Joe:
From the beginning of recorded history there have been slaves and other forms of cheap labor. For many centuries, most people were just subsisting. Whether they were serfs, owned a small plot or otherwise got by, they were effectively slaves to their work in order to survive.
When serfdom ended with the industrial revolution, people were able to switch to the cheap labor jobs in factories. Then with workers uniting in unions, things got a little better, but we were still slaves to our job because even those of us who had a middle management job, were still only a paycheck or two from losing everything.
I used to tell my wife that even though I had a job which I had some control over and could decide what I was going to do on a given day, I was still a job slave because we could only survive for about three months without at least a job that paid about the same as the one I had.
We are all effectively job slaves even if we have what we consider a good job with good pay and we are never going to get rich working as we do.
Now in the last forty years there has been a concerted effort by employers to take back our gains and put us in (what they think is) our proper place.
And sadly even though we could control our government by changing our elected reps, we never do it. We are as bought and paid for as Congress is.
David
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David,
Amen brother! American capitalism needs a laboring underclass to survive. It requires that all participants be wage slaves. At the present, American capitalism has little to fear. Americans are convinced that jobs are the object of the game, especially well paying jobs, are that jobs are the answer to all economic problems and moreover, the purpose of life.
Oh sure, working class Americans' outrage over such things as $55 million CEO salaries has more to do with the fact that their corporations went bankrupt than that the CEOs looted the companies. Regular working class folks are pissed at them not because of their greed and criminality, but because, as my friend Eddie said yesterday at the Twilight Zone Cafe here in Winchester, "The CEO's didn't do their jobs, and so other people lost their jobs." They see corporations as the great givers of jobs. Jobs are everything.
And so the looting CEO and the corporation cutting cuts jobs to make the books look good for the big guys on Wall Street, are not guilty of looting, or cooking the books. They are guilty of "not doing their jobs," as if their "jobs" in any way resembled what the rest of us do. Workers know only work and jobs, because they have been undereducated, misinformed, university indoctrinated and psychologically pistol whipped into submission. It is utterly ridiculous that any adult cannot figure out the obvious inequity of this nation and American capitalism, where an elite one percent of the people grab 45% of the national pie. Such a conditioned stupidity and powerlessness makes you want to cry for your country. Or just get out of the goddamned place for long periods of time, to keep some sort of perspective and your sanity. I do some of both.
But Eddie and his fellow underclass Americans are stuck here. They have no idea that industrialized people elsewhere as poor as themselves do not live in such fear. They have no idea that old people in Sydney or Stockholm do not, as Eddie does, have to cut their blood pressure pills in half doses because they cannot afford to refill the prescription, which requires a doctor visit for re-authorization, plus $40 for the prescription monthly. We're talking about a man here in his seventies, living on about $800 a month, who, according to national social policy and benefits, is supposedly protected by Medicare -- but chose the wrong plan under the purposefully confusing plan C, which is just another way to shift more money and profits uphill.
But what if the profits were distributed more equally among full time American workers? What if that one percent of Americans last year had not earned as much as the bottom 45 percent combined? Every working American would be earning $72,394 per year at the least (a 2007 calculation). And there would be enough left over to double all Social Security payments to boot. And this is allowing for necessary industrial social reinvestment, taxes, balancing of trade deficits.
An excellent calculation table of this can be found in the appendix of Charles Andrews' book, "No Rich, No Poor." I've asked a couple of capitalism loving economists to refute this table. One admits he cannot and the other refuses to return my calls. But the truth is that the $78,000 a year doesn't mean shit. The price of that, redistributed or not, still means the destruction of what natural resources remain on the earth, simply because of the capitalist system we use to generate a money-based wealth economy instead of a labor or social credit based economy. One of the most insightful things I've ever heard came back in the 1990s out of the mouth of the dumbest looking slacker kid you can possibly imagine, a kid named Chris B. "Dude," he said, "money IS slavery."
By the way, about serfdom and feudalism: The end of English feudalism came when the public control of the land under the village system, the means of production, was taken away from peasant farmers by the lords, to whom they had previously just paid an annual rent in crops. When rents reached about a third of their production, they usually revolted. Under the old system, they were in no way slaves. They did not work for the feudal lord every day, or even most days, though they sometimes had to supply labor for roads and bridges and the lord's property. But they were not slaves, nor were they wage labor.
Eventually through enclosure and other methods, Parliament and the nobility seized direct control of the land. They in turn rented the land out to the richer peasants -- yes, some peasants had became well off by the day's standards -- who then hired the displaced peasants as employees, producing as much as possible with as few workers as possible. They became the first employers (the old feudal lords had no interest at all in managing the peasants or their land, just collecting rents). The displaced peasants, having no assets, no way to produce things and no way to locate and distribute to buyers even if they had, now needed jobs to survive, because all these things, such as armories, ships, the larger spinning and weaving units that replaced the family cottage spinning and weaving, were in the hands of elites. That need for jobs was fully exploited.
It's still exploited and is at the core of capitalism. Everybody needs a job. The employing corporation pays the lowest wage possible to as few workers as it can get by with, even if it has to import a new underclass from abroad, which we do constantly. The "customer" wage slave now pays the corporation the absolute maximum that can be charged for virtually everything in the customer's life, even for the most vital necessities of life. Such as blood pressure medication for a 78 year old man. Doctors, among the economic elites, somehow never seem to object to such a life and health devastating system. Hippocrates was apparently a Republican, because he said nothing about regulation, when iot cme to the price of mercy.
Do you really think we can change things by electing different elites? Especially when the elites depend upon fellow elites for campaign money in the first place, and to put into action virtually anything? Do you think that is reformable? I don't.
Capitalism is without doubt dying of its own inner contradictions. Not to mention hitting the wall as to exploitable natural resources for production of the commodities used as sops in powerful nations such as the US, Japan and Germany, which until recently consumed two thirds of the world's resources. Peak everything is the reason we are seeing plain old water on our store shelves and for sale everywhere else on the planet. The global capitalists now dominate the needs hierarchy, top to bottom.
Workers in industrialized nations are so busy begging for jobs and wages enough to keep them in meaningless commodities and gadgets (which only shift more money to corporations) they cannot see the forest for the trees.
It ain't so much about jobs as it is about meaningful, materially and spiritually sustaining, important work that will accomplish what direly needs to be done. Starting with saving the earth that sustains the species.
This will not start with the "greening of corporations," because by their very nature they cannot do so. I t will not start with green technology, at least as we know technology, because science and the earth destroying technology industry are Siamese twins.
It will start with reduction of the number of the species so as to be supportable (my guess is that nature will do that for us) and species co intelligence. Spring from the common species intelligence we all share. Yes, it is extremely slow, and we are trained and conditioned by our global masters to be impatient and expect instant gratification,so they can deliver it at an instant profit. To mother nature, instant is about 1,000 years at least.
Meanwhile, we can build unity and solidarity over the generations. Because when our the veil of our short-sightedness and expectations of instant change lifts, we're gonna need a core of disciplined, rational, spiritual leadership to nudge what remains of the species in the direction of a sustainable course. If people wanna talk about the necessity of work and jobs, that is the ONLY real job at hand.
In any case, we certainly won't get there by Twittering each other over the problem. There is only so much that can be said for communication. Direct action and living example set far more things in motion than bitching -- which uses up valuable psychic energy to no result -- or constructing futures in cyberspace that never manifest themselves in meatpace.
At least that's one old hillbilly's take on things.
In art and labor,
Joe
