[Marxism-Thaxis] Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control
http://www.internetnews.com/commentary/article.php/3793561 Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control Commentary: A person who works with total focus has an enormous advantage over a workaholic who's "multi-tasking" all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption. December 29, 2008 By Mike Elgan: More stories by this author: The industrial revolution didn't arise out of nowhere, and it didn't arise everywhere. It was made possible by the emergence of a set of personal values that came to be known as the "work ethic." The idea behind this meme -- inconceivable 400 years ago -- is that hard work is good for its own sake. Hard work makes you a better person. With hard work, our parents told us, we could grow up to become anything. Work hard, and we could get good grades, elite-school acceptance and scholarships. We could invent things, launch businesses and change the world. "Genius," Thomas Edison told us, "is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." This industrial-age work ethic has its variants, including the "Protestant work ethic," the "American work ethic," and the "Asian work ethic" to name a few. The success or failure of regions, nations and subcultures has been massively influenced by the degree to which populations embrace the value of hard work. And that's why the idea is hammered into kids in school, and lauded and rewarded in the workplace. When the "information age" started replacing the "industrial age," hard work seemed more important than ever. Until the 1980s, to use a computer was to program it. Silicon Valley corporate culture, from tiny startups to the massive Googleplex, emphasizes long hours and feverish work. RELATED ARTICLES Information Overload: Is There a Cure? Is it Too Late to Pay Attention? Is There a Cure for the 'Distraction Virus'? Gates: Info Glut Killing Businesses For more stories on this topic: But since the turn of the new millennium, the nature of work has evolved to the point where hard work is becoming less important to a successful work ethic than another, more useful value: attention. The New Work Ethic Columnist David Brooks, commenting in the Dec. 16th New York Times about Malcolm Gladwell's latest book called "Outliers," made a statement as profound as it was accurate: "Control of attention is the ultimate individual power," he wrote. "People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them." But why is that truer now than ten or twenty years ago? Why will it be truer still ten or twenty years from now? As I wrote in May, Internet distractions evolve to become ever more "distracting" all the time -- like a virus. Distractions now "seek you out." Distractions mask the toll they take on productivity. Everyone finishes up their work days exhausted, but how much of that exhaustion is from real work, how much from the mental effort of fighting off distractions and how much from the indulgence of distractions? Pundits like me are constantly talking about Facebook, Twitter, blogs and humor sites, not to mention old standbys like e-mail and IM. One gets the impression that we should be "following" these things all day long, and many do. So when does the work get done? When do entrepreneurs start and manage their businesses? When do writers write that novel? When do IT professionals keep the trains running on time? When does anyone do anything? The need for "attention," rather than "hard work," as the centerpiece of the new work ethic has arisen along with the rise of distractions carried on the wings of Internet protocol. In one generation, we've gone from a total separation of "work" from "non-work" to one in which both work and play are always sitting right in front of us. Now, we find ourselves with absolutely nothing standing between us and a universe of distractions -- nothing except our own abilities to control attention. Porn, gambling, funny videos, flirting, socializing, playing games, shopping -- it's all literally one click away. Making matters worse, indulging these distractions looks just like work. And it's easy to work and play at the same time -- and call it work. These new, increasingly compelling distractions get piled on to older ones -- office pop-ins, e-mail, IM, text messages, meetings and others. Kids now grow up with the whole range of distractions, from big-screen TVs to video games to cell phones to PCs in their rooms. They're addicted to screens before they even start high school. Their attention spans have been whittled down to seconds, and their expectations for constant amusement are highly developed. In a world in which entire industries bet their businesses on gaining access to our attention, which value leads to better personal success: hard work or the ability to control attention? A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous ad
[Marxism-Thaxis] Work Ethic
Marxism in the Realm of Necessity as negation of the attitudes toward work in the classical European period I happened to read the below and it occurred to me that a lot of Marx's fundamental concepts on work and labor are almost simple negations of the attitudes toward them in the European classical periods. In standing Hegel off his head onto his feet they were doing the same to classical philosophy. For Marxism , the Realm of Freedom, communism, is a negation of this negation, as work becomes a combination of the source of material wealth and the ancient notion of "leisurely" on a different level at the same time. It is productive of necessities , but not toil. CB http://www.coe.uga.edu/~rhill/workethic/hist.htm Attitudes Toward Work During the Classical Period One of the significant influences on the culture of the western world has been the Judeo-Christian belief system. Growing awareness of the multicultural dimensions of contemporary society has moved educators to consider alternative viewpoints and perspectives, but an understanding of western thought is an important element in the understanding of the history of the United States. Traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs state that sometime after the dawn of creation, man was placed in the Garden of Eden "to work it and take care of it" (NIV, 1973, Genesis 2:15). What was likely an ideal work situation was disrupted when sin entered the world and humans were ejected from the Garden. Genesis 3:19 described the human plight from that time on. "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return" (NIV, 1973). Rose stated that the Hebrew belief system viewed work as a "curse devised by God explicitly to punish the disobedience and ingratitude of Adam and Eve" (1985, p. 28). Numerous scriptures from the Old Testament in fact supported work, not from the stance that there was any joy in it, but from the premise that it was necessary to prevent poverty and destitution (NIV; 1973; Proverbs 10:14, Proverbs 13:4, Proverbs 14:23, Proverbs 20:13, Ecclesiastes 9:10). ^^ CB: For Marx material labor is essential to human existence, of course Capital I: "So far therefore as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life. " ^^ The Greeks, like the Hebrews, also regarded work as a curse (Maywood, 1982). According to Tilgher (1930), the Greek word for work was ponos, taken from the Latin poena, which meant sorrow. Manual labor was for slaves. The cultural norms allowed free men to pursue warfare, large-scale commerce, and the arts, especially architecture or sculpture (Rose, 1985). ^^ CB: Contrast this with Marx's attitude to material or "manual labor" above. ^^ Mental labor was also considered to be work and was denounced by the Greeks. The mechanical arts were deplored because they required a person to use practical thinking, "brutalizing the mind till it was unfit for thinking of truth" (Tilgher, 1930, p. 4). ^ CB: Consider Marx's Second Thesis on Feuerbach wherein he declares that the of the truth of theory is practice. Marx , in contrast with the above concept makes "practical thinking" essential to "thinking the truth". ^^ Skilled crafts were accepted and recognized as having some social value, but were not regarded as much better than work appropriate for slaves. Hard work, whether due to economic need or under the orders of a master, was disdained. It was recognized that work was necessary for the satisfaction of material needs, but philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle made it clear that the purpose for which the majority of men labored was "in order that the minority, the élite, might engage in pure exercises of the mind--art, philosophy, and politics" (Tilgher, 1930, p. 5). ^ CB; This seems related to Engels' focus on the contrast between materialism and idealism's attitude to the relationship between thought and being. ^^ Plato recognized the notion of a division of labor, separating them first into categories of rich and poor, and then into categories by different kinds of work, and he argued that such an arrangement could only be avoided by abolition of private property (Anthony, 1977). ^ CB: Which argument Marx and Engels make in the _Manifesto of the Communist Party_ ^^ Aristotle supported the ownership of private property and wealth. He viewed work as a corrupt waste of time that would make a citizen's pursuit of virtue more difficult (Anthony, 1977). Braude (1975) described the Greek belief that a person's pr
