Workers of the world...relax

Gregory gregory.l at mazdaace.co.jp
Tue Oct 1 18:08:42 PDT 2002



>What I don't get about the Abolition of Work crowd, and perhaps I'm missing
>the point, is -- What do they propose to do about necessary labor like
>sanitation, construction, electrical maintenance, fire fighting, police
>work, auto repair, crop planting, food distribution, among the many other
>obvious things one can list? Should we build an army of robots to do this?
>And if so, who will build them? Wouldn't that require work? And most
>pressing of all, who will tend to raising the robots' political
>consciousness?


>DP

-Well Dennis, did you even read the essay?? Abolition of work does not mean the end of activity but, sure, it means an unleashing of creative force to deal with certain things that you mention in a way that will directly benefit you and not to the benefit of Wall Street. I'm glad you didn't mention lawyers, managers, accountants, bureaucrats...Most labor being done these days in the industrialized world is paper-pushing. From Black, "Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. " Who would be doing all the work you mentioned? Well I guess you and I would Dennis. None of what you mentioned is all that specialized and we could learn the basic skills pretty quickly. Even most of the medical industry is wastefulness and is a product of the unhealthy lifestyle that the modern capitalist arrangement of life engenders (everything from diet to mental numbing). Anyhow, read the essay because I think it addresses all of your questions... Greg Lipman http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html



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