Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 934-936

More than 197 million people worldwide are jobless, and an additional 39 million have simply given up looking for work, a United Nations agency said on Monday, warning that government budget-balancing was hurting employment and would probably lead to more job losses soon.
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More people were simply leaving the job market altogether, particularly in the developed world, with labor force participation rates falling “dramatically,” it said, “masking the true extent of the jobs crisis.”
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But even countries in which jobless rates have not risen “often have experienced a worsening in job quality,” the organization said.
U.N. Agency Warns of Rising Unemployment
By DAVID JOLLY
New York Times
Published: January 21, 2013 (emphasis JS)

...in fact I feel I'm dealing here with the worst kind of simple-mindedness - you choose to see an ideological vision of the world, a mythical world of petty commodity producers who all make things which others use, and this is all for the common good because everyone's better off, when the world you live in bears no resemblance to this vision. You can't deal with the complexity, and often the meaninglessness, of contemporary society. So you fall back on the reductive claim that we're all just human beings meeting a fixed set of obligations, and refuse to see anything else. Someone who cures malaria is socially useless because people with malaria are too poor to buy it. Someone who kills the last remaining rhino and sells it to a millionaire as a trophy is socially useful. It's like you don't care if what they're doing actually makes life better for people in general, if it actually causes harm even, so long as it fits into the market matrix.

I've got news for you: the market matrix is NOT moral. It's quite possible to screw people over and succeed in business. It's equally possible, and very common, to try your hardest to be "employable" and still get screwed-over. Your Robinson Crusoe acrobatics can't conceal these simple facts.

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What might a world without work look like?
04 January 2013
(emphasis JS)

 

 

I am the People, the Mob

 
by Carl Sandburg


I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and
clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history
to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the
world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his
voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.