Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 972-974

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man [sic] entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment … all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The House of the Dead

The strangely puritanical – and deeply irrational – obsession with “jobs”, “hard-working families”, etc, at a time in history when greater leisure for all is more than a utopian promise (due to the maturation of labour-saving technology, etc) seems an integral part of the conservative framing – which is perhaps why many on the “left” find it difficult to provide counter-narratives.
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We have a strangely distorted view of “wealth” (due partly to business PR) – we imagine it all comes from “private enterprise” in the present, and from the recent past. But it accumulates over history. We’re all totally dependent on the work and innovations of dead generations, and the taxes they paid.

In other words, the dichotomy between “dependency culture” and “private enterprise” is completely false.
News Frames
Anxiety Culture
[emphasis JS]

Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment. None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. None!

That amounts to an entire global industrial system built on sleight of hand. As legendary environmentalist Paul Hawken put it, “We are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.”
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But the UNEP report makes clear that what’s going on today is more than a few accounting oversights here and there. The distance between today’s industrial systems and truly sustainable industrial systems — systems that do not spend down stored natural capital but instead integrate into current energy and material flows — is not one of degree, but one of kind. What we need is not just better accounting, it is a new global industrial system, a new way of providing for human wellbeing, a new way of relating to our planet. We need a revolution.
None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use
By David Roberts
Grist
[emphasis JS]