Christoph Reuss wrote:
> Yeah, we creative types really dream of the end of 'wage slavery' !
> I could spend years and years only with creative hobbies, NGO volunteering
> and the Net, but alas, the 'job' work gets in the way most of the time.
> However, in a part of the NGO work I got to know a different kind of
> persons: When I created a social programme for unemployed people, I naively
> thought they could be put to a (low-level, low-intensity) task and simply do
> the work all day, or even find own ideas to work something useful. Wrong.
> 90% of them did nothing (except reading the newspaper, chatting/arguing,
> and other nonsense), unless someone advised them "every move" all the time.
> I offered them a variety of opportunities, even a computer system to work
> with, and individual courses on it. But they ended up with playing computer
> games. They didn't ask me for new projects, but for new games after they
> got bored of the old ones. You may say: "See, you're not a social worker..".
> But the 'managers' of other similar programmes confirmed the attitude of
> the participants. Note: The official purpose of those programmes is to
> give the unemployed a structure to increase their chances to get back into
> the working mill err process.
>
> Now, I don't put the blame on those individuals. Rather, I think it was
> "the system" that made them like that. Actually, at least in 'lower'
> positions, corporations don't seem to want employees with "own brains", but
> they want "wage slaves". It will take huge educational and psycho-social
> efforts to prepare these people for the Basic Income society, or they will
> end up in even more boredom, despair and drugs.
Chris,
I spent an entire year shooting pool and watching the TV in the Army because they
had lost my papers. Had I pointed this out I might have been dead in Vietnam.
But I didn't "do drugs" and wasn't bored, (I read a lot.) I also read that
both Veblen and Keynes wrote their first masterpieces when they were "loafing"
(Heilbroner's word, not mine) on the job.
I have experienced on all levels the hostility of those above to people
"improvising" with their jobs at lower levels. They only want to know that you
are there when they ask. Sort of like Butlers. (the Blue Team)
That is one of the reasons that I find Capitalism and the Market to be so
incredibly poor at efficiency with too much redundancy. On the other hand when
the Master Capitalists took over in the Gingrich Revolution they cut their staffs
to the bone and then couldn't deal with the business of the offices.
No, I don't think that 19th century Socialism and Communism with its base in out
of date "scientific" theories is any better. These may as well base their
theories on Phrenology for all of the sense they make. They were all trying to
find their individuality by killing their Fathers. ("I'm sure I can write a
better Bible than that!)
Remember, what "did the Phrenologists in" was not science but racism. They found
the Lakota had the most ideal, large skulls, bigger and better brains, and their
theories never recovered. Of course along the way they operated a huge trade in
human skeletons ($600 per, they said the stench of boiling human flesh around the
Army posts was unbelievable,) that made the Lakota more valuable dead than alive.
That is the reason that I do my own work and am my own boss. I miss the
"safety" and am considered irresponsible by some for not having more of an
inheritance for my offspring, but it seems you can't have both in this
society. Sometimes it's better just to stay out of the way of those "economies
of scale."
REH
