“Why Don’t You Just Get a Better Job” and Other Dumb Shit People Say to Low-Income Earners Stuck in Precarious Work

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Chloe Ann King

For most of my working life I have been stuck in the hospitality industry which is lowly paid, painfully precarious and poorly regulated. In New Zealand, where I live, hospitality employers mostly treat you as nothing more than an easily replaceable unit to turn-over-profit. I have spent over a decade in this industry and as such I have become acutely aware of the fact that no matter how many shifts I work or how many poorly paid jobs I undertake; I will never have enough money to meet rising living costs.

Sometimes, my life is a bit depressing. You know what I mean? I get up, I go and work one of my multiple jobs and I come home. Each week I check my bank balance and I feel pretty put-out about how low my pay is as compared to how hard I worked for it.

Obviously, working hard at minimum wage jobs is never going to land me economic security. No matter how hard I have worked in the hospo industry I have never ever received a pay-rise, not once. The lie of “hard work” serves to convince us that if we fail to achieve happy, healthy and joy filled lives which are economically secure thanks to well paid jobs, it is because we failed to work hard enough for it. Constantly we are told that external factors do not affect us. This type of pervasive ‘positive’ rhetoric isendlessly used by many self-help Gurus such as Tony Robbins, one of America’s most well-known motivational speakers.

The lie of “hard work” is pitched to us – those from the working and lower classes, by not only self-help gurus and spiritualists but politicians and well intentioned high school teachers and even our parents, as being one of the best paths to prosperity. This myth is perpetuated and disseminated by the mainstream media as motivational newsworthy ‘human interest’ stories. However, there is very little which is human about these types of stories. The core of these news pieces has nothing to do with humanity or being human and everything to do with selfishness and individualism and play on insecurities and our need to compare our lives to others who we think or we are passive aggressively told, have it better than us.

A few months ago the NZ Herald (New Zealand’s most read newspaper which controls the national narrative) ran yet another one of these “motivational” articles on a young landlord named Gary Lin. Who has managed to buy up a staggering eleven properties citing “hard work” as a reason for his success. He told the NZ Herald,

“Work hard, work smart, save hard, and invest smart. Wealth creation is not rocket science – perseverance and hard work can get you there.”

As if wealth creation is something we should as young people, be aspiring to. In times of great wealth inequality, we should be demanding wealth dispersal not setting out to create and covet wealth for ourselves. Gary, unlike most of us, was given a hefty “leg up” or what we poor folk call a “handout” by his father in the sum of $200,000 as a wedding gift which allowed him to buy his first home which cost him $175,000. I guess for some people money really does grow on trees.

I hate to break it to you Gaz – can I call you Gaz? But “hard work” had nothing to do with your successes in life.

Gaz got lucky. He won the genetic lottery and was born into wealth – he did not earn the money that helped him buy his first home. It was given to him. Instead of using his unearned wealth to help others he made the choice to punch-down and profit off the growing number of people stuck in the rental trap by hoarding properties. Gaz has engaged in predatory behavior by renting his properties out at market rental rates. In an unregulated rental market the odds are never in favor of tenants. As George Monbiot wrote for the Guardian, “Rent is another term for unearned income.”

People like Gaz rarely acknowledge their economic success is at the expense of those from the lower and working classes. To recognize this Gaz, might have to feel a little bit bad about how he came into his millionaire property portfolio. He might have some kind of world shattering epiphany that he is not as smart as he believes and his successes are owed more to an ability to stomach the ruthless actions and attitudes needed to ‘make it’ in a society that is quickly turning into a dystopian one. Which makes The Hunger Games, look like child’s play. Sociopathy and luck had more to do with Gaz’s successes in life than actual “hard work”, talent and intelligence.

Lawyer and anti-poverty activist David Tong, responded to Gaz’s flawed belief that anyone can own property if they just “work hard” enough, with these words:

“Motivational read from the NZ Herald: You too can be a rich property investor. If dad gives you a $200,000 gift”

“Hard work” and motivation don’t mean shit in a broken economy that was built on the blood, backs and bones of the working class and the most marginalized and vulnerable. Increasingly, accessing upward mobility – which buying property can help you obtain as well as a better quality of life, is becoming an impossible task because of low wages, insecure work and a flooded job market. People are just struggling to get off minimum wage let alone save for a house.

***

The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions states that “At least 30% of New Zealand’s workers – over 635,000 people – are in insecure work. We believe it may well cover 50% of the workforce.” No matter how hard you work it is impossible to get ahead when your employer only offers you inconsistent hours and denies your basic right to a guarantee of minimum hours.

Casual contracts are used widely within the hospitality and service industries and state that your employer owes you “no minimum of hours.” But the expectation is that you will cover and come in when needed and if you refuse you are often faced with penalties. Such as having your shifts cut the next week. Having the stability of a salary as opposed to waged work is a far off dream for so many of us. You can’t budget let alone save money for a house when you never know what your pay-check is going to be from one week to the next.

Economic insecurity because of cut shifts and insecure hours has been a major feature of my working life. For example, last year just before Christmas I had my shifts cut in half. I went from working between four and five shifts a week down to only two. I was given six days’ notice and when I pointed out how hard this would hit me economically to a Duty manager I was told, “I should go and find a second job” and reminded that “I was only on a casual contract so there was not much I could do about it.”

For the last few months I had been back-breakingly flexible for this employer. I had come in whenever I was needed and covered shifts at short notice. I had worked hard to make every customer’s experience an enjoyable one, all this for minimum wage. I spent most of December desperately scrounging around for a second job, as did two other workers who had suffered the same fate.

I popped into the same work soon after my shifts had been cut to collect my tips and one of the regulars who had been drinking, accosted me verbally and demanded to know why I was in such vocal support of the recent rolling strikes of Bunnings Warehouse workers. These workers had been subject to Zero Hour contracts, eternal bullying and harassment from managers and no guarantee of shifts or rosters. He said “why don’t these Bunnings workers just go out and get a better job”. This statement coming from a white male Baby Boomer who enjoyed free tertiary education and did not start his working life off in debt. All is crimson and gold in middle class Whiteywood, I guess.

“Why don’t you just go and get a better job?” This singular narrative epitomizes the ignorant attitudes of people like Gaz and the regular from my work whose name is ironically Gary, as well. It also puts the sole responsibility of finding well paid and meaningful work onto the worker, while absolving a government’s responsibility to push for job creation which serves their citizenry and the environment and to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, in New Zealand.

If over 30% of the workforce is stuck in precarious work and large sectors of the workforce earn below Aotearoa’s living wage of $19.25 an hour, finding “better work” is statistically impossible for a vast majority of us. There are thousands of hospitality businesses in Auckland, New Zealand, and only a handful pay a living wage and nearly none offer a guarantee of hours. As such telling people to “get a better job” is like telling them to buy a lotto ticket and live in hope they take out the jackpot.

***

No matter what the Gaz’s, Gary’s and the self-help superstars such as Tony Robbins of this world have to say on the myth of “hard work” and perseverance paying off one day, the reality is our ability to access upward mobility; buy a house; obtain a decent standard of living is tied to what type of work you can access. External factors not only deeply impact people’s lives they oppress those who do not benefit from certain types of privilege. Not all roads lead to Rome. More often than not for us poor folk they lead to roadblocks and hurdles that increase based on the colour of your skin, the class you were born into and/or your gender, how bodily abled you are and your sexuality or a combination of all of these.

People’s situations are complicated and difficult and cannot be curtailed into passive aggressive motivational “one liners” that nearly always punch-down and not up. Our working class struggles cannot be solved by a set of self-help rules or keys or steps which are meant to guide anyone to economic stability and lead you to the life of your dreams and a perfect job. In the book, The New Soft War on Women, the chapter entitled ‘Doing Well May Not Work Out So Well’, Caryl Rivers and Rosaling C. Barnett, write,

“We like to believe that the workplace is fair and that if we do a good job, we will be rewarded. After all, that’s the American way. But this belief is less true for women than it is for men. Indeed, too often women’s performance which is stellar gets fewer rewards than men do – even men who are less than outstanding.”

During a major speech at Wellesley College, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, talked about the role women can play in politics and public life, she said,

“We know we’ve got to keep pushing at that glass ceiling. We have to try and break it… Obviously. I hope to live long enough to see a woman elected president of the United States.”

Encouraging women to break the glass ceiling is all well and good but what if moving off minimum wage and accessing a living wage, is no easy feat? In America alone, 6 out of every 10 women are stuck on minimum wage.

The Glass Ceiling is so high up most of us can barely even see it. Researchers at the non-profit group Catalyst point out, “[…] when you start from behind, it’s hard enough to keep pace, never mind catch up-regardless of what tactics you use.” Both Rivers and Barnett went on to write,

“Doing all the right things to get ahead-using those strategies regularly suggested in self-help books, coaching sessions and the popular press-pays off much better for men than it does for women.”

As women, we do not struggle to “get ahead” because of personal failings but this struggle is born from structural sexism which creates gendered inequality.

Telling white women and women of colour to be more ambitious and just “work harder” if they want to smash the Glass Ceiling and obtain a decent standard of living is almost laughable. Considering many women, in particular, indigenous women and women of colour, are still struggling to make it out of the basement. Still, self-help gurus such as Tony Robbins preach to millions that none of what I am writing about actually matters: race, gender… whatever you were born as, and into, does not have to hold you back. You just have to believe in yourself and follow the Tony Robbin’s step-by-step guide to snagging a life beyond anything you could ever dream of. Which he has called: ’12 Keys to an Extraordinary Life’. You couldn’t make this shit up. He said at a recent event:

“I don’t care if you are young or old, I don’t care what your colour is, what your gender is, what country you come from, if you understand the science of building wealth you can have an abundance of it. If you violate those rules [of the 12 keys to an Extraordinary Life] either because you’re ignorant to them or you don’t apply then, you are going to have financial stress”

Tony, who sounds uncomfortably like Gaz in his belief anyone can become a millionaire, may as well have just said “we are all one”! “Everyone can make it no matter what grinding and economically depressive situations you come from”! And be done with it.

Financial stress is not brought about because you have unknowingly violated one or more of the ’12 Keys to an Extraordinary Life’ which Tony has made tens of millions off. Violating female stereotypes of passivity have a lot more to do with our failure or success in the workplace than how hard we do, or do not, hustle for top positions and top earning brackets. Rivers and Barnett write, “Competent women violate the traditional female stereotype of passivity. And that violation can trigger a reaction of fear and loathing [in the workplace].”

Financial stress is brought about because of injustices such as the pay-gap and the coloured pay-gap. Something Tony, has clearly gone out of his way to ignore. Self-help gurus and people like Gaz and Gary tend to, “displace questions of social justice and frame their rhetoric by the individualist and corporatist values of a consumer society,” as both Jeremy Carrette and Richard King wrote in the book, Selling Spirituality: the silent take over of religion.

Both Rivers and Barnett point out in relation to the American pay gap,

“Hispanic/Latino women have the lowest median earnings, earning just 55 percent of the median weekly earnings of white men; black women have, median weekly earnings of 64 percent of those of white men.”

The pay gap for America’s first nation indigenous women also sits at 55 cents in the dollar compared to white men, as non-profit AAUW reports. Indigenous women are faced with earning nearly half of what white men do in America.

Similarly, in Aotearoa indigenous Maori and Pasifika women, face significant coloured/indigenous pay-gaps compared to white men and women. TheDominion Post, reported last year, “Maori and Pasifika women are more likely to be in the lowest paying jobs, which increases the poverty in their lives and communities.” The Human Rights Commission has been tracking unfairness and inequality at work and cites that Pasifika women on average earn $57,668 while white men earn $66,900. What this data shows us is that, “Men are paid more than women overall and within ethnic groups. The effects increase when combining several factors as is the case between New Zealand European men and Pacific women. These patterns have persisted over time.”

These “patterns” of women of colour and Indigenous women being paid significantly less than white men and women, to do the same damn jobs have “persisted” all over the world from America to Aotearoa. Injustice and oppression is locally and globally connected.

A more accurate description of what the aspirational metaphor of the Glass Ceiling is made out of is to say it is made from lead. So many women are much more likely to fall off what Rivers and Barnett have labelled the “glass cliff” than triumphantly smash the glass ceiling into a million little pieces. Following Tony Robbin’s guide to obtaining some magical, fairy-tale life, or any other pseudo bullshit glittery guides to financial freedom, aren’t going to be very effective for women born into a system which was built to silence and eradicate them.

The only thing I am aspiring to “smash” is white imperial patriarchal systems that at best disempower women and at worst, brutally and often violently oppress them.

***

As workers we are criticized for our behavior whether we are told we need to be “more ambitious” or we “just need to work harder” in response to our perceived failure to land a great job with good pay and consistent hours. I am so tired of listening to people who endlessly tell me to go and get a “better job” or a “real job” (what does that even mean?!). And I have lost count of the times I have been told by people who hold anti-protester positions to “go and get a job” while I am on the picket line or the protest ground. As if the low waged work I do counts for absolutely nothing. As if service industry work is some kind of phantom job.

This is for anyone who has ever told a service worker to go and get a “job” or a “real job”: why don’t you make your own double shot soy latte, flip your own burgers and pour your own damn beer and make your own designer espresso martini, which costs more than I make in an hour.

When as a worker, I refuse to put up with horrible workplace conditions and hit the picket line or call the Union as a form of resistance I have been called a “trouble maker”, “dirty hippy” and an “inconvenience”. I am proud to be all of those things. I am glad I stood up and was brave and risked job loss (sometimes I have lost my job for speaking out) and arrest in an attempt to better my workplace conditions. The only people who are “dirty” are those who seize on disaster capitalism and economically benefit from the oppression of others… I am looking at you Tony Robbin’s and Gaz.

We need more workers collectively rising up and following the lead of Health Care workers, Bunning Warehouse and Supermarket workers and more recently Bus drivers. Who have all relentlessly hit union backed picket lines to demand ‘fair pay for fair work’ and better work conditions, in New Zealand. And less people thinking magically one day their lives will get better if they just play by the rules and perform their duties at work without complaint. This is nothing but blind faith. It is like believing in god: no matter how long you patiently wait he is not going to come and save you.

People from the working classes and those who have been in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, disenfranchised from the middle and upper-classes can save each other. But we need to refuse to allow those who hold power to continue to pit us against one another in some kind of Capitalist Death Match. Where the only prize you get is some demeaning job where the wages are so low you have to pick between buying food or paying the electricity bill. Starving or freezing does not sound like much of a “win” to me. It sounds like bullshit.

The more people who push against injustice in staggering numbers the harder it is for the media to ignore us and distort our messages of resistance.

Many people’s grinding situations have nothing to do with individual ‘bad choices’ or laziness or you know, violating the ’12 Steps to an Extraordinary Life’. No matter how many times we hear rotten rhetoric like this we must refuse – absolutely – to accept these types of pervasive and dominant narratives. At their core these narratives use shame and ruggedly focus on the individual as a method to pacify and silence. We must disrupt language that is designed to disempower and divide workers while seeming to empower. We need to seek out ways to elevate the voices of our most vulnerable and the messages of people of conscience who can envision a better world and whose political imaginations outstretch the dominant reality.

Lastly, we need to fight and stand with other workers against employers who exploit their employees and view them as nothing more than units to turn-over capital. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, went on to write in their before mentioned book:

“We are never obliged to accept the dominant version of reality (however conceived throughout history) without question.”

We Still Want Everything: The Politicisation of Anti-work

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Hans Rollman

Source: PopMatters

If there is such a thing as a ‘revolutionary novel,’ Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything is as good an example as any. The novel, first published in Italy in 1971, recounts in dramatic narrative form actual events that occurred in late 1969 in Italy: a massive mobilization and strike against Italian auto-maker Fiat that erupted into civil violence and came close to political revolution.

Balestrini—a poet, visual artist and writer—was himself personally involved in these struggles. In 1979, explains Rachel Kushner in an introductory essay, he had to flee the country on skis through the Alps in order to avoid arrest on charges of insurrection and terrorism, later dropped. But more than offering a dramatic recount of the events of 1969, the book offers a potent political analysis of today’s ‘mass worker’ and the struggles they face, couched in everyday language and dramatic action.

The novel offers a fast-paced first-person narrative. The language is blunt, unadorned and honest; the action sticks to key points and races along without detours from the main theme. The narrator comes from southern Italy, and like others from the region, he is lured north by the promise of easy quick cash in the newly modernising factory towns.

The context of this historical moment of capitalist development in Italy is important. For centuries Italians, particularly in the south, had lived an essentially feudal subsistence lifestyle. They eked out a living working the fields and farms of petty landlords, meeting their needs with relative ease but living in a constant state of abject poverty. They could gather food from the forests and fields around them; they could live in fairly basic housing and even sleep comfortably outdoors for much of the year. They wore simple clothing, handed down and patched up.

But then the factories arrived, luring young people off the land with the promise of cash and all that it offered: things their families had never even dreamed of. Stylish clothes, cars, modern homes of their own. At first the lure seemed attractive. But once they left their traditional lifestyles, they discovered they had new needs as well that they had never had before: the need to pay for housing, for food, for clothes for their families. To meet these needs, they had to work, and work hard; they no longer had the right to take a day off whenever they wanted to sit at the beach. To obtain the consumer goods they wanted and needed, they had to surrender to the tyranny of bosses and to the tyranny of work itself.

But they didn’t go without a fight, and that fight is the subject of Balestrini’s classic novel.

Kushner makes an important point in her introduction: the struggle depicted in the novel is predominantly depicted as a masculinist struggle. Women have very little presence in the novel and are objectified when they are. This is an ironic oversight, as Kushner notes, because women more than anyone had call to demand everything. It’s an unfortunate oversight too, she observes, since “it’s accurate to say that feminism had the most lasting and successful impact among the demands made in the revolts of 1970s Italy.”

The narrator—based loosely on a real figure, Alfonso Natella, to whom the author dedicates his work—is a happy-go-lucky southerner who comes north looking for easy cash. He gets it, drifting through a series of jobs, filling his wallet and then quitting jobs just as quickly as he gets them in order to enjoy the cash he’s earned. Then he finds new jobs, and becomes quite adept at scamming employers, as well.

The point of his continuous lies and scams is this: work is not something to be respected. He wants to have a good time, a natural human inclination, and so wants money, but sees no reason to respect the principle of work. At first his hatred of work is primal and intuitive; he has no real political analysis, just knows he wants to enjoy life and is happy to take the quickest route to get there. He’s willing to work for money—and only as long and as hard as it takes to get some—but understands there is nothing intrinsically worthy or noble about work. His views crystallize after he obtains one of the coveted jobs at Fiat, the Italian automaker. There, he eagerly joins in with students, union organizers and other activists who are vying with each other to gain adherents among the Fiat workers.

So I started stirring things up at the gates. Comrades, today we must stop work. Because we’ve fucking had it up to here with work. You’ve seen how tough work is. You’ve seen how heavy it is. You’ve seen that it’s bad for you. They’d made you believe that Fiat was the promised land, California, that we’re saved.

I’ve done all kinds of work, bricklayer, dishwasher, loading and unloading. I’ve done it all, but the most disgusting is Fiat. When I came to Fiat I believed I’d be saved. This myth of Fiat, of work at Fiat. In reality it’s shit, like all work, in fact it’s worse. Every day here they speed up the line. A lot of work and not much money. Here, little by little, you die without noticing. Which means that it is work that is shit, all jobs are shit. There’s no work that is OK, it is work itself that is shit. Here, today, if we want to get ahead, we can’t get ahead by working more. Only by the struggle, not by working more, that’s the only way we can make things better. Kick back, today we’re having a holiday.

The Politicisation of Anti-work

Gradually he comes to develop a political analysis as well. It’s not just that work is bad and pointless: it’s hypocritical as well, with arbitrary determinations of whose work is valued over others, and who gets paid what.

But organizing the workers and inciting them to go on strike is challenging at first. One of the barriers is what the narrator refers to as workers’ ‘neurosis’.

What is this neurosis? Every Fiat worker has a gate number, a corridor number, a locker room number, a locker number, a workshop number, a line number, a number for the tasks they have to do, a number for the parts of the car they have to make. In other words, it’s all numbers, your day at Fiat is divided up, organised by this series of numbers that you see and by others that you don’t see. By a series of numbered and obligatory things. Being inside there means that as you enter the gate you have to go like this with a numbered ID card, then you have to take that numbered staircase turning to the right, then that numbered corridor. And so on.

In the cafeteria for example. The workers automatically choose a place to sit, and those remain their places for ever. It’s not as if the cafeteria is organised so that everyone has to sit in the same place all the time. But in fact you always end up sitting in the same place. It’s like, this is a scientific fact, it’s strange. I always ate in the same seat, at the same table, with the same people, without anyone ever having put us together. Well this signifies neurosis, according to me. I don’t know if you can say neurosis for this, if that is the exact word. But to be inside there you have to do this, because if you don’t you can’t stay.

The narrator’s point is clear: the regimentation and routinization of work tasks generates a tendency to accept the routinization of daily life—a hesitation to question or challenge norms; an inclination toward accepting the status quo, even when there is no rule saying they have to.

We Challenge Everything

Two aspects of the workers’ struggle are impressively articulated and conveyed in We Want Everything. The first is an abject hatred of work—a clear indictment of the pointlessness and myth of work. Work is not noble, work does not contribute to the self or society; it is oppression and exploitation, pure and simple.

“Workers don’t like work, workers are forced to work. I’m not here at Fiat because I like Fiat, because there isn’t a single fucking thing about Fiat that I like, I don’t like the cars that we make, I don’t like the foremen, I don’t like you. I’m here at Fiat because I need money.”

The narrator is careful to emphasize that it’s not just manual labour, it’s not just certain kinds of work that are useless and disgusting—it’s all work. The narrator knows from the beginning, with an instinctive honesty, that he doesn’t like work, but it’s only as the novel progresses that he understands the oppressive and exploitative nature of all work, realizes the political and social nature of the demand—“Less work!”

The other refreshing dimension of We Want Everything is the perceptive critique of unions. Yes, this is a workers’ struggle, but it’s not a union struggle. The unions are portrayed as the enemy of the working class. They’re exposed as serving a mediating role for the company bosses; it’s a critique that is still appropriate to level at many unions today. The unions, in their efforts to retain their control over the workers’ movement, to ensure that they control the workers and members, connive and conspire to undermine autonomous and spontaneous workers’ struggles. They fear loss of control as much as the company bosses do. The bosses want to control the factory, and the union leaders want to control the movement.

What both fear is a spontaneous, grassroots, autonomous and democratic movement self-organized by workers themselves. Example: when the struggle starts, there are various categories of workers, each of which earns different salaries. Because the workers are demanding more money, the union and bosses negotiate the creation of new categories, to provide more pay scales. The workers reject this: they want the elimination of all the different pay scales, so that all the workers earn the same amount, and that it’s an acceptable amount for all. The narrator’s lesson is this: the unions want tangible victories to wave in the air; but the workers want a powerful united movement capable of taking on the bosses.

The Outcome of the Struggle Has Yet to Be Written

“The unions try to start the struggles one at a time, one finishing and another starting, to avoid the struggle widening and to stop the workers organising themselves in the factories from expressing their will autonomously. But the working-class struggle won’t be controlled this way. Almost every day a new struggle starts, and it’s the workers who start it. This is a big test of the working class’s strength… If workers end up divided and disorganised after the struggle, this is a defeat, even if something has been gained. If workers come out of the struggle more united and organised, this is a victory, even if some demands remain unmet.”

The narrator does a superb job of chronicling the gradual evolution of the unions’ role in the struggle: at first encouraging strikes and actions, but as the workers start organizing autonomously and making their own—often more radical—decisions, the unions begin to panic and escalate their own efforts to suppress the autonomous workers’ struggle. Eventually, they even cooperate with the bosses in this effort, each of them terrified that a system which benefits them both might actually be overthrown.

“Unionists, PCI bureaucrats, fake Marxist-Leninists, cops and fascists all have one characteristic in common. They have a total fear of the workers’ struggle, of the workers’ ability to tell the bosses and the bosses’ servants to go to hell and to organise their struggle autonomously, in the factory and outside the factory. We made them a leaflet that finished like this: Someone once said that even whales have lice. The class struggle is a whale, and cops, Party and union bureaucrats, fascists and fake revolutionaries are its lice.”

The Assembly

The varied themes come together in a workers’ assembly that takes place toward the end of the novel. Workers denounce the fact that the union, instead of fighting for equal wages for everyone, has settled for an even more convoluted hierarchy of pay. Workers point out that even though the bosses have conceded a pay increase, the price of consumer goods and housing is rising accordingly. What good is a pay increase, then? Others demand a guaranteed wage for all, regardless of whether they’re employed or unemployed.

The unions warn them against radical demands, since they could upset the country’s economic system. But the workers counter that’s precisely what they want: the destruction of an economic system that perpetually exploits them. Union reforms only strengthen that system. “We say no to the reforms that the unions and the party want us to fight for. Because we understand that those reforms only improve the system that the bosses exploit us with. Why should we care about being exploited more, with a few more apartments, a few more medicines and a few more kids at school. All of this only advances the State…”

But communism is no solution either, observe other workers—the communists are just as obsessed as the capitalists with making people work hard for no reward. What the workers want is an end to work. “Comrades, I’m from Salerno, and I have done every kind of work in the south as well as the north and I have learned one thing. That a worker has only two choices: a grueling job when things are going well or unemployment and hunger when they go badly. I don’t know which of the two is worse.”

“We started this great struggle by demanding more money and less work. Now we know that this is a call that turns everything upside-down, that sends all the bosses’ projects, capital’s entire plan, up in smoke. And now we must move from the struggle for wages to the struggle for power. Comrades, let us refuse work. We want all the power, we want all the wealth.”

The Struggle Continues

The struggle against work portrayed in the novel was sparked by a particular type of worker. Earlier in the century, Italian workers’ struggles (like elsewhere) were defined by skilled workers who could more effectively demand more wealth because of their highly specialised skills. And it was that type of worker around which left-leaning political parties and labour unions organised their strategies. But in the ‘60s a new type of worker appeared: “adept at a thousand trades because he has no trade, without a single professional quality even when he possesses a diploma, lacking a steady job and often unemployed or forced into casual service, who can’t find work and so seeks it in Turin, in Milan, in Switzerland, in Germany, anywhere in Europe. Who finds the hardest, most exhausting, most inhuman jobs, those that no one else is prepared to do.” It is on this worker, Balestrini points out, that the postwar economies of the West were built.

What is significantly different about this worker is that unlike the skilled worker of the past, who could often take pride in their sought-after technical skills, the new worker is defined by “his ideological estrangement from work and from any professional ethic, the inability to present himself as the bearer of a trade and to identify himself in it. His single obsession is the search for a source of income to be able to consume and survive… For him work and development are understood solely as money, immediately transformable into goods to consume.”

As Balestrini notes in his afterword, this worker is in many ways still the worker of today. In the ‘60s and ‘70s the state and the capitalist system hastily responded to the workers’ challenge with a series of measures which suppressed that struggle for a time—automation and robotisation of factories, outsourcing of production to the third world, co-optation of unions and where none of these strategies worked, brutal police repression. But the workers, the issues, and the struggle continues today.

It was because of this new and unpredictable type of worker—who wasn’t fooled by the notion of a ‘work ethic’ and was uninterested in the elitist machinations of unions and political parties—that unprecedented revolts broke out across Italy (and elsewhere) during this period. The novel ends with a dramatic street battle between workers and police, the end of which is left hanging. Throughout that dramatically depicted battle, which rages throughout the city, it becomes clear that the workers’ strength comes from the self-empowered, self-organised movement they have been building in the weeks and months previous.

These weren’t workers following union instructions, or students playing at textbook revolutionary. These were workers who had challenged their bosses face-to-face in the factory; who had walked off the assembly lines in solidarity when one of their fellows was fired. It was their unity that was their strength—not their union or their political ideology. And as the battle rages, they realize that this unity can bring them real power.

“People kept coming from all around. You could hear a hollow noise, continuous, the drumbeat of stones rhythmically striking the electricity pylons. They made this sound, hollow, striking, continuous. The police couldn’t surround and search the whole area, full of building sites, workshops, public housing, fields. People kept attacking, the whole population was fighting. Groups reorganised themselves, attacked at one point, came back to attack somewhere else. But now the thing that moved them more than rage was joy. The joy of finally being strong. Of discovering that your needs, your struggle, were everyone’s needs, everyone’s struggle.”

The aftermath of the battle is left hanging, uncertain. Balestrini’s message is clear: the outcome of the struggle has yet to be written. “Capital only appeared to have won a victory; it has triggered a process that leads unavoidably to a confrontation with the underlying issue, expressed clearly 30 years ago in the struggles of the mass worker with the slogan ‘refusal of work’,” writes Balestrini in his afterword.

More and more the automation of production, and also the possibility in general of trusting almost every type of work and activity to machines and computers, requires a laughably small quantity of human labour power. Therefore why shouldn’t everyone profit from the wealth produced by machines and from the time freed from labour? Today, absurdly, work that is no longer necessary continues to be imposed because only through this is it possible to conceive of the distribution of money, allowing the continuation of the cycle of production and consumption and the accumulation of capital.

It’s surely no coincidence that Balestrini’s novel is undergoing a renewed popularity, at a time of mass mobilizations by a public whose ideological estrangement from work echoes so strongly with that of the characters in his 45-year old book. As demands arise again that echo the demands of the period—less work, more pay, more leisure, guaranteed income—We Want Everything sends a stirring reminder that these are not new demands, and that although it is a new generation rising to the challenge, it is the same fundamental struggle that continues.

“A new era is waiting for humanity, when it will be freed from the blackmail and the suffering of a forced labour that is already unnecessary and the enslavement to money, which prevent the free conduct of activity according to the aptitudes and desires of each and steal and degrade from the rhythm of life, at the same time that there is the real possibility of widespread and general wellbeing. This was the meaning, and could again be the meaning today and in the future, of that old rallying cry: Vogliamo tutto!” We want everything!

Will Robots Take Your Job?

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams

Source: ROAR

In recent months, a range of studies has warned of an imminent job apocalypse. The most famous of these—a study from Oxford—suggests that up to 47 percent of US jobs are at high-risk of automation over the next two decades. Its methodology—assessing likely developments in technology, and matching them up to the tasks typically deployed in jobs—has been replicated since then for a number of other countries. One study finds that 54 percent of EU jobs are likely automatable, while the chief economist of the Bank of England has argued that 45 percent of UK jobs are similarly under threat.

This is not simply a rich-country problem, either: low-income economies look set to be hit even harder by automation. As low-skill, low-wage and routine jobs have been outsourced from rich capitalist countries to poorer economies, these jobs are also highly susceptible to automation. Research by Citi suggests that for India 69 percent of jobs are at risk, for China 77 percent, and for Ethiopia a full 85 percent of current jobs. It would seem that we are on the verge of a mass job extinction.

Nothing New?

For many economists however, there is nothing to worry about. If we look at the history of technology and the labor market, past experiences would suggest that automation has not caused mass unemployment. Automation has always changed the labor market. Indeed, one of the primary characteristics of the capitalist mode of production has been to revolutionize the means of production—to really subsume the labor process and reorganize it in ways that more efficiently generate value. The mechanization of agriculture is an early example, as is the use of the cotton gin and spinning jenny. With Fordism, the assembly line turned complex manufacturing jobs into a series of simple and efficient tasks. And with the era of lean production, we have had the computerized management of long commodity chains turn the production process into a more and more heavily automated system.

In every case, we have not seen mass unemployment. Instead we have seen some jobs disappear, while others have been created to replace not only the lost jobs but also the new jobs necessary for a growing population. The only times we see massive unemployment tend to be the result of cyclical factors, as in the Great Depression, rather than some secular trend towards higher unemployment resulting from automation. On the basis of these considerations, most economists believe that the future of work will likely be the same as the past: some jobs will disappear, but others will be created to replace them.

In typical economist fashion, however, these thoughts neglect the broader social context of earlier historical periods. Capitalism may not have seen a massive upsurge in unemployment, but this is not a necessary outcome. Rather, it was dependent upon unique circumstances of earlier moments—circumstances that are missing today. In the earliest periods of automation, there was a major effort by the labor movement to reduce the working week. It was a successful project that reduced the week from around 60 hours at the turn of the century, down to 40 hours during the 1930s, and very nearly even down to 30 hours. In this context, it was no surprise that Keynes would famously extrapolate to a future where we all worked 15 hours. He was simply looking at the existing labor movement. With reduced work per person, however, this meant that the remaining work would be spread around more evenly. The impact of technology at that time was therefore heavily muted by a 33 percent reduction in the amount of work per person.

Today, by contrast, we have no such movement pushing for a reduced working week, and the effects of automation are likely to be much more serious. Similar issues hold for the postwar era. With most Western economies left in ruins, and massive American support for the revitalization of these economies, the postwar era saw incredibly high levels of economic growth. With the further addition of full employment policies, this period also saw incredibly high levels of job growth and a compact between trade unions and capital to maintain a sufficient amount of good jobs. This led to healthy wage growth and, subsequently, healthy growth in aggregate demand to stimulate the economy and keep jobs coming. Moreover, this was a period where nearly 50 percent of the potential labor force was constrained to the household.

Under these unique circumstances, it is no wonder that capitalism was able to create enough jobs even as automation continued to transform for the labor process. Today, we have sluggish economic growth, no commitments to full employment (even as we have commitments to harsh welfare policies), stagnant wage growth, and a major influx of women into the labor force. The context for a wave of automation is drastically different from the way it was before.

Likewise, the types of technology that are being developed and potentially introduced into the labor process are significantly different from earlier technologies. Whereas earlier waves of automation affected what economists call “routine work” (work that can be laid out in a series of explicit steps), today’s technology is beginning to affect non-routine work. The difference is between a factory job on an assembly line and driving a car in the chaotic atmosphere of the modern urban environment. Research from economists like David Autor and Maarten Goos shows that the decline of routine jobs in the past 40 years has played a significant role in increased job polarization and rising inequality. While these jobs are gone, and highly unlikely to come back, the next wave of automation will affect the remaining sphere of human labor. An entire range of low-wage jobs are now potentially automatable, involving both physical and mental labor.

Given that it is quite likely that new technologies will have a larger impact on the labor market than earlier waves of technological change, what is likely to happen? Will robots take your job? While one side of the debate warns of imminent apocalypse and the other yawns from the historical repetition, both tend to neglect the political economy of automation—particularly the role of labor. Put simply, if the labor movement is strong, we are likely to see more automation; if the labor movement is weak, we are likely to see less automation.

Workers Fight Back

In the first scenario, a strong labor movement is able to push for higher and higher wages (particularly relative to globally stagnant productivity growth). But the rising cost of labor means that machines become relatively cheap in comparison. We can already see this in China, where real wages have been surging for more than 10 years, thereby making Chinese labor increasingly less cheap. The result is that China has become the world’s biggest investor in industrial robots, and numerous companies—most famously Foxconn—have all stated their intentions to move towards increasingly automated factories.

This is the archetype of a highly automated world, but in order to be achievable under capitalism it requires that the power of labor be strong, given that the relative costs of labor and machines are key determinants for investment. What then happens under these circumstances? Do we get mass unemployment as robots take all the jobs? The simple answer is no. Rather than mass decimation of jobs, most workers who have their jobs automated end up moving into new sectors.

In the advanced capitalist economies this has been happening over the past 40 years, as workers move from routine jobs to non-routine jobs. As we saw earlier, the next wave of automation is different, and therefore its effects on the labor market are also different. Some job sectors are likely to take heavy hits under this scenario. Jobs in retail and transport, for instance, will likely be heavily affected. In the UK, there are currently 3 million retail workers, but estimates by the British Retail Consortium suggest this may decrease by a million over the next decade. In the US, there are 3.4 million cashiers alone—nearly all of whose work could be automated. The transport sector is similarly large, with 3.7 million truck drivers in the US, most of whose jobs could be incrementally automated as self-driving trucks become viable on public roads. Large numbers of workers in such sectors are likely to be pushed out of their jobs if mass automation takes place.

Where will they go? The story that Silicon Valley likes to tell us is that we will all become freelance programmers and software developers and that we should all learn how to code to succeed in their future utopia. Unfortunately they seem to have bought into their own hype and missed the facts. In the US, 1.8 percent of all jobs require knowledge of programming. This compares to the agricultural sector, which creates about 1.5 percent of all American jobs, and to the manufacturing sector, which employs 8.1 percent of workers in this deindustrialized country. Perhaps programming will grow? The facts here are little better. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that by 2024 jobs involving programming will be responsible for a tiny 2.2 percent of the jobs available. If we look at the IT sector as a whole, according to Citi, it is expected to take up less than 3 percent of all jobs.

What about the people needed to take care of the robots? Will we see a massive surge in jobs here? Presently, robot technicians and engineers take up less than 0.1 percent of the job market—by 2024, this will dwindle even further. We will not see a major increase in jobs taking care of robots or in jobs involving coding, despite Silicon Valley’s best efforts to remake the world in its image.

This continues a long trend of new industries being very poor job creators. We all know about how few employees worked at Instagram and WhatsApp when they were sold for billions to Facebook. But the low levels of employment are a widespread sectoral problem. Research from Oxford has found that in the US, only 0.5 percent of the labor force moved into new industries (like streaming sites, web design and e-commerce) during the 2000s. The future of work does not look like a bunch of programmers or YouTubers.

In fact, the fastest growing job sectors are not for jobs that require high levels of education at all. The belief that we will all become high-skilled and well-paid workers is ideological mystification at its purest. The fastest growing job sector, by far, is the healthcare industry. In the US, the BLS estimates this sector to create 3.8 million new jobs between 2014 and 2024. This will increase its share of employment from 12 percent to 13.6 percent, making it the biggest employing sector in the country. The jobs of “healthcare support” and “healthcare practitioner” alone will contribute 2.3 million jobs—or 25 percent of all new jobs expected to be created.

There are two main reasons for why this sector will be such a magnet for workers forced out of other sectors. In the first place, the demographics of high-income economies all point towards a significantly growing elderly population. Fewer births and longer lives (typically with chronic conditions rather than infectious diseases) will put more and more pressure on our societies to take care of elderly, and force more and more people into care work. Yet this sector is not amenable to automation; it is one of the last bastions of human-centric skills like creativity, knowledge of social context and flexibility. This means the demand for labor is unlikely to decrease in this sector, as productivity remains low, skills remain human-centric, and demographics make it grow.

In the end, under the scenario of a strong labor movement, we are likely to see wages rise, which will cause automation to rapidly proceed in certain sectors, while workers are forced to struggle for jobs in a low-paying healthcare sector. The result is the continued elimination of middle-wage jobs and the increased polarization of the labor market as more and more are pushed into the low-wage sectors. On top of this, a highly educated generation that was promised secure and well-paying jobs will be forced to find lower-skilled jobs, putting downward pressure on wages—generating a “reserve army of the employed”, as Robert Brenner has put it.

Workers Fall Back

Yet what happens if the labor movement remains weak? Here we have an entirely different future of work awaiting us. In this case, we end up with stagnant wages, and workers remain relatively cheap compared to investment in new equipment. The consequences of this are low levels of business investment, and subsequently, low levels of productivity growth. Absent any economic reason to invest in automation, businesses fail to increase the productivity of the labor process. Perhaps unexpectedly, under this scenario we should expect high levels of employment as businesses seek to maximize the use of cheap labor rather than investing in new technology.

This is more than a hypothetical scenario, as it rather accurately describes the situation in the UK today. Since the 2008 crisis, real wages have stagnated and even fallen. Real average weekly earnings have started to rise since 2014, but even after eight years they have yet to return to their pre-crisis levels. This has meant that businesses have had incentives to hire cheap workers rather than invest in machines—and the low levels of investment in the UK bear this out. Since the crisis, the UK has seen long periods of decline in business investment—the most recent being a 0.4 percent decline between Q12015 and Q12016. The result of low levels of investment has been virtually zero growth in productivity: from 2008 to 2015, growth in output per worker has averaged 0.1 percent per year. Almost all of the UK’s recent growth has come from throwing more bodies into the economic machine, rather than improving the efficiency of the economy. Even relative to slow productivity growth across the world, the UK is particularly struggling.

With cheap wages, low investment and low productivity, we see that companies have instead been hiring workers. Indeed, employment levels in the UK have reached the highest levels on record—74.2 percent as of May 2016. Likewise, unemployment is low at 5.1 percent, especially when compared to their neighbors in Europe who average nearly double that level. So, somewhat surprisingly, an environment with a weak labor movement leads here to high levels of employment.

What is the quality of these jobs, however? We have already seen that wages have been stagnant, and that two-thirds of net job creation since 2008 has been in self-employed jobs. Yet there has also been a major increase in zero-hour contracts (employment situations that do not guarantee any hours to workers). Estimates are that up to 5 percent of the labor force is in such situations, with over 1.7 million zero-hour contracts out. Full-time employment is down as well: as a percentage of all jobs, its pre-crisis levels of 65 percent have been cut to 63 percent and refused to budge even as the economy grows (slowly). The percentage of involuntary part-time workers—those who would prefer a full-time job but cannot find one—more than doubled after the crisis, and has barely begun to recover since.

Likewise with temporary employees: involuntary temporary workers as a percentage of all temporary workers rose from below 25 percent to over 40 percent during the crisis, only partly recovering to around 35 percent today. There is a vast number of workers who would prefer to work in more permanent and full-time jobs, but who can no longer find them. The UK is increasingly becoming a low-wage and precarious labor market—or, in the Tories’ view, a competitive and flexible labor market. This, we would argue, is the future that obtains with a weak labor movement: low levels of automation, perhaps, but at the expense of wages (and aggregate demand), permanent jobs and full-time work. We may not get a fully automated future, but the alternative looks just as problematic.

These are therefore the two poles of possibility for the future of work. On the one hand, a highly automated world where workers are pushed out of much low-wage non-routine work and into lower-wage care work. On the other hand, a world where humans beat robots but only through lower wages and more precarious work. In either case, we need to build up the social systems that will enable people to survive and flourish in the midst of these significant changes. We need to explore ideas like a Universal Basic Income, we need to foster investment in automation that could eliminate the worst jobs in society, and we need to recover that initial desire of the labor movement for a shorter working week.

We must reclaim the right to be lazy—which is neither a demand to be lazy nor a belief in the natural laziness of humanity, but rather the right to refuse domination by a boss, by a manager, or by a capitalist. Will robots take our jobs? We can only hope so.

Note: All uncited figures either come directly from, or are based on authors’ calculations of, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, O*NET and the Office for National Statistics.

We Don’t Need A Government, We Need A Purpose

Posted on November 6, 2016 by Reid Mukai

psychedelic-trippy-abstract-art-poster-soul-universe-time-cameron-gray-font-b-spiritual-b-font-art

By Lance Schuttler

Source: The Mind Unleashed

What truly motivates a person? Years ago I would have answered, “well, money of course. Money helps to to be able to pay for our food, shelter, some entertainment and allows us to (sometimes) further our education.”

While that answer is true in ways, today I would take it further and say that a purpose is what motivates us. It is not that money itself it motivating for us, but it is the security money can provide by allowing us to pay for our basic needs like food, shelter and clothing.

From our childhood, we have been conditioned to believe that it is necessary to have money and the institutions that direct the flow of money to the greater populace. However, if we analyze that deep enough, we see that it is a fact that such a means of rationing resources (which money does) and the institutions that control the rationing are not necessary, but are by choice.

Sure, in some ways government has served it’s purpose. It has allowed us to build an infrastructure on this planet where we can travel pretty much wherever we would like. It has also built schools, hospitals and allowed for the creation of all sorts of public services as well as public entertainment. However, what is important to remember is that it wasn’t governments who built these things. It was people. People made the choice each and every morning to wake up and go to their job to help create whatever it was they were working on.

Though money was almost certainly and incentive for many of these people, I believe that we human beings have an innate desire to help serve a greater cause. Perhaps for many of these people, an additional incentive for doing their work was that they knew on a deeper level, that this was in some way, big or small, to allow our civilization to develop and grow in a positive direction.

In today’s world, with the internet, 3-D printing and the ability to harness unlimited energy for the entire world in the forms of solar, wind, tidal and geothermal, not to mention the numerous patented “free energy” devices which are currently suppressed, the need for money and government has passed us. We no longer need money as a way to ration resources when we have the technology to create unlimited abundance for everyone on the planet. With no longer needing money, we no longer need a system such as governance who acts as the hub of rationing these resources through the means of money.

While I do not think that immediately stopping the usage of money and governance simultaneously around the world would be a wise or even positive decision in the short-term, I do believe that we could easily begin the process of scaling these back tremendously with the intention of completely ridding them of our reality.

It is no secret that many people today do not like their jobs or the work they do. However, people realize that the money that is paid to them allows them to pay for a place to live and for food to eat, which in turn allows them to continue their life. In a very real way, many people are working a job they couldn’t care less about, just in order to stay alive. Some say, “well, that’s life. Get used to it.” Or, “You have to work. Stop complaining.”

I say, “with the technology we have today that could easily provide abundance in all forms for every person on this planet, it is counter-productive to use our time doing things we do not enjoy doing.” If you knew that if we as a planet really want to, we can cleanly power the entire world, which will allow us to grow the food and resources needed to feed, house and clothe everyone. This in turn will allow the basic needs of everyone to be met. From there, we will stop doing the work we’ve been doing to earn the money, which in turns allows us to pay for our basic needs.

At that point, we will start doing things that are passionate about. We will move away from the need of a government and move into finding what is of purpose for us. Perhaps at that point we can move from competition to cooperation. We can begin to heal ourselves, our family and friends. We can then begin to heal our pets, the water and land of the Earth. We can create a truly peaceful paradise.

For those arguing, “this sounds like communism,” I say, “this has nothing to do with politics or money and is several levels evolved past such barbaric methods.” Remember, communism is a political system who also has been enslaved via the monetary system, just as every other political system has been, whether that is capitalism, feudalism, communism or fascism.

Again, powering, feeding, clothing and housing the entire world has nothing to do with politics. It does, however, have everything to do with the human spirit and the deservability that each person naturally has. Remember, we are human beings living on a planet that is flying through our solar system, who receives it’s warmth from a massive ball of gas known as the Sun. We are human beings. We are each a miracle. This planet’s existence is a miracle. We needn’t do a thing but simply exist to deserve the abundance this Earth can and one day will easily provide to all of us.

With that, I ask you: What is it that you can do, whether as a “job” or as a hobby that allows you feel a sense of purpose? What do you get passionate about? Maybe you are already in your purpose.

I do believe strongly that with the advancements we have made and continue to make technologically, but most importantly emotionally/spiritually, we are beginning the transition away from a monetary world and into a world where abundance, peace and purpose are the norm. What can you do to help add to this momentum?

3 Signs Corporate Work Culture Has Become Toxic to the Human Spirit

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Reid Mukai

(Editor’s note: There are of course countless more signs of the toxicity of our culture, but the three mentioned in the article are significant ones.)

By Sigmund Fraud

Source: Waking Times

Feeling trapped on the corporate ladder? You’re not alone… our work culture has become uncaring, toxic and rather dangerous to our well-being.

Everybody seems to be working harder and harder these days, but genuinely happy people are hard to come by, even amongst those who actually have decent jobs. The truth is, very few people are fit and able to succeed under the current status quo of living to work, and more of us than ever are slipping behind in a corporate culture that is becoming increasingly toxic and impossible to endure.

Suspended in ‘survival mode,’ the individual is really not doing well in this environment. But, corporations are doing well, and have grown to have an enormous impact on our lives, even affecting how we educate our children, programming them with the ambition to grow up to become human resources just like everyone else.

Our society hasn’t always been so dominated by the corporate model, as it is today, though. In just the last 150 years or so, the corporation has become more pervasive and influential than the church and most political parties have ever been. Now, human relationships, commerce, and organized human endeavor are monopolized under the corporate model, making financial profit, rather than truer virtues, the primary driver of the vast bulk of daily human activity.

Is dedication to the corporate work model serving us well?

So many people hate their jobs and work only for the weekends… then they go nuts in 48-hour orgies of convenience and excess in order to ferociously attempt to reclaim their lives for themselves. Were human beings meant to live this way?

Who feels it knows it, and in order for the world to change, individuals must first have good reason to love their own lives. The corporate work trap is holding far too many good people in bondage, side-lining them from being change-makers in a needy world.

Here are 3 signs the corporate work culture has become toxic to the human spirit and that it must be abandoned.

1.) The culture of over-work and over-competition is driving us crazy and turning us against each other.

Entry into the corporate worker-bee culture is about being selected, and the education system grooms children and young adults to work for and think in terms of being evaluated, tested, judged and ranked against friends and peers who are subdivided by age, gender and aptitude.

The aim is to be chosen, so early on we are taught to be selectable. We learn to follow the leader, follow the rules, fall in line, and to do our best to be the best at whatever else everyone else is doing.

In order to prosper in the corporate work scene, value must be proven, again and again, and the sense of urgent competition never stops.

To make ourselves always available for this level of participation, we’ve been programmed to sacrifice our most valuable asset, time. The important roles in life, such as caregiving to the young and old (those who don’t work), are snowed under, giving us less and less room to be human and throwing us further and further out of alignment with the natural rhythms of life.

“Bad work culture is everyone’s problem, for men just as much as for women. It’s a problem for working parents, not just working mothers. For working children who need time to take care of their own parents, not just working daughters. For anyone who does not have the luxury of a full-time lead parent or caregiver at home.” [Anne-Marie Slaughter]

2.) The corporate work culture is socially engineering us to conform to a wasteful, meaningless consumer lifestyle.

We are several generations deep into the greatest mass social engineering project ever initiated against human beings. A true and vast global cultural revolution. Enforced on us with mis-education, brainwashing, peer-pressure, propaganda, economics, regulations, ordinances, laws, and the seizure of personal time, our culture has been deliberately transformed into a consumer wasteland by the empires of media, advertising and business.

Colonized by television and mass media, the modern mind has been weened on the illusion that happiness is external and can be purchased. Kept as far as possible from personal development and spiritual growth, we are now expected to be total consumers of media and of stuff, always in pursuit of endless growth and instant gratification.

“We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.” [David Cain]

Which is why we work so hard… because working gives us the freedom to consume… which is what we are supposed to be doing. We fit in when we work to consume to obey. And we’ve been trained to believe that fitting in matters.

“The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by. Is this you?” [David Cain]

3.) The corporate work model has become the contemporary slave management program for a world ruled by fiat money masters.

What we are told to believe is prosperity, is really just an elegant trap, an illusion. And at the very top of this pyramid of lies is the dark secret as to why we all have to work so hard in order to experience life on planet earth.

At its very core, the world economy is based on a rigged fiat monetary system that is explicitly designed to create and perpetuate debt slavery, both personal and public. The dollar is a private enterprise, privately owned by a select few people who create money for the rest of us and get paid like gods to do so.

For every dollar that is put into play in this world, a dollar plus interest is then owed to the people who own the money. The more we do, the deeper in debt we go. It’s guaranteed. At present, more money is owed to the money masters than is actually in circulation. This is bondage, it is servitude, and it is slavery.

It’s also the secret which has allowed the 1% to become the 1%, and why income equality between workers and plantation owners is so outrageous.

We don’t have time to resist any of this in any meaningful way, because we’re struggling to make it work in the corporate world, jockeying against each other for illusory wealth and prestige on a playing field created by criminals. The further we go down this road, the more control these people are given over our lives, and the more intrusive they are permitted to be.

The hamster wheel won’t stop until we have honest money.

Final Thoughts

So, we know that the corporate culture as is doesn’t serve us well, so we must then ask ourselves what we do wish for our lives to be like. Do we really need to buy into all that is being offered here?

The movement for change is growing, and avenues for expressing yourself outside of this system are growing along side of our awareness of just how ridiculous and toxic the corporate work culture has become.

Life is all possibility and our highest potential awaits us, although, before we can fully realize it, we’ll have to break through the crusty fog of wrongfully imposed culture and fully activate our imagination, creativity and courage.

The Clock Inside Us

Posted on March 20, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Eman Shahata

Source: The New Inquiry

Once a weapon to combat idleness, the clock has become a prosthesis, augmenting the human body to override its need for rest

IF time is money, then sleep is theft. Today’s cult of busyness regards sleep as a defect that threatens to render people competitively unfit. In a recent article for the Guardian, Lucy Rock wrote about CEOs’ “competitive sleep deprivation,” with top executives sleeping for a mere three to four hours, mimicking Margaret Thatcher’s four-hour sleep cycle when she was in office. Similarly, Angela Ahrendts, head of retail at Apple and former CEO of Burberry, has claimed she “gets a headache when she sleeps for more than six hours.”

Such enthusiasm for sleeplessness seems to make an executive virtue out of a capitalistic necessity. But it has deep epistemological roots. In the wake of Enlightenment and in tandem with the emergence of capitalism, humans began to view nature as a pool of resources to be tamed, mastered, owned, and directed toward fulfilling human desires. It wasn’t long before this conquest of nature was redirected toward the intransigencies of human nature. Despite all the technological advances that positivistic science yielded, humans were still faced with their own physical limitations. They could build skyscrapers of glass and steel that defied gravity in the name of human reason, yet they could not tame the unreasonable demands of their own body for rest.

The attempt to tame the body of its unprofitable tendency to tire began as an effort to make “saving time” a moral issue. Sixteenth-century moralist and mercantilist discourses already regarded punctuality as a prerequisite for the conception of a modern man, the pinnacle of social development in an imagined context of linear progress. British historian E.P. Thompson points out in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” that toward the end of the 17th century, as wage labor relations began to become more prevalent, time began to be conceived as a precious commodity to be spent rather than merely passed. “Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time,” Thompson notes. “And the employer must use the time of his labor, and see that it is not wasted.” Tolling bells and fines levied by employers taught students and workers that their time was being counted, that it was a regulated and regimented currency.

Moralists urged “time thrift,” and framed the waste of time as summoning divine punishment. As British nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood put it in the 17th century tract Meetness for Heaven, “This is our working day, our market time … O Sirs, sleep now, and awake in hell, whence there is no redemption.” Paternalist and colonialist discourses, whether in addressing the English poor or indigenous people from developing countries, represented idleness as a trait of those who are “naturally inferior.” For instance, as Thompson notes, clergyman John Clayton’s pamphlet “Friendly Advice to the Poor” urges the factory worker, whom he refers to as a “sluggard,” to use his time efficiently and refrain from “dulling his spirit by Indolence.” Similarly, where theories of social evolutionism gained prominence, time discipline was seen as essential for the transition to “mature societies.” Thompson notes how economic-growth theorists viewed Mexican mineworkers as “indolent and childlike people” because of their deficient time discipline.

Parallel to the rise of “time thrift” comes the monumental role of the clock. In 17th century Britain, clocks restructured work habits by materializing the ethic of time thrift, setting a clear demarcation between “work” and “life” and reminding workers of their tasks. The omnipresence of clocks was a guarantor of regulation, it ensured the institution of order in the workspace. The clock’s ubiquity legitimized time discipline and naturalized it, making it banal and commonsensical. It made sure that no one escaped the tempo.

One might say that the clock becomes a subject, with agency in its own right, shaping social customs and subjecting people to its rhythms. As anthropologist Bruno Latour has argued, technology and things are not simply animated by humans but also mediate human action. And as anthropologist Benjamin Snyder argues, clocks served the purpose of training and manipulating the body to accomplish set tasks, thereby “turning it into an inexhaustible source of energy.” The incessant sound of the ticking clock, the mounting anxiety it almost automatically evokes, has come to regulate the body and embed it within the culture of busyness.

If clocks are agents that shape human actions, is it valid to assume that clocks are an “other”? By making sure everyone maximizes their efficiency, clocks address the physical limitations of the human body, becoming a kind of prosthesis that pushes humans closer to reaching an “optimal” state of activity.

This is reflected in the late 19th century emergence of the idea of an “internal clock,” which exemplifies how biological processes can be redefined in terms of prominent material objects. By this means, the ideology of time discipline— inseparable from the clock—becomes seen as a natural imperative. In the wake of the clock’s ubiquity, positivist and scientific rhetoric began to depict the biological clock as an “endogenous” factor that operates according to “innate” biological rhythms, leading to medical advice shaped by the metaphors it employs: “how to reset your internal clock” and so on. Such advice points to the mechanization of the body, which now requires “daily maintenance.”

It may seem as if the presence of a master clock in our brains, which synchronizes and sets sleeping patterns on its own, means we no longer need an outside force to tame our bodies. Our bodies have internalized this systemic regulation, becoming in this sense, machinic. However, what implications arise from this? This mechanization of the body—a precursor and template for the ongoing reconceptualization of the self in terms of quantities alone—reflects how our bodies have become products, rather than agents, of a culture of busyness and rationality that glorifies productivity. Scientific discourses have succeeded in masking the way we’ve been clocked in and can no longer clock out.

Dead, White, and Blue

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Reid Mukai

The Great Die-Off of America’s Blue Collar Whites

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Source: TomDispatch.com

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.”

It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. There has also been a major racial gap in longevity — 5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women — though, hardly noticed, it has been narrowing for the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide, alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction.

There are some practical reasons why whites are likely to be more efficient than blacks at killing themselves. For one thing, they are more likely to be gun-owners, and white men favor gunshots as a means of suicide. For another, doctors, undoubtedly acting in part on stereotypes of non-whites as drug addicts, are more likely to prescribe powerful opiate painkillers to whites than to people of color. (I’ve been offered enough oxycodone prescriptions over the years to stock a small illegal business.)

Manual labor — from waitressing to construction work — tends to wear the body down quickly, from knees to back and rotator cuffs, and when Tylenol fails, the doctor may opt for an opiate just to get you through the day.

The Wages of Despair

But something more profound is going on here, too. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it, the “diseases” leading to excess white working class deaths are those of “despair,” and some of the obvious causes are economic. In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working class people of any color.

I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back — and better yet, a strong union — could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas like retail, landscaping, and delivery-truck driving. This means that those in the bottom 20% of white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces.

White privilege was never, however, simply a matter of economic advantage. As the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.”

Some of the elements of this invisible wage sound almost quaint today, like Du Bois’s assertion that white working class people were “admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.” Today, there are few public spaces that are not open, at least legally speaking, to blacks, while the “best” schools are reserved for the affluent — mostly white and Asian American along with a sprinkling of other people of color to provide the fairy dust of “diversity.” While whites have lost ground economically, blacks have made gains, at least in the de jure sense. As a result, the “psychological wage” awarded to white people has been shrinking.

For most of American history, government could be counted on to maintain white power and privilege by enforcing slavery and later segregation. When the federal government finally weighed in on the side of desegregation, working class whites were left to defend their own diminishing privilege by moving rightward toward the likes of Alabama Governor (and later presidential candidate) George Wallace and his many white pseudo-populist successors down to Donald Trump.

At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken it up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal. The Guardian, for instance, now keeps a running tally of the number of Americans (mostly black) killed by cops (as of this moment, 1,209 for 2015), while black protest, in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and a wave of on-campus demonstrations, has largely recaptured the moral high ground formerly occupied by the civil rights movement.

The culture, too, has been inching bit by bit toward racial equality, if not, in some limited areas, black ascendency. If the stock image of the early twentieth century “Negro” was the minstrel, the role of rural simpleton in popular culture has been taken over in this century by the characters in Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. At least in the entertainment world, working class whites are now regularly portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street-smart, and sometimes as wealthy as Kanye West. It’s not easy to maintain the usual sense of white superiority when parts of the media are squeezing laughs from the contrast between savvy blacks and rural white bumpkins, as in the Tina Fey comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. White, presumably upper-middle class people generally conceive of these characters and plot lines, which, to a child of white working class parents like myself, sting with condescension.

Of course, there was also the election of the first black president. White, native-born Americans began to talk of “taking our country back.” The more affluent ones formed the Tea Party; less affluent ones often contented themselves with affixing Confederate flag decals to their trucks.

On the American Downward Slope

All of this means that the maintenance of white privilege, especially among the least privileged whites, has become more difficult and so, for some, more urgent than ever. Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating.

If the government, especially at the federal level, is no longer as reliable an enforcer of white privilege, then it’s grassroots initiatives by individuals and small groups that are helping to fill the gap — perpetrating the micro-aggressions that roil college campuses, the racial slurs yelled from pickup trucks, or, at a deadly extreme, the shooting up of a black church renowned for its efforts in the Civil Rights era. Dylann Roof, the Charleston killer who did just that, was a jobless high school dropout and reportedly a heavy user of alcohol and opiates. Even without a death sentence hanging over him, Roof was surely headed toward an early demise.

Acts of racial aggression may provide their white perpetrators with a fleeting sense of triumph, but they also take a special kind of effort. It takes effort, for instance, to target a black runner and swerve over to insult her from your truck; it takes such effort — and a strong stomach — to paint a racial slur in excrement on a dormitory bathroom wall. College students may do such things in part out of a sense of economic vulnerability, the knowledge that as soon as school is over their college-debt payments will come due. No matter the effort expended, however, it is especially hard to maintain a feeling of racial superiority while struggling to hold onto one’s own place near the bottom of an undependable economy.

While there is no medical evidence that racism is toxic to those who express it — after all, generations of wealthy slave owners survived quite nicely — the combination of downward mobility and racial resentment may be a potent invitation to the kind of despair that leads to suicide in one form or another, whether by gunshots or drugs. You can’t break a glass ceiling if you’re standing on ice.

It’s easy for the liberal intelligentsia to feel righteous in their disgust for lower-class white racism, but the college-educated elite that produces the intelligentsia is in trouble, too, with diminishing prospects and an ever-slipperier slope for the young. Whole professions have fallen on hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hating on those — of any color or ethnicity — who are falling even faster.

Barbara Ehrenreich, a TomDispatch regular and founding editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword) and most recently the autobiographical Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything.

The Mechanics Of A Free Society

Posted on January 17, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Colin Turner

Source: Freeworlder

Most people who have given any consideration to a moneyless, ‘free world’ society are already aware that we have the technology today to create a world of abundance without the constraints and inequality of the traditional market system, owing to how much human labour can now be efficiently automated.

Without scarcity, and a massive reduction in the need for labour, money effectively becomes obsolete. That’s the theory. But it’s not the full story, nor does it convince everybody who comes into contact with the theory. In fact, it convinces surprisingly few indeed.

In my opinion, this kind of super-advanced “Star Trek” moneyless society is still quite a distance away – not because we lack the technology – but because we humans lack the openness and understanding required to make it work.

A truly free society should be just that – unlimited, self-determining and self-organising for the optimum benefit of all. Today it appears that, left to our own devices, humanity just can’t wait to blow itself to pieces. How can you de-regulate society and hope to achieve equilibrium against that backdrop?

Let us remind ourselves that today we share our world with people separated by walls to stop them killing each other, giant corporate agencies detached from the social and ecological effects of their business, people who kill animals for pleasure, and, worst of all, a population that has somehow programmed itself to consume recklessly to compensate for its own imagined insecurity.

To my mind, celebrity/brand worship, religious fervour, and xenophobic flag-waving are all here to remind us that – irrespective of our technological advances – we still have a long way to go before humanity can unite in the common purpose of sharing our world and its bounty equitably and sustainably for all.

As someone who has considered these ideas perhaps more than most, I have had plenty of time to critique and refine my own philosophy along the way. As a result of these self-inquiries, I have come up with a number of ideas that I believe can help us paint a fuller picture of what to expect in a free society, and some ways that we can enact it today.

Social Gravity

This is the glue that keeps society together. We are a social species. By and large, we prefer to do things together. We naturally gravitate into groups, teams, villages and cities.

This all stems from one basic human need – the urge of individuals to belong to something greater. Everything from our cities, our cultures, our religions, even our great unwritten social contract of be-good-to-others – stems from this need.

Social Gravity is the force that naturally binds us – even keeping our unfair, outdated system together, with all its flaws. This is because most people prefer to accept the broader consensus rather than apply radical new thinking. The fact that it keeps our system together, in plain view of its injustices and suffering, tells you just how powerful a force Social Gravity is.

Now imagine how much more powerful this force could be in a society that positively promotes life, health, diversity and happiness for all. Social Gravity is the primary force that will bond a free society and make it work.

Currently, most free world advocates are fighting against Social Gravity as they meet peoples’ resistance to radically new ideas and change. But we know this is changing ever more by the day as these people are beginning to question the logic and injustice of the prevailing system themselves.

As more change their viewpoint, the more they ‘normalise’ the environment for others to do so too. This is why it’s important to let people know how you are thinking. Even if they disagree now, you will probably become a point of reference for them later as they too begin to change.

This natural social pressure is what will maintain order, balance and efficiency in a free society. The more people benefit from it, the stronger that force becomes.

Self-Determination

Most people do not understand the true meaning of anarchy – to the point that I’ve almost given up using the term. Over the years, the media and prevailing thought have suffused its meaning with disorder, chaos and violence. But this is not anarchy – this is usually just the collapse of oppression.

Our screens are often filled with views of young people rioting, throwing missiles or looting shops, with the strong suggestion that they have become ‘lawless’, or that ‘law and order’ need to be restored – but this is a deep and dangerous misunderstanding.

Scenes like this are, in fact, the backlash of oppression. Whatever happened before is what creates those scenes. This is anger, not anarchy.

The best way to describe anarchy is to look to the animal kingdom. By and large, animals are peaceful creatures and will happily co-exist with each other in a steady-state* environment. The only time an animal is ever violent is when it must kill to eat, or when threatened, and – crucially – no animal ever kills more than it needs.

This is self-determination – the default behaviour of all beings. When survival is not threatened, peaceful coexistence is the default state of all animals, including humans. It’s simply easier than violence.

History books and media are full of references to aggressive culture, heinous acts of violence and torture – man pitted against fellow man. This gives an abiding impression of a bloodthirsty homo sapiens, indiscriminately bludgeoning all in his path to get what he wants. But this is a false impression, and yet another dangerous misunderstanding of the world and of ourselves.

The reason for this is simple. Wars, conflict and aggression make for more interesting stories so are always reported on and read about in our history books and media. Whereas, peace and non-conflict is essentially boring and does not get written about – yet it probably accounts for 99.999% of all human behaviour.

For every lunatic who takes up a gun and starts killing people, there are millions and millions of other people who don’t, but we never hear about them. The reality is, our human experience, from a statistical point of view, is almost entirely peaceful.

A self-determining society doesn’t use or require laws. Laws were invented primarily to protect private interests and enforce the payment of taxes. In a world of abundance, open access and greater understanding of ourselves, these laws would become redundant.

Nor do we need laws to protect ourselves from each other, as that basic morality is already hard-wired into us. We are a social species. We want to get along. We all experience this spirit of humanity every day in the help we get from our work or student colleagues, our friends and families, and from strangers – even in times of crisis. When financial stress is gone, people are good to each other.

The ideological boundaries between us – culture, religion, nationality, etc – are purely superficial, and friction between differing views – much of which is inequality-based – can only diminish as the common ideals and benefits of a free society become apparent.

As long as we each have our survival needs met by society, there is nothing to compete for – at least nothing that is worth killing or dying for.

Of course, we cannot expect self-determination to automatically rule out all acts of senseless violence or anti-social behaviour, but once scarcity is not an object to peoples’ existence, we can certainly expect to reduce such incidences to a minimum.† (See Anti-Aggression Strategies)

* A steady state environment is an environment where scarcity and territories are not an issue. Technically, we humans have long since solved the problem of scarcity through the application of technology. We just have to work on our own ‘software’ to create a fair distribution system for it. Also, by doing so, we will regain sufficient trust between each other to render our territorial and cultural boundaries as meaningless as county lines.

† It’s worth pointing out that senseless violence and anti-social behaviour are already common daily occurences under our current law system – most of which can be related directly to scarcity and inequality. It seems wholly unreasonable to assume such behaviour would increase in a self-determining, abundant society.

Life Education Program

To give a free society any chance of succeeding or surviving, a radical overhaul of our current education system is essential. By and large, our current system prioritises reading, writing and arithmetic as core learning, but, in my opinion, these are far from the most important skills we need to acquire.

Children from the earliest age (even from 0) must have access to the most important information that can help them live a rich and fulfilling life, with all the skills for building great self, inter-personal and community relationships. This information can easily be compiled for children of all levels of cognisance.

Here are some examples of topic headings (though I’m sure many more could be extrapolated here):

Nature
Introduction to our planet, our ecosystem, death and the cycle of life, appreciation of all life.

Environment
Ecology, the food chain, water, weather, city and bio-systems, energy, sustainability, regeneration.

Community
The mechanics of community, the purpose and benefits of sharing, respect, trust, empathy, being responsible, leadership, team-work, resolving disputes, appreciating unfamiliar races and cultures.

Self
Anatomy of self, basic hygiene, health, nutrition, hydration, oxygenation, meditation, massage, self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-respect.

Life Skills
Interpersonal relationships, effective communication, empathy, understanding and coping with negative emotions, problem solving, critical thinking, creative expression, food growing and preparation, sex, parenting and family.

Of course, traditional learning still has enormous value and will continue to be taught in a free society, but relevant and practical lessons on life and life skills must have precedence in order to create better, happier communities.

By building Life Education as a modular program, we could even start introducing this vital new education in stages today.

Community Service

While many necessary jobs in the community will naturally be filled by those passionate and motivated enough to devote their time unconditionally to it, there will invariably be a shortfall in volunteers to participate in some of the less glamorous functions of modern society – like sweeping the roads, etc.

Community service is a concept that most of us are already familiar with – though we usually associate it with punishment for petty criminals. But the fact is, organised community service is undoubtedly the most efficient way to deliver essential services equitably within a large population.

In the enactment of a free society, every member of the community should be encouraged to contribute a reasonable minimum number of hours community service a month. Remember, for a society without conventional employment, this would be a trivial commitment for most people.

A monthly schedule of required services and tasks in the community could be published, where members would opt to participate in whichever tasks best suited their skills and availability at the time.

The number of recommended hours per month would obviously depend on local factors, ie. what needed to be done, population number, availability of skills, complexity of tasks, etc, but the idea is to keep peoples’ commitment to a minimum by spreading the community workload as widely as possible.

Children should also be actively encouraged to engage in their community’s projects from as young as possible – and in as many diverse tasks as possible. This would help them discover their own aptitude, engage with the community, and gain valuable life experience in the process.

Each service task would have a strong social aspect, where people are encouraged to work in teams, during the same hours, and towards common goals. There’s no reason why community work in a free world should ever be onerous, or could not even be carried out in entertaining ways.

For example, with a little imagination, some tasks could even be turned into sports events where teams compete to fulfil tasks, or see who can come up with the most innovative solutions. The overriding goal is that community service, while providing essential services, would be entirely opt-in, and a fulfilling and engaging experience that people would enjoy.

The Project Pledge Scheme

In any community, large projects always need to be undertaken – like building a new bridge, road, school or hospital. The current market system works quite well in this regard, as it monetarily ‘locks in’ the required personnel to complete large scale tasks uninterrupted for many months or years at a time.

In a moneyless world, rotating volunteer personnel from within local communities to help with long, complex projects may prove inefficient, or, in some cases unworkable.

A solution might be to create a Project Pledge scheme, where willing workers publicly pledge to see the project through until completion. It’s reasonable to assume that any large scale community project would find it easy to enlist local volunteers who would benefit directly from the project.

A project launch ceremony could be held where they each undertake their pledges. What’s important is that the project managers would seek the full commitment and pledge from participants at the outset, while the volunteers themselves become personally invested in the project’s success too.

As with all community service, large projects would also have a strong emphasis on creating an enjoyable social experience for the participants.

As technology gets better and more widely available, large intensive projects would obviously require fewer and fewer personnel, but a Project Pledge Scheme could be a viable interim solution.

Central Resources & Skills Database

A free society needs an effective information network to maintain its efficiency. We can have a central information database relating to resource location and inventory, and a comprehensive directory of people and skills. Such a database would be maintained and moderated by users.

The resources section would be a map-based inventory and requisition facility for users to list, find and request the resources they require. By resources, I mean anything from raw iron ore to a wooden dining table. Whatever physical resources people have available for sharing, they can list it on the database.

Anyone looking for those resources would simply run a search on the database, find the nearest match, and place a requisition order. If necessary, resource requisitions could be weighted according to urgency and depth of benefit to the community. For example, a community urgently requiring concrete for re-construction of a well would have greater priority than an individual requiring concrete to build a garage.

Like the inventory, the requisition system would be entirely transparent, and a user making the request would be able to see where his request was positioned in the queue and read the other requests. A fully transparent system is the only way to avoid needless misunderstandings and conflicts.

Items that need to be delivered from one area to another could then come under the Community Service system in the despatching area to source a driver and truck to carry the requested goods – if possible on an already existing despatch route.

The skills section would be a map-based directory of people who wish to offer their labour or specialist skills to others. Users looking for those skills would be able to make contact with them directly.

It would seem logical for a company like Google who already have the established infrastructure and reputation to incorporate such a facility into their current portfolio, but of course, it could be any provider.

The HonorPay System

Obviously the notion of giving for reward is firmly embedded in our culture. It’s not entirely clear to me if we can ever fully transcend this essentially ego-based reward paradigm – or even if transcending this would be a good idea.

Many supporters of a free society believe we can surpass ego. I’m not so sure, since at its most base level, ego is part of our survival mechanism, and, in its highest form, embodies our individuality. Certainly in the interim period, moving from a market-based system to a free society, I believe it will be useful to maintain a symbolic reward or Honor system.

The HonorPay system, or something like it, may offer just such a symbolic payment system. It’s a free web utility that provides a means to award limited ‘Honors’ to any person you wish, aggregating their public reputation score.

The Honor awards have no useable value, and are simply tokens of appreciation. In a world powered purely by volunteerism, appreciation will be a valuable incentive.

The HonorPay system is already live (honorpay.org), and something that can be used today, providing people with a means of incentive and reward beyond physical or monetary tokens.

Open Proposals Platform

In matters relating to large numbers of people, it would make sense to have a an open platform where each person can vote on decisions that affect everybody, voice their own opinions, and propose motions of their own.

Relatively simple to implement, such a platform would seem to be a basic requisite for an open society. Though surprisingly, it may end up seeing little use, since a more conscious, abundant and creative society will likely have moved beyond reducing everything to binary choices and leaving an endless trail of disgruntled minorities! However, while still useful, there may be a far more interesting and potentially beneficial purpose for building such a system.

Today, even in supposedly democratic countries, most important decisions relating to things like budgets, laws, jobs or foreign conflict are never put to a public referendum. Most referenda are nothing more than democratic window-dressing that only address political ‘hot potatoes’ or moral hazards that politicians would rather avoid, and which usually have almost no relevance to how the country is actually run.

Implementing a public polling platform today would give people the opportunity to ‘vote’ on every issue that affects their lives. Even though their vote would not officially count, it would still give them a means for their collective voice to be heard. For example, it would be much more difficult for a country’s government to follow through on its own internal policy when the open polling platform is clearly showing a large majority of the population that don’t agree with it.

Such a platform could play a very important role in bringing about change, while also bringing the required technology for post-change society.

Organic Leadership

Just because a self-determining society doesn’t use governance doesn’t mean that we don’t need leaders and role models. Leaders are people who see further, who can envision greater possibilities, who can solve problems, or who have the courage and enthusiasm to inspire people during uncertain times.

In a free society, people will still seek leaders to inspire and help them. However this does not mean that we need rulers. Rulers do not necessarily help, they merely rule – and usually only when there is something to protect.

A truly free society does not require protection, as it is based on the understanding of nature and community first, not on private property. However, some kind of leadership structure is undoubtedly an efficient way of accomplishing complex tasks. (Think film director, for instance)

In Organic Leadership, leaders are nominated for specific tasks based on their ability through the common wishes of the group. Selection can happen in any way, but should be an organic process where the natural choice of the group is obvious.

A leader’s true role is merely to administrate the desires of others, or to adjudicate on which suggested course of action is the best one. Leadership in this form will only exist as and for when it is necessary, and based on the common understanding that, once chosen, the leader has final say on matters for which they are appointed.

Creative Arbitration

No matter how well we design and create the kind of world we want to see, there will always be disputes among people, whether over relationships, personal beliefs, or claims on land or property. That is just part of the deal with being human. We aren’t perfect – so it’s best to begin by accepting that fact!

By far the most crucial instrument in resolving disputes is speed. Unresolved problems create stress, animosity and compound fear. These are the explosive ingredients of aggression and war, so the sooner a solution is found, the better.

Where people are unable to find solutions themselves, it would seem reasonable for both parties to nominate an independent arbitrator whom they both trust to help them reach a solution. (The arbitrator can be anyone from the community who is willing to help)

But let’s define what we mean by ‘solution’. In today’s world, resolutions are usually reached using the law or courts to decide. It almost always come down to a binary choice where one side wins and the other loses. There’s nothing wrong with this in theory, but to create a lasting, stable society, no-one should ever need to be the loser.

For example, if two parties A and B are arguing over property rights, and an arbitrator – acting in the interest of the community – decides that A is the more deserving claimant, it may please A and the community, but still leaves B the loser. Even though B may accept that resolution, they are left with a sense of personal injustice and/or embarrassment that can ferment into one of the previously mentioned ingredients of aggression. This is unnecessary.

In a free society, we should never settle for a resolution that leaves even one person marginalised. This is a limited view. There is always a creative solution that brings an optimal – and preferably superior – outcome for everyone, and nothing should be considered solved until such a solution is found.

Once the limits of traditional society are lifted, much more solutions become available. For example, why would someone want to claim your house if they could readily organise an even better one for themselves elsewhere?

Creative Arbitration is about finding an amazing solution that makes all parties happier than before. We shouldn’t settle for less. The best persons to be elected to assist in dispute resolution ought not necessarily to be those most wise, but those most flexible and creative in problem-solving.

Anti-Aggression Strategies

Implementing a free and abundant society is undoubtedly the best way to reduce incidences and reasons-to-exist of socially aberrant behaviour, but, of course, we are not perfect and some incidences of violence and anti-social behaiour will still arise – albeit many times less than before.

Having a system of prescribed laws and measures to tackle ‘crime’ will not be possible nor desirable in a self-determining society, so what is the solution? How do we stop people perpetrating violence on others? How do we stop people who take unfair advantage? How do we punish people? Should we punish people at all?

The answer is simple: common sense.

Every situation is unique and should be handled using local information, with respect to the people involved, and the application of common sense. Creative Arbitration can be applied to resolve disputes and find an optimal outcome, but if it’s not possible and someone is continually making life miserable for others or being violent, then they need to be restrained. It’s that simple.

Common sense dictates that you don’t allow a gunman to continue his killing spree uninterrupted. He will obviously be restrained. How and in what measure would be determined by the situation. Drastic force may be required.

In the event that anyone does need to be restrained to prevent harming others, then every effort should be made to rehabilitate that person during that time, and to integrate them back to the community as early as possible.

In today’s world, a prison is merely a place to lock people up out of harm’s way, but it should be viewed more as a ‘timeout’ opportunity for someone with social or emotional problems to get the intensive help they need.

There are plenty of effective rehabilitation strategies and techniques available today that can be employed, but which are usually too expensive and labour intensive to be successfully implemented. A free society would have no such restrictions, and plenty of good councillers passionate enough about their work to put in the time.

Community Lighthouse

In order to prevent social decay, or regression back to our former imperial ways, a free society requires an early warning protection system. This could perhaps be incorporated into the Open Proposals platform and act like an immune system for the community at large.

If there are problems in some areas with resources or people where quality of life is becoming less than optimal, then members of that community should be able to raise alerts – anonymously if desired – to warn the greater community of the problem.

As previously stated, speed is the key to finding effective solutions, and applying a creative problem-solving approach. For example, say a remote village is being denied some vital resource due to the actions of a local farmer. A problem like this, if ignored, could end in some violent confrontation, which in turn could lead to repercussions, which in turn could become a larger tribal or familial conflict, etc.

A Community Lighthouse system could alert a neighbouring community who may be able to intervene quickly, impartially, and creatively arbitrate a solution, or, failing that, find an alternative means of providing that resource to the community. It may even just suffice for the farmer himself to be alerted to how unpopular he is becoming.

All major problems spring from unresolved small problems. By resolving small problems early, we can avoid the larger ones. A Community Lighthouse system would be crucial to the ongoing stability and security of a free society.

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	lobotero on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: The Wicker…

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Work

We Don’t Need A Government, We Need A Purpose