WORK LESS Institute of Technology

Great article Tom. I'm very impressed with you having gotten an article printed in CounterPunch. Makes it possible for you to say that you are a writer; anybody can slap up a web page but to get published is a whole new level.

Yup, work is primarily about controlling a person's time so they don't have time to investigate what is happening in the world. Even if a person is unemployed they are often in a survival mode which is a full time preoccupation in itself, and the stress factor is as much of a drain on your thinking as the stress factor when you have the day job.

Commplimentary to not working for the economic sector, different than working for the civil sector, is not supporting the economic sector by consuming its goods and services which are luxuries. One still has to pay for a subsistence survival, but all the extras that are meant simply to make life worthwhile aren't really needed if you're not working, and in fact they are often the only reason for working. Welfare will pay for rent, food and an internet connection, and what else does one need to buy (I'm assuming that friends are not the type of people that you have to buy, or buy things with, in order for them to be your friends).

Posted by: ov at October 27, 2004 12:28 AM

Empire requires consumption. There is much to be said for cutting consumption on the individual level. I have also found that my level of consumption has gone down considerably since I retired. This is not simply because I have less money; it is because work itself engenders the need to consume to justify the work.

On a macro level, how do we have a tolerable society if the bulk of its citizens decide to significantly curtail consumption? The machine of empire would clearly be in dire straits. We would no longer be the "envy" of the world. We would no longer have the power to invade and control the world. Would this, in itself, be a devastating state of being?

I think we need to work for a world where America can devolve. As long as might makes right and we do not have properly functioning international institutions, we will feel the need to continue the consumption tread mill. Whether we like it or not, however, there will be a time where the treadmill will cease to function. Our level of consumption and production has already overshot the ability of the earth to sustain our behavior. Better to plan and change behavior now that simply wait for the chaos to follow.

Posted by: at October 28, 2004 08:18 AM

As I understand both your essay and Shivani's, the problem is not with work itself so much as control of work.

Work itself, when it's something we have control over and do as much as we feel is necessary to meet our own needs, is a good thing.

What we need is a return to the understanding of work as something that a worker *does*, not something he is *given*.

One step in that direction is to meet as many of our needs through work for ourselves, and work for direct commodity exchange with our equals in LETS systems and similar frameworks.

Ralph Borsodi showed that, even when we factor in the value of our time at the prevailing wage, home-grown food is still cheaper than grocery store food. Reducing our labor-time by the amount we'd have to work to buy the stuff we grow ourselves, we come out ahead.

Try this thought-experiment: a small truck farmer exchanges produce for beer from a micro-brewer. Obviously, the farmer can't buy enough beer to support the brewer, and the brewer can't buy the full output the farmer needs to sell to support himself. But both the farmer and brewer can feel secure that their needs for vegetables and beer will be met in the future, and that each has a reliable and predictable market for the portion of his output consumed by the other. And the more local providers of goods and services enter this exchange framework, the larger portion of each person's output and consumption can be securely and predictably provided for, without the danger of market dislocations and resulting unemployment that exist in large, anonymous commodity markets.

Of course, much of what we consume cannot be produced by self-employed workers. The solution there is to increase the relative share of production that is carried out by producers' co-ops, and to increase the bargaining power of workers in the wage-labor market.

The state capitalist system is set up so that the government intervenes in the market to reduce the bargaining power of labor. Because the state's bank licensing laws and capitalization requirements prevent workers from organizing interest-free credit through their own mutual banks, they are forced to pay for access to capital on the capitalists' monopoly terms.

Imagine the situation if any group of people (a LETS system, maybe) could agree to issue mutual banknotes against any form of collateral the membership agreed on, with the "interest" charge being limited to the actual overhead cost of administering the loan. The only condition of receiving such a loan would be agreeing to accept mutual banknotes as payment for one's own services. This would not, in fact, be a loan: the mutual bank would simply be performing the service of transforming its members' property into monetary form. This is exactly what a capitalist bank does in a secured "loan"; but because of the state's enforcement of market entry barriers, the bank is able to charge a monopoly price for the service in terms of usurious interest rates.

Now imagine a society in which competition from mutual banks was allowed to drive the prevailing interest rate down to less than 1% for secured loans, with drastically reduced rates for unsecured debt like credit cards. The average person would pay off his mortgage in ten years or so, and pay off his credit cards. More people would retire a few years earlier, or reduce their work to part-time, or (because of access to cheap capital) meet part or all of their income needs through self-employment.

What would happen to the bargaining power of labor, if the wage-labor force were reduced by several million, and the average worker didn't have thousands in debt hanging over his head to make him keep his mind right? Jobs would be competing for workers, instead of the other way around. Even wage-laborers would get a wage much closer to their full product than at present, and have much more say over their working conditions and hours of labor. Even nominally capitalist enterprises, arguably, would approach de facto status as workers' co-ops, given the increased bargaining power of their work force.

This is exactly the effect that access to land had on the bargaining power of labor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: workers who had access to the commons could rely on them to meet subsistence needs in a pinch, and thus were less desperate to hold onto wage-paying jobs at any cost. Because of the increased bargaining power and wages resulting from this partial self-sufficiency, workers often worked only enough to meet their needs, and then took the rest of the week off (hence the celebration of St. Friday and St. Monday). Likewise, they often treated seasonal wage labor simply as a means to supplement their income from self-employment. The same was true in the early days of the industrial revolution in America, where a significant part of the labor force was small farmers who just worked enough seasonally to make enough money to pay taxes and other demands of the cash economy.

That's why the gentry in early industrial England was so fanatical about enclosing the remaining commons and reducing the household plots of agricultural laborers. They were quite explicit in warning that, if workers weren't robbed of independent access to the means of subsistence and wages reduced to subsistence levels, workers would only work when they felt like it.

Posted by: Kevin Carson at October 28, 2004 09:09 AM

Per person/per year it takes about one acre to feed someone. A family of four living on three+ acres (kids eat less) wouldn't have to pay that much for labor for their food, and it would be cheaper than working, as long as you don't count the rent/mortagage/property-taxes for the land itself.

The "state capitalist" system does not always side against labor. The heavy anti-labor lifting started in the mid-60s, and was entrenched with the election of RW Reagan. Things are as bad now as they might have been under McKinley.

Leo Strauss and the anti-liberal philosopher friends of his who became the intellectual caste of the Nazis, by the way, were growing up in a Germany dominated by Weber's theories, and they explicitly rejected them.

I simply reject the possibility that there is a god, and so deny all-powerful over-arching effects attributable to the effects of a religion.

Posted by: Josh Narins at October 29, 2004 08:46 AM