Tom Walker wrote:
>
> Brad McCormick wrote,
>
> >>Ah! My proposal: That, just as we outlawed the buying and
> >>selling of persons a century and a half ago, we now need to
> >>take the next step in the humanization of "mankind", and
> >>OUTLAW THE RENTING OF PERSONS, i.e., outlaw wage labor.
>
> Here's a few paragraphs from J.M. Clark's _Studies in the Economics of
> Overhead Costs_, written in 1923 (pp. 15-16). Note especially Clark's
> observation in paragraph three: "The reason why the expenses of production,
> some of them, normally vary in proportion to output is simply because the
> terms of the wage contract are drawn in that way."
>
> 12. LABOR AS AN OVERHEAD COST
[snip]
I don't see precisely how this addresses the question of
the renting of persons, but it certainly seems intelligent,
and, to me at least, suggests the "down side" of an end to
wage labor: That employers would no longer have *any*
responsibility for workers' well-being (but didn't the same thing
happen with the abolition of slavery? A few years ago, IBM
downsized a lot of employees out and then hired the
same persons back, often to do the same jobs, as
"contractors".
Ultimately, concrete formal structures are not what is
*most* important, but rather the secular equivalent of the
biblical dictum that Christ will be
present wherever 2 or 3 are gathered
in His name. The miracle (of construction of a genuinely
human(e) world) takes place whenever
a small group of persons related (e.g.) through their
work (employees, managers, customers, students,
teachers, etc.) endeavor to make
their inter-related life into a dialogically self-accountable
self-shaping praxis (ref.: Hegel's "Evil and Forgiveness",
Husserl's 'Philosophy as Mankind's Self-Reflection'...).
Yes, I am here directly urging a quiet kind of "mutiny"
(to deploy a more scholarly word: "placing in
brackets", Husserl's: "Epoche"...),
in which the directives of "superiors" are no
longer *obeyed* but rather are taken as one factor among many
about which the persons whose hands are on the levers
("man thinks because he has a hand"...)
cooperatively and in mutual (universal) respect decide what
to do with the resources over which they
dispose. This structure (which deserves the name: "event"
in an honorific sense) seems to me to be able to arise
in a department of a Global Corporation, a Government
Bureaucracy, a State Enterprise.... (And, of course, the
non-dialogical "voices" of the Police and the Army are
always nearby to snuff it out. Semper paratus!)
I once worked in an office 2 doors from a man who now seems
like he may have been a dream. He was a white haired and
bearded patriarch looking figure (in IBM Research). He had
a calendar on his office wall,
on which all the months were 30 days, and
the calendar had the legend:
"Was man made for the Sabbath?
Or was the Sabbath made for man?"
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(914)238-0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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