Murray Bookchin, January 14, 1921--July 29, 2006

An actor reads Murray Bookchin's description of his own book "The Ecology Of Freedom."

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The existing technics of the western world--in principle, a technics that can be applied to the world at large--can render more than a sufficiency of goods to meet everyone’s reasonable needs. Fortunately, an ample literature has already appeared to demonstrate that no one need be denied adequate food, clothing, shelter, and all the amenities of life.
Murray Bookchin,
The Ecology Of Freedom

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 81, 82

The standard by which the theory must judge the democratic quality of any society, and by which its claim that any particular society is democratic, must be tested, is how nearly it attains the presently attainable maximum, i.e. the maximum level of abilities to use and develop human capacities given the presently possible human command over external nature.
C.B. Macpherson
Democratic Theory
(emphasis JS)


... in the very near future our problem will be not to get people to work but to find something for them to do, not to make the most efficient use of scarce means but to start repairing the scarcity of human values that have been submerged in the struggle against material scarcity.
C.B. Macpherson
The Real World of Democracy






go see Mr. Mueller

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 81

It seems sensible to think of automation as a freeing of people from toil. We might even think that one reasonable objective of automation is to create unemployment-- the more the better! And that a society optimally industrialized should be blessed by nearly total unemployment.
Hugh Kenner
Bucky
(emphasis JS)

Good news! Everyone's miserable.

Why are low unemployment figures called "good news"?

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Go Ahead

JS, 2006

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 81

Where are the days?

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What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Philip Larkin

A Cartoon

Go see Mr. fish.

boot-up

What do you expect? The country is a boot.

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 78, 79, 80

Salieri couldn’t get over the fact that Mozart didn’t “earn” his superior musical talent through industry, chastity, and humility.
Comment by:
The Anti-Puritan



An innovator in everything he did, John Muir was the first to ship grapes from California to Hawaii. At the end of ten years he told his life-long friend William E. Colby that he had cleared $100,000 and had all the wealth that he would ever want. He turned his back once more on money making. During the Harriman expedition to Alaska in 1899, someone mentioned the great wealth of the sponsor, the railroad magnate, E. H. Harriman. Muir replied, 'Why, I am richer than Harriman. I have all the money I want and he hasn't.'"
from
The Wilderness World Of John Muir
by Edwin Teale.



When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with all other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
John Muir

Speech

What's On This Little TV?

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 76, 77

Today an ever decreasing amount of human labor is necessary to create an ever increasing amount of wealth. Back of this development lies the introduction of technology (such as an increased use of computers) which replaces human labor. It is not difficult to see that this tendency will not go away, and that the rationalization it represents will continue to accelerate within the next decades. Standardized work will become dispensable as it is translated into routines, routines being what computers and machines are made for. As a result, structural unemployment will turn into a pressing problem if no appropriate answer is found. The current system of the distribution of wealth, which is based on work income, will enter a fundamental crisis and it is our thesis that this crisis cannot be overcome as long as our society bases the distribution of societal wealth on the criterion of work.
Manuel Franzmann & Sascha Liebermann
Saving Citizenship from the workhouse




The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
William Blake,
Proverbs of Hell