Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1419-1421

The real Horatio Alger was a pedophilic minister from Brewster, Massachusetts who fled to New York to write formulaic short stories for newspapers. He died penniless in 1899.

Why the ‘Dump Trump’ strategy is doomed
by  Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

 My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle.

...

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers.

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
DAVID GRAEBER
TheBaffler
[emphasis JS]

 

The call for full employment should not be confused with an affirmation of the work ethic at the expense of pleasure and leisure. We agree with Marx’s contention that the “true realm of freedom” begins exactly where work ceases and that “the shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.” For socialists, freedom is exclusively identified with the time we spend outside the sphere of material production. We find ourselves through the relationships we build with friends, neighbors, and lovers, the political struggles we engage in alongside our comrades, and the creative and artistic endeavors we pursue as ends in themselves.

How Full Employment Means Working Fewer Hours
By Chris Maisano
AlterNet
[emphasis JS]