We're Wage Slaves for Market Forces

In modern times, the main problem with "work" is that so many people have sunk into a life of alienated labor: the gap between "what people do" and "what people need" has become unbridgeable.

Human beings are no longer in touch with Mother Nature or even with human nature. It should not be surprising if they feel that the locus of power is no longer within them.

All human beings need to refrain from "working" for a living. "Work," as it is generally known, is a complete denial of the liberal education that people struggle for in their youth.

The modern corporation has no room for liberal thinking; on the contrary, to work for a living means either to be a slave, stuck in an entry-level position forever, or to climb the corporate ladder and be a sycophant, a hypocrite, and a robot, losing all touch with one's soul, constantly trying to please a boss.

The boss is in turn dehumanized by those on the next-higher level of authority. What a contradiction most people endure: they pay lip service to democracy on a political level, yet they spend eight hours a day in an economic environment that is totally undemocratic!

One of the most famous champions of the work ethic was Benjamin Franklin, with his proverb, "Time is money."

What Franklin meant, unfortunately, is that time - one's life - must never cease to be anything but the pursuit of money. Money must always be pursued, never merely enjoyed.

Where do the problems of modern "work" come from? Well, partly from the fact that there is no intelligent life on earth. Like so many other species, the human species expands and consumes until its members starve and die.

The three basic problems of human life have still not been solved: overpopulation, over-consumption of resources, and destruction of the environment.

As a result, the competition for survival is intense, and for most people life is just a long stretch of drudgery followed by an ignoble death.

The person who can best provide an understanding of the nature of work is not really Marx, but Darwin - although what is involved is cultural, not genetic evolution.

It is the intense struggle for survival, the intense struggle by each human against other humans, that leaves people cursed with having to work and work, until everything before their eyes is just a gray blur.

No child can imagine the situation, no child can imagine that for ten thousand mornings an alarm clock will drive him or her out of a warm bed and out into the cold predawn streets. But that is exactly what happens to almost all human beings, until the Angel of Death has mercy upon them.

A Darwinian struggle for survival, an eternal competition against our neighbors, is the first and greatest commandment.

This planet is only eight thousand miles wide, but we are convinced that everything we see or touch must be made bigger, faster, and more powerful.

If the television commercials allow a flickering image of lounge chairs, cool drinks, and palm-sheltered beaches, our minds are in no danger of corruption, and for civilized man a vacation is no more than a financial bloodletting.

Certainly no one who wears a necktie can feel anything but vaguely cheated by the two weeks holiday.

After the first few days of trying to enjoy a vacation, one can see why Thoreau said (in the second chapter of _Walden_), "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. . . ."

It is sad to see people who have no income at all, but it is perhaps sadder to see young people grabbing at "high tech" jobs, thinking that in that way they can protect themselves from the storm of laissez-faire capitalism.

No matter how many hours one spends in front of a mirror, perfecting one's hairstyle and one's buzzwords, it is just not possible to turn oneself into an adequate piece of machinery, not when the machine is really designed to make money for people who sit in the back seats of limousines with tinted windows.

Even if one could become that ideal piece of machinery, one would not be happy. Such "ambitious" young people may be losing touch with the notions of dignity, honor, and self-respect.

It is misleading to talk about the "daily grind" when the grind is not "daily" but eternal. In fact, the grind is almost everything: one's daily job takes up more time that any other part of the twenty-four hour cycle, and certainly more time than any other phase of one's life.

Perhaps some well-paid industrial psychologists have looked into the question of making the grind even more pervasive. (For those who have jobs, of course - for a large number of people, ironically, there is the vast emptiness of unemployment.)

If the research and development of sleep were ever left to large corporations, they would do their best to reduce human slumber to zero.

After all, sleep is a big waste of time, a third of a human life, and that time could be devoted to increasing production of goods and services, increasing the Gross Domestic Product, increasing corporate profits.

The only answer to the global economy is the local economy. The unasked-for global community should be balanced by the local community: the band or village.

Every time people produce their own goods and services, they are striking three blows against corporate feudalism: they are not increasing the income of a CEO in New York, they are no longer alienated from their own labor, and they cannot be laid off as redundant.

Of course, they will not want to reduce themselves to an utterly Paleolithic style of life, so they should trade their goods and services with other people in that local community: turnips for blankets, pottery for furniture.

Human beings need the kind of work that does not require them to sacrifice their dignity or their self-esteem.

They do not need masters, because they can be their own masters. They do not need to be slaves, and they do not have to possess the mentality of slaves, thinking always of somewhere to hide, thinking always that sleep is the ultimate goal.

They need to live on their own land, to work their own land, to watch the wind-stirred grain turning to gold under the summer sun.

tags: work  corporate  feudalism  alienation  capitalism  slavery  consume  

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