Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 921-923

In the 19th century here, without any influence of Marxism or any European thinking, it was pretty much assumed that wage labour is about the same as slavery - it's different only in that it's temporary. That was such a cliché that it was a slogan of the Republican Party. And for northern workers in the civil war that was the banner under which they fought - that wage slavery is as bad as slavery. That had to be beaten out of people's heads.
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky on How He Found His Calling
(emphasis JS)

 

 

Guns are the only “durable commodity” a citizen can own that cannot be devalued or depreciated through financial collapse. Guns are the only real form of wealth for the average American, with currency in doubt, pensions unprotected, the bond and equity markets in near collapse and most real estate in “free fall” decline.
Posted by Gordon Duff
Monday, December 17th, 2012
Press TV: School killings, first shock, then blame and conspiracy

 

 

So machines may soon be ready to perform many tasks that currently require large amounts of human labor. This will mean rapid productivity growth and, therefore, high overall economic growth.

But — and this is the crucial question — who will benefit from that growth? Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to make the case that most Americans will be left behind, because smart machines will end up devaluing the contribution of workers, including highly skilled workers whose skills suddenly become redundant. The point is that there’s good reason to believe that the conventional wisdom embodied in long-run budget projections — projections that shape almost every aspect of current policy discussion — is all wrong.
Is Growth Over?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Published: December 27, 2012

(emphasis JS)

Getting There...

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 918-920

Q: We seem to have accepted an increasingly dysfunctional norm as normal. Why has this happened?

The major cause, separation of mothers and infants at birth, has grown throughout our century. At the same time achieving a high standard of living became the focal point of all schooling and training, creating a new mind-set and set of values. Standard of living has nothing to do with the development of intelligence, including ironically, the ability to be socialized and schooled. Quality of life determines the growth of intelligence, and as standard of living increased, the quality of life for children decreased. Quality of life to an infant-child means only one thing: complete unconditional acceptance and emotional nurturing on the part of a permanent caretaker. We have the most emotionally deprived children on earth, separated from parent at birth, and continually separated as they grow. Convinced that we are giving them what is most important, a high standard of living, we overload them with material goods to compensate for the love and attention denied. We earn money to buy these goods by working to make them, leaving little time for the child already isolated. So our heaping goods on the child to compensate for the love and nurturing they don't get, itself keeps the wheels of industry turning. And around it goes. Each child grows up to intensify the cycle in their interaction with their own offspring. It's an insane spiral toward chaos, sponsored and encouraged by a society based on economic games in which a few winners are bought at the price of masses of losers.
Touch the Future
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Amazing Capacities & Self Inflicted Limitations
In conversation with Michael Mendizza
(emphasis JS)

if I were to argue that a small fraction of the U.S. military budget could provide basic life resources for all under-employed Americans (or even all under-employed humans worldwide), the conversation in any meaningful form would end, thanks to the programmed routing of ideas.
Future of Work: Finding Value in the Rejects of the Job Economy
By: Nick Meador
h+
Published: October 10, 2012

 

 It’s time to question everything we in Western civilization have, for decades (at least), taken for granted to be the only possible survival paradigm: boring, unfulfilling work. This will largely involve unleashing the infinite creative and imaginative power of the human race – not by finding ways to “drop out” of the system, but by including a wider variety of human minds in the collective process.

Future of Work: Finding Value in the Rejects of the Job Economy
By: Nick Meador
h+
Published: October 10, 2012
(emphasis JS)



Workers Of The World, Relax!

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 915-917

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.
Joseph Campbell

Productivity growth slowed in the 1970s but revved up again in the 1990s and has stayed strong most years since. But ... productivity growth and employment growth started to become decoupled from each other at the end of that decade. Bernstein calls the gap that’s opened up “the jaws of the snake.” They show no signs of closing.
...
Wages as a share of G.D.P. are now at an all-time low, even as corporate profits are at an all-time high. The implicit bargain that gave workers a steady share of the productivity gains has unraveled.
...
As digital devices like computers and robots get more capable thanks to Moore’s Law (the proposition that the number of transistors on a semiconductor can be inexpensively doubled about every two years), they can do more of the work that people used to do. Digital labor, in short, substitutes for human labor. This happens first with more routine tasks, which is a big part of the reason why less-educated workers have seen their wages fall the most as we moved deeper into the computer age.
...
Digital labor will become cheaper than human labor not only in the United States and other rich countries, but also in places like China and India. Off-shoring is only a way station on the road to automation.
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Second, technologies are going to continue to become more powerful, and to acquire more advanced skills and abilities. They can already drive cars, understand and produce natural human speech, write clean prose, and beat the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital progress has surprised a lot of people, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.
...
The Great Decoupling is not going to reverse course, for the simple reason that advances in digital technologies are not about to stop. In fact, we’re convinced that they are accelerating. And this should be great news for society. Digital progress lowers prices, improves quality, and brings us into a world where abundance becomes the norm.
Jobs, Productivity and the Great Decoupling
By ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON and ANDREW McAFEE
New York Times
Published: December 11, 2012
(emphasis JS)

About the robots: there’s no question that in some high-profile industries, technology is displacing workers of all, or almost all, kinds. For example, one of the reasons some high-technology manufacturing has lately been moving back to the United States is that these days the most valuable piece of a computer, the motherboard, is basically made by robots, so cheap Asian labor is no longer a reason to produce them abroad.

In a recent book, “Race Against the Machine,” M.I.T.’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that similar stories are playing out in many fields, including services like translation and legal research. What’s striking about their examples is that many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of technology isn’t limited to menial workers.
Robots and Robber Barons
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Published: December 9, 2012
(Emphasis JS)


Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 912-914

 

One way of pushing the human personality too far is by depriving it of its minimum requirement for variety of stimuli. The resulting loss of well-being takes a form called boredom. The continuum sense, by producing this unpleasant feeling, motivates the person to change what he is doing. We in civilization do not customarily feel we have a 'right' not to be bored, and so we spend years doing monotonous work in factories and offices or alone all day doing uninteresting chores.
Jean Liedloff
The Continuum Concept
(emphasis JS)

For instance, someone diagnosed with ADHD will likely have trouble performing routine work tasks without a prescription for heavy stimulants that pose a real health danger to that person. Slowly but surely, our culture is beginning to question and reject the idea that there’s anything wrong with someone who can’t stay “on task” for the amount of time regularly demanded by such a job. On the contrary, there’s something wrong with the work paradigm itself.
Future of Work: Finding Value in the Rejects of the Job Economy
By: Nick Meador
h+
Published: October 10, 2012

(emphasis JS)

 

 

 

I have wondered for some time if the value of work has not become distorted in areas where we are engaged in what the world at large views as more “meaningful” work. I have worked in both arts administration and politics/social justice positions and have had my sense of self-worth and identity very challenged by things as whimsical as the moods of artistic directors and the various political infighting in non-profit boards. When we rely on the affirmation of the workplace to tell us whether we are valuable human beings we really do enslave ourselves.

Comment submitted by Linda Rogers on October 10, 2012
Future of Work: Finding Value in the Rejects of the Job Economy
By: Nick Meador

(emphasis JS)

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 908-911

In an unprecedented development, millions of newly minted college graduates are moving directly from the classroom to the unemployment lines and sometimes to the encampments of Occupy Wall Street. American workers now compete in the much-touted global market; it is a distinct irony that not Marxists but corporate leaders urge the workers of the world to unite in a drive toward efficiency—efficiency that can be best defined as low wages.
...
But no matter how well a newly minted worker fits the needs of corporations, we have seen that the marketplace does not provide many opportunities to “live with purpose” through labor.
Don't Slave Your Life Away: Why America Should Embrace a 4-Day Work Week
AlterNet / By Bill Ivey

Momentum Machines says it’s created a new robot that can make about 360 burgers an hour in a 24-square foot area and that they plan to use it in “the first restaurant chain that profitably sells gourmet hamburgers at fast food prices.”

Why robots? Besides efficiency, Momentum Machines says they will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. “Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground after you place your order and “gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in all the juices.” Plus it’s more consistent and more sanitary, they add.
Can a robot make a better, faster burger?
Kurzweil site
November 26, 2012

 

 

 

but then, how do we employ all the young folks with degrees in economics or psychology?

tom kersey comment
Can a robot make a better, faster burger?
Kurzweil site
November 26, 2012

 

 

 

 Got To Go To Work

 

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repeatedly, until u want to stop
By: Ashley jones