joanna bujes wrote:
> Joan wrote -- if there were a consumer's strike...
>
> "Wouldn't we just be throwing out neighbors out of work?"
>
> Do we need jobs? Or do we need a life?
You're speaking hypothetically, of course. Of course, a job and self-actualization belong in the same sentence somehow. It's too late for me to figure out how. In the meantime, though, we are already on somewhat of a consumer slow-down, in the U.S., at any rate, wouldn't you agree? We've all called in sick with the credit card flu.
On some level, having a decent
> life and working is interconnected. Under capitalism however, jobs and
> the goods produced through them must multiply infinitely in order to
> keep the system going. We are all seeing what this is doing to the earth
> and to each of us.
I think that's because government's created an artificial person, called a corporation, without forcing it bear the full costs of its existence.
> As producers/workers have less and less power, it seems to me that a
> consumers' strike is far more damaging to "business as usual" than a
> workers' strike.
Well, you can see that our current consumer slow-down hasn't really damaged "business as usual" but did throw a lot of people out of work.
> It's an idea. It's not the end of the discussion but the beginning.
It's a seductive and attractive idea, I just think it damages workers as well as corporations. It's a little bit pie-in-the-sky, as well, because it's not as if all of us could go and live off the land or return to a pre-industrial state. There's too many of us. But I want to talk some more about this. -joan
> As for throwing people out of work, that's already happening and it will
> continue to happen in the neo-imperialist pursuit of lower and lower
> labor costs.
> Joanna
___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>