasonal job at C.I.E.E. a few months after I did-- and who was hired despite still having a beard and long-hair and looking like a campus youth ghetto counter-cultural freak/hippie--noted that "Everyone I knew from college is bored stiff with whatever plastic 9-to-5 job they end up getting in the office building world. So things are bound to change for the better by the 1980's."
But, aside from Marvin and me, none of the dissatisfied white office workers in their 20's seemed to have the faintest idea of how they collectively might go about ever attempting to create a new economic society or system; in which they wouldn't have to spend their 20s and 30's in the 1970's and 1980's having to do menial clerical office work for the culturally-straight, often less-educated, unhip elderly folks in their late 40's, 50's and 50's--who usually were the ones assigned to be their immediate supervisors.
