An excellent argument against social security and pensions, I congratulate you.
Your conception of desperation is limited. Even the rich despair. But a rich person probably doesn't despair as I mean it: to be relatively young and have before you most of your life, possessed of no especially marketable skills, trapped in the service industry*, contemplating the strong likelihood of a life wasted.
Of course, I'm talking to a boomer. All the same, this is a rather incredible conversation -- as if all the statistics of economic gloom that get produced on this list have no actual real world consequence; that things aren't terrifyingly bleak and conducive to desperate behavior, like crime or, even worse, working for free as a means of bolstering one's pathetically unexceptional resume.
*although, to work in the service industry is to be paid money, and to have money is like having money. So, admittedly, it's difficult to see dead-end service work as despair-inducing.
On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Adam Proctor <proctorvt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Calling someone who works for free a "scab" or calling for ridicule of that
> person in any way is nothing but a wad of ultra-leftist crap. Look, we as
> workers under capitalism are all exploited. If viewed through a logical
> economic (and Marxian) lens, there is little difference between those who
> work for a wage and those who - through economic and social coercion due to
> the ever precarious nature of the working class under capitalism - are
> forced to take on an internship-style position in hopes of securing more
> longterm employment. The only immediate difference is that the rate of
> exploitation for the volunteer is much higher--in fact, it's absolute. By
> blaming a worker who works for free in order to secure long term employment,
> you are making two fundamental errors:
> 1. You're ignoring the fact that we all work under various rates of
> exploitation. For at least some of the working day, the products of our
> labor are being appropriated by someone else (i.e. you're working for free
> during a portion of your day).
> 2. You blame the worker for being forced into accepting the positions that
> are available on the labor market. This is a classic tail wags the dog
> argument, where you are blaming the worker for accepting a choice of options
> over which he or she has no control.
>
> So in the hopes of heroically standing up for the working class by calling
> out scabs for working for free, you have fundamentally disconnected the real
> conditions of the working class from the actual forces at play in
> capitalism. You have created a ghost, a strawman. In the process you have
> completely betrayed the only logic whereby we might ever truly understand
> the workings of capitalism so we might one day defeat it.
>
> So that, my friends, is a load of ultra-leftist crap.
>
>
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