S. Lerner wrote:
> Ray wrote:
> snip
> >"I think we will eventually have to accept that the holistic non literal
> >nature is best left to the highest and most creative activities that
> >humanity can conceive while the concept of "Jobs" in the old "hired
> >hands" sense may very well pass away.
> >
> >It could be one of the ironies of history that "jobs" will become as
> >they were in Peru during the Inca and in China in the Cultural
> >Revolution something that everyone does for a few short months
> >as a kind of tax for the system. The rest of the time will be given
> >to creative work or maybe even no work at all.
> >
> >I have trouble with the no work idea maybe because of the
> >Baptists on the reservation and they may have been right about the
> >psychological need for it. But I don't believe we have begun to ask
> >the questions on this yet."
>
> Ray - You've just summarized what I'm working on, which is how to
> re-arrange society, via a Basic Income, so that when 'jobs' fade away, the
> transition to what James Robertson calls 'ownwork' can be as painless as
> possible. To me, the end of 'wage slavery' is a cause for
> celebration--there will always be good work (arts and other) to do and most
> jobs just get in the way. The Baptists probably sold the model of human
> beings that holds us to be inately lazy and evil, only whipped into shape
> by fear of god and coercion by our betters. I never bought.
>
> Sally
You're right Sally,
This becomes a massive systems issue that is confronted by religion (Western
Religion) as was pointed out in Kurtz's original Hardin post. A point that
Mike Hollinshead has also been making on a more sophisticated level for over a
year. MH's new book is wonderful. I hope that some of his ideas published on
these lists were not stolen by Hardin.
But there is also the problem of good private labor for the jobs that will be
necessary. Blue collar Jobs have been sold so much over the last 100 years as
"hired hand" drudgery, with life being at home with the kids, that I wonder
what kind of shift will now be necessary in the consciousness to return to
skill values rather than time values. On the assembly lines and even in
management, value has been ascribed, (hinted at in the Taylor article,) to
drudgery, rather than the accomplishment of the job in the highest level of
perfection. All of this to the service of a "scale" product. The most for
the least in the least time.
On the management level the value has not been in the product but in the volume
sold, (no matter what the quality) and in the profit gained. Thus there has
been a 'creative" game with two sides in battle against each other. The Blues
and the Whites. The Blues pushing a minimal quality and the Whites pushing a
maximal volume. (Veblin's Machine?) This has begun to run down as more and
more time has been gobbled up away from the home and family life to extend the
game.
The Blues for a while, gained the most because of the Union's rules about
overtime which the Whites did not have but with the decline of the Unions
brought on by the Whites collaborative efforts at bringing in outside foreign
mercenaries to do the Blues work at cheaper hourly rates, the Whites now have
the advantage.
Taylor added to the list, the most modern incentive, and I believe the last
gasp of the game, that of the office as either social arena or as home
itself. Frankly, this goes along with the past strategies where it was
considered Entertainment and a place to have gourmet meals and three martini
lunches for the Whites while the Blues got overtime. The past advantages were
paid for by government tax incentives but the Whites started a plan to lower
taxes which also lowered the Blues access to the Government by making the
Government weaker. This then cut into the Whites write-offs. Oh yes, the
Government is the referee with all of the real power. The next best way to get
ahead, like in professional wrestling, is to include the referee in the
melee. After all we now have a wrestler idiot for the governor of the former
progressive state of Minnesota. So the referee is now compromised as well.
But the whole problem is the place and nature of work. Adam Smith, J.S. Mill
and the others all started it when they began to fight for the value of their
work in the same way the Messianic Universalist Religions had. (forgive me for
leaving out Marx and Engels) In short by making everyone else less valuable
and pushing their game as the "bottom line" (get it?) of all games.
The second issue is and was the hierarchy of pleasure (leisure) at work. Blue
collars don't consider what management does to be work but basically leisure.
I've known workers who were so proud of their ability to withstand drudgery
bonded with other workers that they refused to be kicked upstairs when they
showed the talent for it.
On the other hand the management considers the Blue collar worker to be a hired
hand doing menial labor while they are doing high-value (speculative dollar
growth) work. Both of these groups have about as much chance of changing and
surviving, as the poor Cambodian professionals did when Pol Pot marched them
into the countryside.
Much is made of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot's solution to being overwhelmed with
the immensity of what they attempted by just murdering the whole bunch. Mao
coming off as the least murderous but the most psychologically devious. This
murderous response to an overwhelming situation by the "powers that be" is the
greatest danger for those who must try to facilitate the future changes.
America has always dealt with it by making an enemy to be out fought or out
played on a murderous game field. A country that glorifies the individual,
cowardly hides in the group game when it comes to assigning judgment for
genocide. But the issues are the same. How to deal with devastating change
that upsets all traditions and tends to separate people from the Truths of
their experience and culture in order to be fair to the whole population in the
coming future of work.
The disconnect on things like the meaning of Truth and Facts that I pointed
out earlier is IMHO a huge one, with the fundamentalists, (both religious and
science) and many of the more liberal branches of the Middle-Eastern (six days
shalt thou labor) Religions. It does not help that each considers themselves
to be THE Universal Religion and that the only way to Paradise is through their
gates. Again the same heresy is found in Science as well as the other
professions. Consider that as we approach the millennium, (something that is
purely Christian based), the entire Entertainment Industry with the
collaboration of the Computer Industry is going nuts with shows about angels,
secret societies, aliens and numerical prophecies.
If you think that a jobs program that is not Middle-Eastern based has much
chance in this climate then I would like to know where you get those optimism
pills. They learned about baseball (Nez Pierce) basketball (Meso-America)
lacrosse and hockey (Cherokee and Muskogean) and football (Cherokee ball game)
all from this place but they didn't learn that the games were a substitute for
war and life and were Sacred metaphors. Playing them out in real life was
taboo but not in Europe or the Middle East. Got to go to work. More later.
REH
