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You might find this essay by Bob Black of interest on "The Aboltiion of Work": https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/
by pdfernhout 9y ago
You might find this essay by Bob Black of interest on "The Aboltiion of Work": https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.or...
"... It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."
We might ask ourselves what "leading economic indicators" might look like when this was happening...
- jernfrost 9y agoThans for the suggestions. I have contemplated this as well. It always puzzled me at work as a software developer how we had more sales people than developers. It just seems wrong that we have more people hired to sell the software than make it. Then you got all the guys doing marketing in addition and the ones managing all these people. You end up with a lot of stuff surrounding the core value creation. A lot of this is really just need because we live in a free market economy where we need to sell stuff to people. We can't just give it to them if they need it. OTOH how would be allocated resources effectively if we did not have the market. The soviet approach seems to have been a big failure. Although I suppose wit the internet, computer, crypto currencies etc, there might be other ways of organizing labour and allocating resources. At least I wish people would acknowledge something is fundamentally wrong with how we organize society today. Unless we do it is hard to pour resources into finding alternative ways of doing things.