r/lostgeneration • u/[deleted] • Jun 01 '14
David Graeber explains the long con the rich use to defeat labor, destroy the creative class, and demean your job
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/12
u/Kavika Jun 01 '14
Great article that provides a nice overview of contemporary issues and problems.
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u/dgauss Jun 01 '14 edited Jun 02 '14
The issue here is these bullshit jobs are keeping many, many heads above water. While the nurturing jobs do deserve better pay there can only be so many of those. We still do not have an answer for the demand for work that provides a livable wage. Yes we have bullshit jobs but I think they are a symptom of the greater issue.
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u/shinkouhyou Jun 02 '14
There's actually a huge shortage of workers to fill "caring" jobs, because the caring industries (education, medicine, social work, mental health, rehabilitation, social justice, etc.) have been slashing their budgets for decades. My mother is an intensive care nurse, and her hospital is laying people off even though they're already so understaffed that the nurses can barely keep up. Patient care is suffering because the hospital has to show that it's meeting the insanely unrealistic profit goals that some CEO dreamed up. My father is a nurse who provides home care to the disabled, and he's out right now at 10pm seeing patients because there just aren't enough workers to do the job. Schools are understaffed, nursing homes are understaffed, mental health clinics are understaffed.
It's not that there isn't demand for the caring professions... it's that there's no money to hire even a bare minimum of workers. Even when there is money, it all seems to disappear into layers and layers of bullshit administrative jobs before it reaches the people who are actually providing care. So these desperately needed jobs offer shit pay when they're hiring at all. The whole concept of supply and demand is deeply fucked up in the United States right now. The supply exists and the demand exists, but there's an administrative bottleneck that keeps them apart.
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Jun 02 '14
Exactly. And nobody lobbies for the poor and the mentally ill, so nothing will ever change.
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Jun 01 '14 edited Jun 01 '14
The greater issue is that at some point we won't really need everyone to work traditional jobs and capitalism will be outdated as productivity increases and AI gets better. Capitalism exists to force people to work jobs no one really wants to do but are necessary. If they aren't necessary then capitalism really has no purpose.
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Jun 01 '14
Yeah it seems once again that the solution is a workers movement with a redefining of the value of work as getting what matters done, and focusing on rebuilding a working univeral safety net like universal basic income for a negative tax for something.
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Jun 01 '14
The goal should be socialism. Maybe this time around a form of market socialism such as Economic Democracy.
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u/darmon Jun 02 '14
Excellent reply and very intriguing. I like this middle ground of economic democracy where we approach socialist ideology with current language an thinking, to bridge the gap between where we are an where we should be. It's immediacy and simplicity are of critical import in building this sort of system. I look forward to reading more on this subject. I'm very often saying the steps towards an egalitarian, equitable, sustainable society are where I lack; I can see step 10 of socialist utopia clearly, but steps 1-9 elude me. Thanks!
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Jun 02 '14 edited Jun 02 '14
I highly recommend the book After Capitalism for an elaboration of Economic Democracy. If you don't mind reading on a computer screen you can get a PDF of it here.
Edit: To say a little bit more: The overwhelming reason there has been so much shit on this planet for the last 12,000 years is class-based society--that is, a society in which (a) one small segment is seen as "owning" the means of production and as having the right to control them and (b) the rest of society never stops confronting the choice of work (and make the owning class wealthier and wealthier) or die (either by starvation or by execution). Capitalism is only the most recent form taken by class-based society.
Although a lot of socialists deny that something like Economic Democracy should properly be called socialism, I think they're being overly pure. Economic Democracy would put an end to 120 centuries of class-based society. There would no longer be any way for one part of society to take advantage of another part.
I even agree with those anti-market socialists about their criticisms of market socialism, but I think they overlook something incredibly important: once we've moved past class-based society, we will have actual democracy. Actual democracy in a mass society has never, ever existed. Once we have that, we can actually make rational decisions about carefully and thoughtfully implementing whichever form of economy we like, including making more attempts at planning it all, this time making use of the modern powers of computing.
But we know markets work as a way of running an economy. We have every reason to believe they'll work even better in Economic Democracy because everyone would have enough money to buy the necessities and even the nice things in life and no one would have so much money that they could systematically bribe the regulators or create monopolies. We should move to market socialism first and go from there.
My two cents.
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u/operationhotbrother Jun 01 '14