Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 905-907

Social Security lifted more than 20 million women out of poverty in 2009. Without it more than half of the nation's elderly women would live in poverty.

The War On Women Is a Class War
AlterNet

Rescuing political action from its current paralysis is no different from developing the publicness of the Intellect outside the realm of wage Labor, in opposition to it.
Paulo Virno,
A Grammar of the Multitude

We’re all on the same side. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, as the expression goes, but we must let go of a system that is making us sick, making us crazy, and killing us. During my entire life, success has been defined, incorrectly, by the amount of money a person has, rather than the amount of compassion. Similarly, the entire system has been defined in terms that make no sense because the system rewards money over happiness, and death over life. As John Ralston Saul pointed out in his 1992 book Voltaire’s Bastards, “never has failure been so ardently defended as success.”
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Time is not on our side, and it might be too late already to prevent our own near-term extinction. It’s long past time to let go of a system that enslaves us all while destroying all life and therefore all that matters. And it’s not merely time to let go, but to terminate this increasingly violent system that values the property of the rich more than the lives of the poor.
Guy McPherson
The Good Men Project

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 902-904

[R]ather than resenting the vampire, the contemporary zombie often aspires to become just like one of them - just as the well-known Joe the Zombie Plumber aspired to become a vampire, a la some Bloomberg. Indeed, unlike the slave, the zombie does not villainize its oppressor at all. Like those afflicted with Stockholm Syndrome, who come to care for their tormentors, or the host possessed and deformed by a parasite, the zombie more or less willfully sacrifices itself to the vampire.
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Trained in the masters' schools, raised on the tv shows the masters create, which reflect their cultural norms, reading the newspapers the masters run, and generally swallowing the predominant ethos, culture, and tastes of the ruling classes, it should come as little surprise that the zombified host (who, as living dead, lost his political resistance along with his pathogenic resistances) should come to esteem the enterprising vampires.

(That these parasites should be portrayed as sexy aristocrats, ought to yield little surprise either. Meanwhile, unlike the sexy, aristocratic vampire, the proletarian zombies - sapped of all elan vital - are rarely portrayed as anything aside from the thoroughly repulsive creatures they have been deformed into. Indeed, no one ever wants to touch, let alone sleep with any of these shuffling, rotting corpses.)
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The corrective to the extremes of power that result in vampires and zombies is not, then, humanity (which, since we're all human, is effectively a meaningless term) but the elimination of both of the extremes of the dead, through the equitable distribution of the world of the living. This parasitic relationship of zombies and vampires has its corrective, then, not in the destruction of the parasite or the elimination of the host but, rather, in the replacement of the capitalist system (along with the other relations of domination) with not parasitic relations, but with a symbiotic social arrangement in which all may benefit - and justice, which is always possible, can be made actual.
The Zombie Vampire Industrial Complex
Elliot Sperber
hygiecracy blog

It was just this week that Foxconn, the Chinese company that manufactures so many of America's favorite gadgets, initiated a plan to buy 1 million robots to replace human workers. When that day comes, thousands of men and women working at Apple's Chinese manufacturing plants will be unemployed. You'll have to wonder—in spite of notorious labor abuses at Foxconn—were those jobs better than none?
How a Robot Will Steal Your Job
Cord Jefferson   
Gizmodo

I've got a better idea. Tax the robotic factory well enough to give the unemployed decent wages for doing "nothing". If you work you get paid very well. If you choose to go surfing every day and live off of the state you get a nice check to cover your living expenses.
Why do we aspire to keep people working as cogs in a machine?
im.thatoneguy
comment
How a Robot Will Steal Your Job

Why Not Make It So?

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 899-901

I would guess that a population scrambling to make it on time to their third job has less time to think of how unjust their society is.

no time to protest (sorry occupy iowa... i could only make it to one event)

no time to teach their kids morals, how to love

no time to investigate what really happened because you sure cant trust the main stream media

I just know one thing for sure; eventually we will all be unemployed in about 50 years due to automation. what then?
Manopeace
comment on
How Less Work for Everybody Could Solve a Lot of Our Economic Turbulence and Make Life More Pleasant

With the Protestant hegemony fading, let us project a similar demise for the simplistic, planet-threatening credo known as the "Protestant Ethic." …
In fact, hard work by itself leads to exhaustion, without often gaining a livable wage.
Why the Protestant Work Ethic Is a Menace to Society
By Robert S. Becker
AlterNet

Rather than the “deserving” or “working” poor, with its connotations of moral judgment and authoritarian social control, it is time to begin speaking the language of economic and social rights. For instance, the right to a Universal Basic Income, a means of living at a basic level that would be provided to everyone, no questions asked. Against the invidious politics of the work ethic, it’s time to argue that some things should be granted to everyone, simply by virtue of their humanity.
Hipsters on Food Stamps
by Peter Frase
Jacobin Magazine
[link, JS]

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 896-898

…what is arguably the nation’s biggest challenge: breaking out of a decade of income stagnation that has afflicted the middle class and the poor and exacerbated inequality.

Many of the bedrock assumptions of American culture — about work, progress, fairness and optimism — are being shaken as successive generations worry about the prospect of declining living standards.
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The biggest causes, according to interviews with economists over the last several months, are not the issues that dominate the political debate.

At the top of the list are the digital revolution, which has allowed machines to replace many forms of human labor, and the modern wave of globalization, which has allowed millions of low-wage workers around the world to begin competing with Americans.
Standard of Living Is in the Shadows as Election Issue
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times
Published: October 23, 2012
[emphasis JS]

“There’s this idea that we can somehow rely on entrepreneurship to get us out of the job crisis,” said Scott Shane, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University. “That’s getting harder and harder, considering there are fewer and fewer of them, and they’re each employing fewer people.”

The decrease in start-up size is probably driven by some combination of technology, changes in management philosophy and tighter financing.
When Job-Creation Engines Stop at Just One
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
New York Times
Published: October 4, 2012
[emphasis JS]

As Benjamin Franklin might have repeated, against those who deny climatic disruptions staring us in the face, "We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." How hard must we work to find alternatives to the folly of glorying counter-productive, life-taking hard work -- that destroys rather than serves life?
Why the Protestant Work Ethic Is a Menace to Society
By Robert S. Becker
AlterNet
[emphasis JS]