Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 454-455

The majority of adults in this country hate their work. Whether it is a factory job, a white collar job, or with some exceptions a professional job, or the role of being a housewife. They hate their work-- as much as young people rebel against the prospect of similar work. Indeed it is the parents' feelings that are a principle source of the children's feelings. The middle class also resents the authority that is imposed by work-- the boss and the system-- and they feel that they lack power over their own lives.

The new consciousness seeks new ways to live, in the light of what technology has made both possible and desirable. Since machines can produce enough food and shelter for all, why should man [sic] not end the antagonism derived from scarcity and base his society on love for his fellow man? If machines can take care of our material wants, why should people not develop the esthetic and spiritual sides of their natures?
Charles A. Reich,
The Greening Of America

Dear Joe,

…Like probably many other people I hate spending my time in an office with air conditioning perpetuating an economic and social system of psychopathy, with seemingly intelligent people scrambling over to stick knives in each others backs to 'get ahead'. You know what I mean? The fake smiles, the enforced 'team player ethic', all of that capitalist workplace crap that employers and their paid flunky psychologists have been working on since 1900.

I know I have to get free of the debt trap but even getting back into a job on the same level of money slavedom hasn't happened thus far and I'm under 40! My right wing dad always said become a lawyer. And I was like eight, going nah, I wanna be a social worker or an artist, much to his apoplexy. Now I think it doesn't matter if one retrains, because wherever you are in this system if you are an independent thinker and scorn the non-critique 'happy consumer' society -- you are always an outsider.…

I trained in the biological sciences in the end and always found the palpable cognitive dissonance in my professors unbelievable. Here I was learning about how we face imminent collapse through the loss of biodiversity, rainfall pattern change, atmospheric pollution, desertification, erosion, pesticide and fertilizer pollution, genetic modification crossover, hormone poisoning, etc. and they just carried on -- business as usual, man.

Pascal

Leeds, England
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Dear Pascal,
I am glad to hear someone else is as "lazy" as I am.…Fuck no. I don't wanna work ever again.

Joe Bageant