Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 367, 368

…"individuals' full development" not only creates wealth but "is wealth once wealth has been stripped of its limited bourgeois form". Marx, for whom "free time" was an index of wealth, since it was time "for leisure and superior activities" could not predict that "free time" would be colonized by leisure industries and that the productivist frenzy would find its corollary in consumption frenzy, including consumption of commodified leisure. But it hardly matters. What's important is that the time individuals spend "working" on their "full development" is not work time for the simple reason that "self-development work" is not work in the economic sense: it does not produce "value" in the economic sense, that it does not produce anything salable, nothing that is designed to be exchanged for something else. Full self-development and wholly developed individuals are not commodities.
Andre Gorz

Theorizing Deliverance from the Labor- and Commodity-Centered Society

The people that we've elected, and those entrusted with this nation's corporate and financial assets, better get it together fast because soon those questions will be resonating a million times over, and the noise from the masses may well topple the walls surrounding their gated communities and country clubs and rattle their gilded cages. We were told, Work hard, play by the rules, and pay your taxes and you will get ahead--you will have the so-called American Dream. That's a damn lie, and I for one am mad as hell about it. God help those in charge should I and the millions of other people like me (our numbers seem to be growing exponentially by the day) reach a point of desperation and no return. There will be a revolution and no redemption for the people who caused this mess.
Joris B. Rapelje

Clinton Township, Mich.
The Nation,
Jobless in America