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Most Americans would find a job loss to be a total financial disaster. This gives employers the ability to be as authoritarian as they want, more or less. Toe

Most Americans would find a job loss to be a total financial disaster. This gives employers the ability to be as authoritarian as they want, more or less. Toe the line or be out of a job (and lose health insurance, possibly risk homelessness, etc.) is a powerful coercive mechanism. In many states, people can be fired for political activity outside of work.

zeroname 8y ago
> Most Americans would find a job loss to be a total financial disaster. Yeah, but probably not all those Googlers that feel like they need to be both activists and work in Silicon Valley.
prolikewh0a 8y ago
Chomsky points this out in this [1] interview. >Incidentally, there’s an interesting book that just came out finally, says some of the obvious things about this, by a woman named Elizabeth Anderson. She’s a philosopher and an economist. It’s called Private Government or some name like that, but her point is that, which is a major point, yes, there is a government, but governments can be repressive. But most of our lives are under private government, which she says are indistinguishable from communist dictatorships. >Any business, for example. If you subject yourself to it, you become essentially a slave of the institution with no rights, give away your liberty, and so on. >....And when the Industrial Revolution came along, everything changed. You could only survive by being subordinate to a major corporate structure, and wage labor became the norm. [1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky-the-fairway https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-noam...
- pmiller2 8y ago
  Specifically, the concept of being so beholden to an employer as to be essentially forced to obey their (nearly) every whim is called “wage slavery”[0]. While it’s not nearly as bad as the days of the “company town,” [1], when workers could be paid in company scrip good only at company stores[2], while renting company living quarters, more people are wage slaves today than will admit it, and they get angry when you suggest they are! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store
  - GW150914 8y ago
    Aren’t some of these mega corps contemplating building their own employee cities? We could see people forced to re-learn just what a company town implies, and all out of a drive to centralize in SV and lower housing costs.

zeroname 8y ago

> Most Americans would find a job loss to be a total financial disaster. Yeah, but probably not all those Googlers that feel like they need to be both activists and work in Silicon Valley.

prolikewh0a 8y ago

Chomsky points this out in this [1] interview. >Incidentally, there’s an interesting book that just came out finally, says some of the obvious things about this, by a woman named Elizabeth Anderson. She’s a philosopher and an economist. It’s called Private Government or some name like that, but her point is that, which is a major point, yes, there is a government, but governments can be repressive. But most of our lives are under private government, which she says are indistinguishable from communist dictatorships. >Any business, for example. If you subject yourself to it, you become essentially a slave of the institution with no rights, give away your liberty, and so on. >....And when the Industrial Revolution came along, everything changed. You could only survive by being subordinate to a major corporate structure, and wage labor became the norm. [1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky-the-fairway https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-noam...

pmiller2 8y ago
Specifically, the concept of being so beholden to an employer as to be essentially forced to obey their (nearly) every whim is called “wage slavery”[0]. While it’s not nearly as bad as the days of the “company town,” [1], when workers could be paid in company scrip good only at company stores[2], while renting company living quarters, more people are wage slaves today than will admit it, and they get angry when you suggest they are! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store
- GW150914 8y ago
  Aren’t some of these mega corps contemplating building their own employee cities? We could see people forced to re-learn just what a company town implies, and all out of a drive to centralize in SV and lower housing costs.