and why are people letting this crap about workers wanting "safety" as FT employees? This sounds just exactly like the kind of rationalizing ideology spewed out by contractors on the technical writing list. They tell everyone --uncritically appropriating new managerial ideologies--that full time employee are, ultimately lazy, that contractors have this adventurous spirit, are more innovative.
This is just crap, crap, crap and we know it from research! It's fre market ideology of the entrepreneurial business man drunk on patchouli~!
At 10:24 AM 4/16/2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>John A:
>>Typical hippie narcissistic stupidity of the anti-humane sort.
>That's a little too harsh - they were trying, and who knew what would work
>35 years ago? But now we know it just isn't enough. You're never going to
>get more than a handful of people who want to live Twin Oaks-style - and
>Twin Oaks itself survives by selling hammocks, cashew butter, and web
>design to the outside world. It's a way of carving out your own niche
>while leaving the balance unchanged. It free-rides on industrial society,
>while leaving most other social relations unchanged. Beats living purely
>inside your own head, but it's not unrelated to that.
No kidding. Working for small businesses all my life, I can't see how anyone is outside the system. (I don't even want to talk about the conditions of labor, which are crappy. not only do small businesses have little "surplus" to tide them over, they often work best through emotional manipulation and that doesn't goa way when things are "communal. I once worked for a little hippy restaurant, in exchange for a room in a house, shared kitchen privileges. Nothing was fairer, less difficult, or safer (!!) because it was small, hippy, communal. feh. There was a great study of this type of business in a collection of research monographs from Michael Burawoy, _Ethnography Unbound_ where, in spite of the collectivist practices, there was inequality within the collective.
As Doug points out, the small business is in business-to-business or busines-to-consumer sales or both. B2B is, Jumpin-Dead-Guy-on-a-Stick-Jehosaphat!!, often the result of the very conditions that have been attributed to the flow of big capital: just-in-time production -- outsourcing! --new managerial ideologies, etc. These small businesses wouldn't be possible, often, were it not for these changes, the very ones that are considered 'chaotic.'
If you're selling to consumers, you depend on them having enough income to afford the higher prices of the products -- so you gots your yuppie market and you gots you vol. simplicity market who afford the price by washing their ziplocks. IOW, you only exist because of the system you are supposedly fighting. In the long-run, your interests lie in keeping that system going.
Now, you could wish for a state of affairs in which everyone lived simply. In which case, many of these small businesses won't be in business. If you aren't cultivating any sense that we have obligations to a wider society--that there are interdependencies (and dependencies!!)--that what matters is not just you and your collective of like-minded people living in your lifestyle enclave (cf., Robert Bellah et al. in _Habits of the Heart_) then why should the people in this future society give a crap about the have nots -- those who fall through the cracks of utopia?
The thing is, the whole thing can only work with precisely what Carrol says is important: organization, social movement, planned and coordinated boycotts. Which is to say, if you want it to work, you have to proselytize and get mass amounts of people to do it. See the excerpt from Marx I forwarded in the previous post.
I think it's all interesting because, what's always been most fascinating to me was Marx's theory of social change: all history is the history of class warfare.
--You have various types of class societies: slave, feudal, capitalist.
--one supercedes another when the 'old society' gives birth to the new -- that is, when a competing way of organizing economic activity becomes successful. The bourgeousie became a powerful force that waged various forms of class warfare on the land-holding feudal nobility. They don't abolish an existing class society, but work alongside it, creating a new one.
--Marx said that this would be the way history would work, one superceding another. It would be violent and bloody and unjust because each transition simply seats another small, minority class of people in positions of power. As such, they fashion a society that supports and reinforces their economic, political, social power.
--Why would the transition from capitalism -- socialism be different? Marx maint'd that, under capitalism, there would only be an endless expansion of wage slavery.
"All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property."
Now, as Dawson points out, the problem with the hippie approach is that it's ultimately Republican --or something. I see this in the talk of "deadbeats":
"If you started a business and started hiring employees, would you offer them more than whatever it took to get them to work for you? Would you want to be forced to pay a higher minimum wage to them? Would you want to be forced to pay higher taxes from your business's productivity to fund "deadbeats?" We must see both sides of the issue here."
Instead of questioning the ideology of the petty bourgeois business owner who sees his taxes being paid to support "deadbeats," it's simply uncritically appropriated as a legitimate way to feel! WHAT deadbeats exactly?
Fuckmedead!
Do you happen to know someone who could, oh, work 40 hrs a week and get by just fine but doesn't so they can collect the Earned Income Tax Credit?
This is precisely what a small business owner would consider a deadbeat. And they denounce it precisely because such things keep people out of the labor market, providing them with an alternative way to live. And it's precisely those kinds of things, they complain, that will force them to pay higher wages to those who are competing in the so-called "free market".
lookee, if it's wrong to give incentives to big business, why is it "right" to give incentives to "small businesses"? When a government supports any business at all this is no longer a free fucking market.
Further, while you may be supporting the "good small businesses" you're also supporting the "bad" small businesses with these fukcing tax incentives. Besides which, having never bothered to question the ideology of the buseiness owner to begin with, the successful big business can just say: "freeloader! I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, so can you." And he'd be perfectly legitimate in saying so because his way of thinking hasn't been questioned from the git-go!
Besides which, if you never bother to question the arguments of the petty private property owner -- then you aren't getting at the arguments put forth by the not-so-petty-private-property-owner. If the petty bourg business owner can feel that it's legitmate not to want to support deadbeats, why shouldn't the Big Buoyz do and say the same? There's nothing that makes the small business owners legitmate and those of the big business owner illegitimate.
feh. It all just boils down to a small class of people trying to get their way by using the government to make the playing field exist on _their_ terms. To line their pockets with the dead body labor instead of the other guy's pocket.
kelley