Hi Charles, I liked your piece of writing but I'm not at all sure that you can make such distinctions between the world of work before and after the industrial revolution.
The main difference is that work qua job is now paid in cash. Previously any work done was either paid in kind or as part of a collective effort of survival. Three years ago in Nepal I saw young men collecting milk from farm to farm for 10 hours a day (up and down mountain tracks for, I judge, 20 miles a day), carrying a churn on their backs that weighed over a hundredweight (112 lbs or 50 kilos) by the time it was finally delivered to a cheese factory. Similarly, all over the country, thousands of young women were carrying loads of tinder for their homes from forests anything up to 10-15 miles away. They couldn't even afford donkeys and maybe 40 or 50 smallholdings shared one water buffalo for ploughing (at which yours faithfully had a go -- something I urge all FWers to experience!). In Delhi and in Kathmandu I saw beautiful young women from Rajasthan carrying 20 bricks on mortar boards on their heads up bamboo ladders for, seemingly, as long as there were daylight hours. I reckon these jobs are as tedious as any we can talk about today in western society. From another angle, considering the amount of commuting that millions of people do for anything between two and four hours a day, I can only think that the world of work has considerable social attractions as well as being necessary for cash. I really don't see much conceptual or real difference between the world of work and non-work as between agricultural and industrial cultures (though I see huge differences between these and those of hunter-gatherer times) except that the physical efforts in recent centuries have become successively less fatiguing due to exploitation of cheap energy resources. Much more to the point is that as energy resources become increasingly expensive in the decades to come, survival for the bulk of the human race will become more precarious than it's ever been. The only solution I can think of is that our descendants will have to be a great deal more skilled than we are. Unfortunately, our state educational systems have been steadily dumbing down generations of children as though our present bonanza of cheap energy will continue for ever and the relatively few scientists and engineers that we have can be relied upon to carry on sustaining the rest of us. I think we ought to be very worried, not about our concepts of work, but about the skills that our grandchildren are going to need in future decades. Keith At 04:33 01/02/03 +1100, you wrote: <<<<< There has been a flurry of writing recently about the nature of work. As someone who has been part of this list since it began in the mid '90's I see this theme recur every now and again - but never really get thrashed through. Much of what is said recognises our current thinking about 'work' - that it is tedious, often poorly constructed and mostly about earning enough income to live. From this perspective it is very hard to imagine how it might usefully be reconstructed (which is why the thread dies out so quickly, to be replaced by other things which appear easier to discuss even if they are no easier to resolve). "Work" as we now know it has a less than two hundred year history. This is not to say that people prior to that time didn't work, just they didn't think of work as we do now. The concept of 'going to work' is an industrial, factory or mine, concept. The idea that 'work' was something you did away from the rest of your life was invented at the same time as the industrial revolution. Prior to that, work was what you did during your life to provide what you or those around you needed. While there was a distinction between 'work' and 'not work' prior to the Industrial Revolution (people probably 'played' much more then than now, for example) it was only a theoretical distinction - both 'work' and 'non work' were part of life. Only in the last two hundred years has work become outside life in the individual sense, but a critical part of life in a societal sense. And therein is the dilemma. According to our current wisdom, we need to sacrifice some portion of our individual lives in work in order for society to survive. And, as many people have noted in recent days, much of this sacrifice is painful, non productive and just plain stupid, but it does actually contribute to societies survival (though some want to question whether what we experience ought to be called survival). Undoing that current wisdom is very difficult, it pervades everything we see, and all the material things we own or watch others own. But the fact is that it is a recent way of looking at the world. In my experience over the past nine years now that I have been actively working to create a better future for work I have found that if we can actually look beyond 'economic work' (or job as I prefer to call it, because language becomes very difficult here) we can imagine other ways to organise ourselves to get done what needs doing (which is after all what our real objective is). I know in my life and in the life of those around me, things have been greatly enriched when we have begun from a premise which at least provides the potential for everyone to have a meaningful place in the world (which is not one of the premises on which economics is based). All of the above has been said without mentioning money, income or redistribution. Which just shows how far we can get in our thinking if we also put aside these post-industrial revolution concepts as well. Charles Brass Chairman the futures foundation PO Box 122 Fairfield 3078 Australia phone 61 3 9459 0244 the mission of the futures foundation is "...to engage all Australians in creating a better future..." >>>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
