If it is the economy that is unreal, not those who run it¡ªif the rich and the bosses and the managers are human beings who inevitably care for other beings, and who would rather care for other beings than exploit them¡ªthen change is possible. Better to direct your white-hot festering rage not toward scapegoating the 1 percent, and staying helpless, but toward finding the best way to describe this again and again, [...] in order to build that solidarity broader than our individual workplaces.Yeah, structural analysis is important, but you really think hating the wealthy isn't a powerfully politicizing motivating force? "Solidarity" doesn't mean universal humanist goodwill, for fuck's sake; it means building class consciousness.
In the last few years, I¡¯ve experienced the rare pleasure of good work, teaching freshman composition¡ªa job that is usually contingent and undercompensated in universities but which I do for an institution that values it and compensates it fairly.Once you've found a place in the economy which seems safe and stable, you will employ every kind of rationalization to sabotage the idea of meaningful change (much less your actions....) Marxist class warfare is between those who exist in precarity (i.e. their labor has been fully commodified) and everyone else. So, the it's not the 1%, it's the 10% or the 25%. It''s declaring war on your family or all of your friends. There isn't any meaningful solidarity between well-paid university instructors and contingent labor, despite heartfelt political affinity and even time served (or sense of identity.)
You Can't Tip a Buick: “We need a guaranteed minimum income because we're not free until we're free, if we want to, to tell off not just our boss, but all bosses altogether, and we're not free to do that until we can do it without starving or dying of exposure.”In terms of making an argument for a guaranteed income, it's simpler than that: Either we find a way to guarantee a living to those made redundant by the machinations of the global economy or there will be blood in the streets.
The math I like best says it is within the realm of possibility, with a rearrangement of how taxes are collected and distributed, for every citizen to receive a basic income upon which to survive, which would not be tied to work.Absolutely. That's the math I like best, too. I've been a strong supporter of basic income ever since I first heard about it in the mid-1990s. It's getting more media attention and attracting more supporters lately, especially as more and more of the middle class falls into the ranks of the precarity with no end in sight.
If this were to be implemented, you could choose not to participate in this construct and still eat. Imagine a world in which your choices about where and how to work were not determined in the context of white-hot rage or crippling fear over the inability to simply feed yourself.I've been imagining that world - in vivid detail - ever since I was a teenager who hated her job at a fast food restaurant in the 1980s. I've been writing about it online since 1998. (Note: relevant self-link.)
We must extend this solidarity far beyond the bounds of our individual workplaces, if we¡¯re going to change this whole situation...Too often I see people directing their rage against the wealthy, as if they are monsters...Better to direct your white-hot festering rage not toward scapegoating the 1 percent, and staying helpless, but toward finding the best way to describe this again and again, more persuasively, more beautifully, in whatever art or political action or writing or talking you have a gift for¡ªwhat shitty work is really like, what debt is like, what selling our lives to an unreal and exploitative economy is like¡ªin order to build that solidarity broader than our individual workplaces.Agreed wholeheartedly. But as the author acknowledges, jobs consume a great deal of time and energy that could otherwise be used for this art or political action or writing or talking:
...perhaps that is one of the worst things about shitty jobs: they make many too tired even to be angry, and too tired to imagine a world where more people could get to do the work they want to do and still eat.I probably wouldn't even have the time and energy to post this comment right now if I had a "normal" full-time job.
Many of us who once relied on the basic economic institutions of our societies--education, employment, healthcare, public infrastructure, retirement, social assistance in times of need--are confronting the brutal reality that such faith is no longer merited. Meanwhile, the "experts" poised to deal with this mess are working in the service of the very institutions that profit from it.posted by velvet winter at 11:52 AM on August 1, 2014 [22 favorites]
And what if these experts could "fix" our economy? What if we could convince them to "curb the excesses of Wall Street" and get our economic engine "back on track"? This demand would ignore the fact that the very success of the capitalist market economy--the ways in which it has seemingly provided so many with so much in so short a time--is built on violence and plunder. [...]
The sorcery of capitalist economics is precisely to make its own violence invisible, so that it can appear to be nothing but the miraculous liberator of human potential and the progressive deliverer of ever-abundant goods. And there is a disturbingly good reason for us to give in to this illusion: most of us are dependent on the very economy that has systematically exploited us and undermined the health of our communities and our environments. We have come to rely on the very "job creators" (that new euphemism for exploiters) whose project of profiting at our expense we condemn. We have come to need the very economic growth machine that is eating our world and destabilizing our planetary climate in the name of "progress."
We can no longer ignore the immense challenge at the heart of this moment in history: We are trapped in patterns of life on which we have come to depend, but which we must fundamentally transform as a matter of our very survival. How do we acknowledge our dependence, and address the needs that it gives rise to, while also imagining and constructing new forms of freedom? [...]
"The economy" is a way of thinking and experiencing the world in which our power and agency is robbed from us...This economy was constructed by processes of enclosure, where people were forcibly separated from their means of subsistence (land, community, tools and skills) and pushed into dependence on wage-jobs and commodity purchases. [...]
It is not a na?ve notion of "dropping out" (as if everyone had the privilege to do this, or the privilege to choose otherwise), or a dreamy hope of evading hard work and struggle. It is, rather, about recognizing that the work of breaking out of our dependence is a necessary site for our creative action. [...]
We must shift from simply asking how we might create more (or better) jobs to asking about how we can progressively create the conditions in which we no longer need them.
...how can we begin to build a world in which the unpaid labor of birthing, parenting, caring for elders, building community, creating art, working for justice, and defending and restoring our ecosystems can be supported as shared social goods? What forms of accounting would make this work and its value publicly visible? [...]
And second, how do we re-common the enclosures that created our dependency on wage-work in the first place? [...] Life beyond "jobs" is not for everyone, and nor does it need to be. But it must become an ever-more available option. [...]
Do we know how to make this possible? Not yet.
But we can say this: It is time to launch the largest explosion of practical experimentation that our society has ever seen.
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posted by exit at 8:20 AM on August 1, 2014 [14 favorites]