Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 372-374

One of the things that I am absolutely convinced of is that we have to have work as a centerpiece of any social policy.
Barack Obama, 2008











Out of this slavish dependence on mechanical time which spread insidiously into every class in the nineteenth century there grew up the demoralising regimentation of life which characterises factory work today. The man who fails to conform faces social disapproval and economic ruin. … Hurried meals, the regular morning and evening scramble for trains or buses, the strain of having to work to time schedules, all contribute to digestive and nervous disorders, to ruin health and shorten life. George Woodcock




We don't need this dominant concept of scarcity any longer. We don't need any longer the morality which gives pride of place to the motive of acquisition. We don't need any longer the incentive of unlimited freedom of acquisition. In at least the most advanced capitalist countries we produce already more commodities and more new capital than we know what to do with.

And 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 the human values that have been submerged in the struggle against material scarcity.
C. B. MacPherson
The Real World Of Democracy