Humanity Ground Zero: The Erasure of Labor from United States Postal Iconography.

Postage stamps are sites of nationalist imagery, produced continuously by the US government since 1847. Over time, a limited group of people deemed worthy of representing the nation on stamps—white male politicians and military heroes—was diversified to include different kinds of persons: women, Native Americans, African Americans, and people in the arts, sciences, athletics, and entertainment. This paper focuses on a singular exception to this iconographic diversification: workers, people who labor. Stamps that seem to be about labor (those devoted to such topics as labor leaders, collective bargaining, and employment for the disabled) are, we claim, about something other than "labor as such." Drawing on Marx's Grundrisse , we argue that in capitalist societies, waged labor and pauperism are indissolubly linked because laborers have no control over the reliability of their employment. Laborers are "humanity ground zero," people deemed (in capitalist common sense) to have accomplished nothing beyond working for a wage and who therefore cannot be represented in postal iconography as builders of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]