Share free time and work - References and quotes Philosophy 2021 REFERENCES AND QUOTES A BLUEPRINT FOR SURVIVAL Government pressure to curb unemployment. Bring demand and supply closer with industries more integrated in community to avoid waste, overproduction and production of goods it doesn’t want 15 I PROSPERITY WITHOUT GROWTH Works role in todays society, what it could and what it is for many. See ARBETSSAMHÄLLET – HUR ARBETET ÖVERLEVDE TEKNOLOGIN for an historical and contemporary analysis of work and its glorification. Unemployment and the hunt for increased labour productivity 161 Possibility of reducing working hours, work-sharing. Keynes saw it. Challenge labour productivity even if it has brought some good stuff. Revalue what kind of jobs we need. Care, craft and culture. Figure 8.1 and moving from carbon intensive jobs 164 "What happens to employment when material consumption is no longer expanding? What happens to inequality as conventional growth rates decline? What can we say about financial stability when capital no longer accumulates? What happens to the public sector in the face of declining aggregate demand? These are the kinds of questions that we need to ask about this new economy." 188 Sharing capital 190 “post-growth economics is an exercise in continually challenging the conventional wisdom.” 193 Work as valued as contributing to society (basic income) to participate in a common endeavour. See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on importance of goalsetting 224 I BIEN Russel Brand on what community deem useful work https://basicincome.org/history/ I THE SPIRIT LEVEL: WHY MORE EQUAL SOCITIES ALMOST ALWAYS DO BETTER More unequal societies have longer working hours 223 Democratic employee ownership. Importance of participation. 248 More employee owned company the better society. Advantages of employee ownership and participation: 1. Social emancipation 2. Scale of earnings under democratic control 3. Redistribution of wealth from shareholder to stakeholders 4. Improves productivity 5. Regain experience of being part of community 6. Improve sociability in wider society 7. A start to have a society freer of hierarchical division and status-seeking 253 I ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS – PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS Income disparities and distribution of capital ownership 395 Squatters and employees. Employee Shareholder Ownership Programs (ESOPs) See THE SPIRIT LEVEL: WHY MORE EQUAL SOCITIES ALMOST ALWAYS DO BETTER on employee ownership 248, 253 396 Local ESOPS and possible good effect on environment 397 I ARBETSSAMHÄLLET – HUR ARBETET ÖVERLEVDE TEKNOLOGIN Creating jobs is a strange phenomenon 9 Bertrand Russel, increasing productivity, pins and working hours, “This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?” Productivity has had little effect on working hours. Working hours in a historical perspective 10 Crises of overproduction 11 The banker vs farmer on a scale of meaningful/empty work 12 work cannot in general be defined as good or bad. Working for what? See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on importance of setting a goal 13 Definition of work 14 Work from humiliation to right. Journey of work from humiliation in the classical antiquity, transformed by religious anxiety and violence of industrialization transformed work to a duty and through fear of unemployment made it to a right, influencing our contemporary view of work as duty and right. Keynes and “mankind is solving its economic problem.” 15 Nor the punishment of God nor necessity (the fortunate ones at least) is forcing human being to work but human beings themselves. Advertising and governmental stimulus helps to avoid the crises of overproduction 16 Work ideology is valuing work for the work itself 21 Work as humiliation and subduction of will. Freedom from work. 24 Slavery has no use for work ideology 25 Protestant view of work is living in the rights worship of entrepreneurs and the left inculcating of the well-behaved worker, the “blame yourself” mentality and belief that power and wealth is the result of hard work 29 success through work as a sign of being chosen 31 The pretended meritocracy and importance of inheritance 32 Catholics more lenient towards the “lazy” poor than Luther and Calvin who gave no attention of luck or heritage. Cotton Maher wanted to starve the underprivileged to force them to work 33 Leisure and work changing places in what considered to be virtue. Diogenes See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes, https://davidjonstad.se/2019/10/08/i-stallet-for-forandring-ett-storslaget-skadespel/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International The cross was replaced by the whip during industrialization as a way to persuade workers to work 34 adjust the effort according to need. Work for survival. See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on importance of setting a goal 35 The opportunity to earn more less appealing than working less. Using power and poverty to get workers to work. If work is good why all the control? Mills on work 36 Bentham, Locke and Smith ambivalence on work “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.” “His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.” See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on importance of setting a goal 37 Thoughtless obedience 40 Stupefying work and limiting our imagination of what is possible. Obedience described as something positive. Russel, “At first, sheer force compelled them to produce and part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in idleness. By this means the amount of compulsion required was lessened, and the expenses of government were diminished. To this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity.” Nietzsche, “Fundamentally, on now feels at the sight of work – one always means by work that hard industriousness from early till late – that such wok is the best policeman, that it keeps everyone in bounds and can mightily hinder the development of reason, covetousness, desire for independence. For it uses up an extraordinary amount of nervous energy, which is thus denied to reflection, brooding, dreaming, worrying, loving, hating; it sets a small goal always in sight and guarantees easy and regular satisfactions. Thus a society in which there is continual hard work will have more security: and security is now worshipped as the supreme divinity” Time made power invisible 41 Time replaces obedience 42 Bob Black and the workplace as a prison 43 work and increasing inequalities See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on Success to the successful 44 Alain de Bottons, ”All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something much more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative”. Idea of right to work stems from February revolution in Paris 1848 46 Peter Kropotkin, ”Enough of ambiguous, words like ”the right to work,” with which the people were misled in 1848, and which are still used to mislead them Let us have the courage to recognize that Well-being for all, henceforward possible, must be realized” 48 Instead of right to work, the right to well-being. Kropotkin, “The “right to well-being” means the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours, whilst the “right to work” only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his right to the common inheritance and to enter into possession.” Lafargue on work as a right as shame. The compromise of the labour movement was an acceptance of the foundation of the working society, instead of direct access to the resources, access went through income of work. This leads to the right to work 49 Mix up of means and ends. Should work really be an end in itself? One-dimensional thinking keeps us from exploring alternatives. See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on goal, ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS – PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS on means and ends 50 Work and doubtful effect on health 58 Do we really like our jobs and what do we like with our jobs? Is it the work activity or is it the structure, the social interaction, the purpose and the income? If the income is removed fewer and fewer would still go to work 59 Imagine if other institutions could give the social interaction and meaningful activities that work gives. Imagine if you got paid doing it See DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST on universal access to market 60 Emma Goldman and identity politics and the work ideology 62 Radical feminism, not right to patriarchy, but down with the patriarchy. 63, 64 Work is excluding. Giminez “For example, an increase in the proportion of female and non-white capitalists or even the replacement of white male capitalists by women and members of racial and ethnic minorities could not ever result in a ‘kinder and gentler’, non-exploitative capitalism.” Problem of meritocracy is how we can distinguish between performance and social heritage and inhibitory categorization See THE SPIRIT LEVEL: WHY MORE EQUAL SOCITIES ALMOST ALWAYS DO BETTER 65 Nancy Fraser, feminism, universal care-giver model, basic income and men’s free riding on womens unpaid domestic labour 68 The rephrasing of capitalism of radical demands for structural transformation into system preservation social issues. 69 Bob Black, “They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.” 72, 73 Gorz and having us fight for work, “The result is that everyone, unemployed and potentially insecure workers alike, is urged to fight for a share of the 'work' capital is abolishing all around him/her; and every march and every banner declaring 'We want work' proclaims the victory of capital over a subjugated humanity of workers who can no longer be workers, but are denied a chance to be anything else.” 73 Productivity increase in Sweden. Technology could set us free! 79 24 minute working day. Fear of the liberating potential of technology 80 No prohibition to work but freedom from work 87 Howard Zinn, “Let’s not speak anymore about capitalism, socialism. Let’s just speak of using the incredible wealth of the earth for human beings. Give people what they need: food medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don’t’ ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it” The irrational consumption only reflect the irrational production. The work/production is the problem 96 Keynes and technology absorbing work as a possibility 106 Keynes and Economic possibilities for our Grandchildren solving mankind’s economic problem. 107 Will we have a nervous breakdown? Problem activating ourselves outside the realm of work 108 Vulgar pseudoreformistic Keynesianism, 6 % of income on food = 2 hours of work 109 What is productive work is determined by our view of human needs See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on goal 143 New Economic Foundations calculation of real value to society of different professions https://neweconomics.org/2009/12/a-bit-rich Powerful economic interests prevents a discussion of the value of work ekonomiska intressen att förhindra diskussion kring ett arbetes värde. 143 Professional groups trying to be important. 167 Some self-reflection is needed, do the services we provide really produce necessities of life? 168 Rationality of production is subservient to power. Social competence as obedience. Degeneration of work 169 Bob Black, ”Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.” 170 Alienation of work 174 Life passing by while existing in a state of passiveness. Alienation from creative ability and senses. 178 Coercion is the foundation of all employment relations. Employment relations are built on power differences. 180 Strategies for dealing with emotional work 181 Alienating effect of work on senses and feeling makes it hard to know who we really are 183 Professionalism is subordinate to the arbitrariness of power 184 Empty work 185 Swedish LFV and employees surfing porn 75 % of their working hours 186 Office worker dedicating 1,5 – 3,5 hours a day to empty work 187, 188 Built-in unemployment in employment 188 Veblen, leisure class, and retaining power by showing power 189 Morris, “To sum up, then, concerning the manner of work in civilized States, these States are composed of three classes—a class which does not even pretend to work, a class which pretends to work but which produces nothing, and a class which works, but is compelled by the other two classes to do work which is often unproductive.” 189, 190 Bolchover and empty work 190 Office space and symbolic work 191 Baudrillard and work as a spectacle and the end of work as the production of necessities and things with use value. Work is kindergarten for grown ups with huge difference in power between employer and employee. 192 Office and being subject to insane bosses. David Brent ”Put the key of despair into the lock of apathy. Turn the knob of mediocrity slowly and open the gates of despondency – welcome to a day in the average office” 193 Accepting the irrational work because of the possibility of losing income 200 Overproduction produces excess time and an insecure labour market. Veil of silence. 201 Are we more interested in responsibility (power) than producding something useful to society? Talk about work! Bolchover, There seem to be no limits to what we talk about these days. Paedophilia, incest, our own alcohol or drug problem, child abuse, you name it. All these are issues that were previously deemed to painful or vulgar to discuss. Now our airwaves are filled with debate about subects that past generation would have found impossible to stomach. Oprah Winfry and Jerry Springer are instantly familiar symbols of this modern phenomenon of openness.
Yet, despite many of our own personal experiences and the ready availability of relevant statistics, the reality of the workplace seems to be the last taboo in our society. We just seem to skirt over the fact that there are a mass of people who go in to an office every day and suffer from dispiriting, de-energizing, mindless tedium. Isnät this worth talking about? If we can talk about somebody’s aunt having a lesbian sex with their sister, surely we can find a way to talk about this. After all, quite apart from huge corporate and economic effects of this larg-scale inactivity, the whole experience surely also has a destructive effect on the individual concerned. I should know, because I’ve been there’re. To be honest, you can actually feel pretty much as a dead as it is possible to feel while you are still breathing. Does that sound a bit over-dramatic to you? You’re lucky then. You’ve obviously never been a member of the Living Dead brigade” 202 Discussion of work, clean toilets or create music 211 Subversive rationalization. Goal rationality exposes the rationality of power and its irrationality. 212 Basic income 215 The goal for the basic income because it could be used to sustain the current societal structure of overproduction 216 Zizek and critique of basic income as charity, as a way to avoid dealing with inequality. Wilde, “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it”. The growth critical perspective on basic income as a tool to deal with inequality and power asymmetries. Gradual transition to a fair distribution of resources. 217 Essentialism and existentialism and basic income. Gorz and basic income. Before full automation of work some conditional work is required by human beings 218 “Only through the degeneration of civilization, through the psychosis of mass consumption, the smoke screen of production, and the lost meaning of the concept of work have we managed to maintain the myth of the necessity of work” The working society is destroying human being and planet. 219 “It is the compulsive work incitement, the decoupling of production and need and the inability to make use of the freedom potential of technology that has produced this record of relative misery – a relative misery, because the difference between what is and what could be has never been bigger” 220 I DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST Employee ownership to end imbalances between owner and workers. Share the results of the worker. 78 Who captures the value of work 155 Power determines the shares of wealth/productivity. Rooted membership and stakeholder finance. Employee owned firms. 158 I ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS – PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS Box 22.1 how wealth creates power See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on “Success to the successful”. Problem of wealth as status : 1. Conspicious consumption increases scale 2. Creates a damaging zero sum positional race. See THE SPIRIT LEVEL: WHY MORE EQUAL SOCITIES ALMOST ALWAYS DO BETTER 391 Caps on income and wealth. Conspicuous consumption can be seen as a negative externality and could be limited by a progressive consumption tax. Income could be capped using a progressive income tax and it is good if it also limit economic growth because the people and planet needs less of it! 🙂 Wealth can be capped through a progressive wealth tax such as real estate tax and inheritance tax. 392 Much of private wealth grows because of infrastructure and institutions provided by society. 392, 393 Subsaharian Bill Gates. Tax and the Northern European countries 393 Marginal utility of a dollar is bigger for a poor person than for a rich. Just desert argument based on that people are paid for their contribution to society, But how do you know you are contributing if the goal of the society is not clear? Furthermore people are benefiting now from past contributions. Approaches proposed by ecological economists include equal opportunity in education, job access and job andvancement, jobs at living wage and directy payments but also equal entitlements to wealth created by nature and by society independent of entrepreneurial ability. See https://twitter.com/wistikent/status/1219359615890219008/photo/1, History of basic income 394 Distribution of factors of production. 395 Distribute return to natural capital. 399 Alaska fund and Sky trust 400 Henry George and the reasoning for a land tax. Practically harder to physically redistribute land than taxing. 402 I THE SPIRIT LEVEL: WHY MORE EQUAL SOCITIES ALMOST ALWAYS DO BETTER Concentration of power in economic institutions. Companies the source of income inequality See DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST on Piketty, capital households vs income households and increasing inequality 142, 242 Privatization has increased inequality 243, 244 Tom Paine, wealth, power and democracy 244 Make societies fairer through democratic employee-ownership 248 “Employee-ownership has the advantage of increasing equality specifically by extending liberty and democracy”. Economic democracy. 252 Stop pampering the rich. They will not leave or bail. “We know that more egalitarian countries live well, with high living standards and much better social environments. We know also that economic growth is not the yardstick by which everything else must be judged. Indeed we know that I t no longer contributes to the real quality of our lives and that consumerism is a danger to the planet. Nor should we allow ourselves to believe that the rich are scarce and precious members of a superior race of more intelligent being son whom the rest of us are dependent. That is merely the illusion that wealth and power create. Rather than adopting an attitude of gratitude towards the rich, we need to recognize what a damaging effect they have on the social fabric.” 262 Different action that can make societies fairer. 263, 264 I ECONOMIC POSSIBILITIES FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN – JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES capital accumulation started with gold and silver from new world to old world See MYTEN OM MASKINEN: ESSÄER OM MAKT; MODERNITET OCH MILJÖ, COLONIALISM IN THE ANTROPOCENE: THE POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF THE MONEY-ENERGY-TECHNOLOGY COMPLEX 2 Technological unemployment, “This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem.” 3 “these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.” The economic problem, the struggle for existence, could be solved. Deprived of tradional purpose of solving the economic problem, will it lead to a benefit for real values or a nervous breakdown 4 What to do with new freedom?, “Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.” “For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!” 😊 5 “There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.” 5, 6 “We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.” 100 years have soon passed, time for new gods. “Meanwhile there will be no harm in making mild preparations for our destiny, in encouraging, and experimenting in, the arts of life as well as the activities of purpose.” 7 I ENERGY AND ECONOMIC MYTHS “we must cure ourselves of the morbid craving for extravagant gadgetry”, get rid of fashion, make durable more durable and repairable, stop the empty infinite regress “circumdrome of the shaving machine”, “This change will call for a great deal of recanting on the part of all those professions which have lured man into this empty infinite regress. We must come to realize that an important prerequisite for a good life is a substantial amount of leisure spent in an intelligent manner”. 378 I MAKING MONEY AND BANKING WORK FOR SOCIETY - POSITIVE MONEY I QUANTITATIVE EASING - BIEN I HELICOPTER MONEY – A DISASTROUS BASIC INCOME – CLIVE LORD“But the helicopterists are not interested in limiting activity on environmental grounds. As long as the aim is growth, not combined with ecological fiscal rules, the risk is that payments to the general public, whatever their name, will bring rip-roaring ecological destruction nearer.” Helicopter money - A disastrous basic income I Helicopter money - Wikipedia To encouragement Next encouragement