Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1702-1704

Kate McFarland: I’ve never found it necessary to structure my life around the pursuit of any career path. The goal merely to make sure that my basic needs are satisfied and otherwise to pursue what interests and engages me at the time. I don’t have an “occupational identity” and don’t feel this as a personal deficiency. There’s a famous passage in The German Ideology in which Marx says, in describing the communist utopia, “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity” and thus can “do one thing today and another tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” That’s almost a perfect expression of the idea.

Of course, given that “career” implies a full-time paid employment rather than just any area of specialization, anti-careerism more specifically–and perhaps even more significantly–rejects the notion that we’re defined and valued by our contributions to the GDP. It also rejects the idea the success is measured by professional promotions and raises.
Interview: Kate McFarland On Anti-Careerism]
December 3, 2017 Jennifer Lawson

…state and local governments are giving out $80 billion a year in tax breaks and other subsidies in a foolhardy, shortsighted race to attract companies. That money could go a long way to improving education, transportation and other public services that would have a far better shot at promoting real economic growth.

Instead, with these giveaways, politicians and officials are trying to pick winners and losers, almost exclusively to the benefit of big corporations (aided by highly paid lobbyists) at the expense of small businesses. Though they promise that the subsidies are smart investments, far too often the jobs either don’t materialize or are short-lived, leaving the communities no better off.
Race to the Bottom
Editorial
New York Times
Published: December 5, 2012 




 Within the technological ensemble, mechanized work in which automatic and semi-automatic reactions fill the larger part (if not the whole) of labor time remains, as a life-long occupation, exhausting, stupefying, inhuman slavery.
Herbert Marcuse