Most of the fine souls on this list (self included) contribute not a whit, through their employment, to the sustenance of themselves or anybody else. What you and I contribute to is the maintenance of the system, which then allocates loaves of bread, fishes, roofs and blankets according to a plan laid out by marketing dorks, financial accountants, TV celebrities and fundamentalist clergy. And you know what? Any one self-loathing unemployed contributes more to the maintenance of the system than do ten paycheck-nibbling cubicle dwellers.
For a brief interlude (one hopes it's brief) you are given an opportunity to peek behind the curtain and you are revolted at what you see. So what do you do, given the choice between drawing the curtain back so you don't have to look anymore or becoming an Ancient Mariner about the fraud? Given the choice, you will want the curtain drawn back as quickly as possible so you can forget what you saw and go on about your business, which is... which is... What? Well collecting a paycheck so you can buy the things you need so you can get up in the morning and to go to work to do the things you have to do to collect a paycheck so you can buy the things and it goes around and it comes around.
How different really was the "jail" you were in Monday from the jail you were in a few weeks ago when you had a so-called job? Maybe you think it was different because you were paid more, you were treated with respect, you were doing something worthwhile, you had opportunities for promotion and you had some security -- maybe even a bit of comfort. Oh yeah? So where did that respect, opportunity, security and accomplishment go? Or was it a mirage? If it was a mirage, would you like to have it back now?
It so happens we have an opening at our firm for someone with your qualifications: sandwichperson and deconsultant. We're a non-hierarchical firm so you get to start at the same level as the senior staff. The sandwichperson part comes from Susan Buck-Morss's article in the Fall 1986 New German Critique, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering." The sandwichman is the last incarnation of the flaneur. "...particularly in times of unemployment, workers must make themselves 'attractive' to the firm: 'the closer work comes to prostitution, the more inviting it is to describe prostitution as work -- as has long been true in the argot of prostitutes. The convergence considered here proceeds with giant steps under the sign of unemployment; the 'keep smiling' on the job market adopts the behavior of the whore, who, on the love market, picks up someone with a smile.'" (page 121)
Apropos to that convergence is a term used by a pair of German sociologists, Voß and Pongratz: The "labor power salesperson"
"The labor power salesperson assumes such far-reaching control and management functions, that s/he, as hitherto only management, has almost switched camps and his/her objective interests as labor power are hard to recognize. Nevertheless, the conflict of interests between labor and capital reappears in unexpected form. Because the labor-power salesperson aligns him/herself with the firms’ interests to such a far-reaching extent and controls the transformation of his/her labor power into labor, s/he brings the conflict of interest within him/herself. [...] The conflict of interest appears less and less in the form of the industrial era between labor and capital, and more and more between two sides of one and the same person -- the class struggle is transplanted within the heads and souls of employees."
The bottom line is this: there is enough real work for everyone, but only if that work is shared out through a drastic reduction of the hours of work. That is not to say there is a "fixed amount of work," only that there is a finite amount of productive, useful, worthwhile work. Beyond those moralistic adjectives the amount of work can, in principle, be expanded ad infinitum, along with the degree of self-prostitution required to obtain and perform it.
snit snat wrote,
>Oh, yes, yes, I know that what they need is to get jobs and going on about
>unions or revolution isn't exactly going to help them. It's just
>depressing... the lost opportunities for consciousness-raising. It is too
>bad we can't tap into that. I obviously don't know enough about hwo unions
>go about things, and I know they have limited funds and must concentrate on
>actually creating unions. Still, here are all these people that could be
>educated about the issues so that they will be more primed and accepting of
>the idea of unions when they encounter them. It's not just getting people
>to actively create a union workplace, it's creating a population of people
>that support them in various ways. Or something like that -- if any of this
>makes any sense at all.