Toward a Salutary Political-Economy – Freedom from Jobs While - TopicsExpress

Toward a Salutary Political-Economy – Freedom from Jobs While gains have certainly been made toward a more inclusive, egalitarian society over the half-century since Martin Luther King delivered his iconic I Have a Dream Speech (as part of the March for Jobs and Justice in Washington, D.C.), in many respects – particularly in economic matters – there has been little or no progress at all. Indeed, by certain measures equality has significantly diminished in the US. Accompanying a minimum wage that, when adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in 1968, and wages that – except for the wealthy – haven’t risen in decades, the economy has polarized wealth to a greater degree than ever, reducing the economic classes more and more to two – rich and poor – and squeezing the middle and working classes into little more than a memory in the process. In among other places, this lack of change is observable in the fact that it’s five decades later and people are still talking about jobs – coveting jobs as though jobs were those necessities and luxuries that work is obtained to secure. Notwithstanding this culture of work’s ideological claims to the contrary, jobs are less preconditions for freedom than impediments to freedom’s concrete realization. Beyond consuming most of workers’ waking hours (consuming that which constitutes the precondition for freedom – time), jobs also wreck people’s health, vitiating freedom in the sense of bodily movement as well. Moreover, that people are compelled to work a job – irrespective of the job’s need, or function – demonstrates the consanguinity of jobs and dependency, rather than in-dependency. Some may counter at this point that needing a job is just a natural, unavoidable fact – that people must work to live. But the inordinately excessive amount of time that people devote to work in the US (and capitalist societies in general) is less a natural fact than a cultural one. Indeed, let us not neglect to consider the fact that when people talk about “good jobs” they are not necessarily discussing the correction of some pressing problem, or providing some truly desired service, or satisfying some actual need. When people discuss “good jobs” they are primarily discussing ways to make money. If one can turn a solid profit selling known carcinogens, such will count as a “good job” – irrespective of the fact that such enterprises wreak far more concrete, objective harm than good. Contrary to popular opinion, then, people don’t actually need jobs; we work jobs in order to acquire money. And money’s another thing we don’t in truth need – we need those things that this socioeconomic system only provides in exchange for money: food, housing, clothing, etc. Jobs are but a middleman – a means to acquire resources, not an end. Rather than representing any instance of simple irrationality, however, this treatment of jobs as ends, rather than means, reflects the upside-down logic of capital – a rationality contrary to critical reason, for, more often than not, jobs don’t rectify problems so much as they reproduce them. Another aspect of this that should be pointed out when discussing people’s demands for jobs is that... ...Read the rest of this essay here: heathwoodpress/salutary-political-economy-freedom-jobs/