“Increased awareness will not happen through successive adaptations to the requirements of capitalist accumulation, but through awareness of the necessity of breaking with those requirements.” —Samir Amin
Friday, August 17, 2018
From "Dissent": Imagining A World With No Bullshit Jobs
More on useless work:
"According to Graeber, the same free-market policies that have made life and work more difficult for so many people over the past few decades have simultaneously produced more highly paid managers, telemarketers, insurance company bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists who do nothing useful all day."
Add salespeople and sales managers and you understand my life...
" Kim Moody argues that rising productivity and low pay has more to do with intensifying management techniques, like lean and just-in-time production and surveillance technology that polices workers, than it does with automation. If that is true, then it seems like we are stuck in a vicious loop of companies creating more bullshit jobs to manage and police workers..."
--
"This is what statistics actually show—productivity in industry skyrocketing, and with it, profits, but productivity in, say, health and education declining, therefore, prices going up, and profits being maintained largely by squeezing wages. Which in turn explains why you have teachers, nurses, even doctors and professors on strike in so many parts of the world."
--
"Brooks: Another of the arguments you make is that the structure of the modern corporation resembles feudalism more closely than the ideal of hypothetical market capitalism. What do you mean by that?
"According to Graeber, the same free-market policies that have made life and work more difficult for so many people over the past few decades have simultaneously produced more highly paid managers, telemarketers, insurance company bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists who do nothing useful all day."
Add salespeople and sales managers and you understand my life...
" Kim Moody argues that rising productivity and low pay has more to do with intensifying management techniques, like lean and just-in-time production and surveillance technology that polices workers, than it does with automation. If that is true, then it seems like we are stuck in a vicious loop of companies creating more bullshit jobs to manage and police workers..."
--
"This is what statistics actually show—productivity in industry skyrocketing, and with it, profits, but productivity in, say, health and education declining, therefore, prices going up, and profits being maintained largely by squeezing wages. Which in turn explains why you have teachers, nurses, even doctors and professors on strike in so many parts of the world."
--
"Brooks: Another of the arguments you make is that the structure of the modern corporation resembles feudalism more closely than the ideal of hypothetical market capitalism. What do you mean by that?
Graeber: When I was in college they taught me that capitalism means that there are capitalists, who own productive resources, like say factories, and they hire people to make stuff and then sell it. They can’t pay their workers so much that they don’t make a profit, but they have to pay them at least enough that they can afford to buy the stuff the factory produces. Feudalism, in contrast, is when you just take your profits directly, by charging rent, fees and dues, turning people in debt peons, or otherwise shaking them down.
Nowadays the vast majority of corporate profits don’t come from making or selling things but from “finance,” which is a euphemism for other peoples’ debts—charging rents and fees and interest and whatnot. It’s feudalism in the classic definition: “direct juro-political extraction” as they sometimes put it. This also means the role of government is very different: in classic capitalism it just protects your property and maybe polices the labor force so they don’t get too difficult, but in financial capitalism, you’re extracting your profits through the legal system, so the rules and regulations are absolutely crucial, you basically need the government to back you up as you shake people down for their debts."
We don't need to do so much of what we do. Capitalism has us all grasping at ghosts.
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Monday, April 30, 2018
The World Really Does Owe You A Living
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a
living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological
breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely
right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because
of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery
because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.
So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to
inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and
think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along
and told them they had to earn a living."
-“The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30
"The problem with the kids today is that they think the world owes them a living!"
-Everybody's Grandpa everywhere
Your Gramps was wrong. The world does owe each and every one of us a living. For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that "the world" means all of the people on the planet. All of the people on the planet owe you a living, just as you owe all of those people.
We do not have to sell our labor to each other. We do not have to kill ourselves at occupations, simply because our less-technologically-advanced ancestors had to. We have reached a point in the development of our society and it's technological aptitude where there is no reason for all of us to occupy a 40-hour-per-week job. There just isn't that much that needs to be done. We create useless occupations to ensure that we cling to the old paradigm (ever have to deal with a commissioned salesperson?), just because that is the way it has always been done. We are seized with indignant rage when we see the unemployed. We call them lazy and useless. Sounds good to me.
And all of these useless jobs are designed specifically to serve a single purpose:to preserve the power of the powerful. In other words: keeping the wealth in the hands of the wealthy. Your job is not going to make you rich. It is going to keep you in your place. And the place of millions, even billions of us, all over the world, is to die in poverty.
We continue to murder the poor using labor largely because the tiny number of people who have the power to change this don't want it to change. They don't believe it is in their interest to do so. Poverty kills by making healthcare unaffordable, by mandating malnutrition, by enforcing ignorance. There are many excuses made for this, but they are all insufficient. The paradigm of labor is used as a weapon of social control by the oligarchs, providing just enough income to make the poor cling to their jobs, but not enough for them to break out of their situation.
There is a solution to all of this: The practice of selling labor needs to end. Production for profit needs to end. Manufactured scarcity needs to end. Put the means of extraction, production and distribution in the hands of all of us, in the form of collectives. Convert the basis of the world's economy from profit to need. Design and produce for need rather than wealth-creation and the need for useless labor goes away.
This creates a society where only a few are needed for work. So, the paradigm becomes part-time work, work-as-needed or work on a rotational basis. The vast majority of one's time becomes free to pursue whatever the heart desires, rather than doing what must be done simply to survive.
We have the means to do this, and each and every one of us owes it to all the others to make this happen. So, yes, the world does owe you a living. Demand it.
-“The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30
"The problem with the kids today is that they think the world owes them a living!"
-Everybody's Grandpa everywhere
Your Gramps was wrong. The world does owe each and every one of us a living. For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that "the world" means all of the people on the planet. All of the people on the planet owe you a living, just as you owe all of those people.
We do not have to sell our labor to each other. We do not have to kill ourselves at occupations, simply because our less-technologically-advanced ancestors had to. We have reached a point in the development of our society and it's technological aptitude where there is no reason for all of us to occupy a 40-hour-per-week job. There just isn't that much that needs to be done. We create useless occupations to ensure that we cling to the old paradigm (ever have to deal with a commissioned salesperson?), just because that is the way it has always been done. We are seized with indignant rage when we see the unemployed. We call them lazy and useless. Sounds good to me.
And all of these useless jobs are designed specifically to serve a single purpose:to preserve the power of the powerful. In other words: keeping the wealth in the hands of the wealthy. Your job is not going to make you rich. It is going to keep you in your place. And the place of millions, even billions of us, all over the world, is to die in poverty.
We continue to murder the poor using labor largely because the tiny number of people who have the power to change this don't want it to change. They don't believe it is in their interest to do so. Poverty kills by making healthcare unaffordable, by mandating malnutrition, by enforcing ignorance. There are many excuses made for this, but they are all insufficient. The paradigm of labor is used as a weapon of social control by the oligarchs, providing just enough income to make the poor cling to their jobs, but not enough for them to break out of their situation.
There is a solution to all of this: The practice of selling labor needs to end. Production for profit needs to end. Manufactured scarcity needs to end. Put the means of extraction, production and distribution in the hands of all of us, in the form of collectives. Convert the basis of the world's economy from profit to need. Design and produce for need rather than wealth-creation and the need for useless labor goes away.
This creates a society where only a few are needed for work. So, the paradigm becomes part-time work, work-as-needed or work on a rotational basis. The vast majority of one's time becomes free to pursue whatever the heart desires, rather than doing what must be done simply to survive.
We have the means to do this, and each and every one of us owes it to all the others to make this happen. So, yes, the world does owe you a living. Demand it.
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