Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1738-1740

As Kaveh Waddell explored in The Atlantic in 2016, companies including Accenture, Intel, IBM, and Twitter now use sentiment analysis to track their employees’ emotions. Last year the London newspaper The Daily Telegraph installed black boxes under every desk to track when their occupant was present (a move the paper said was to improve energy efficiency, but which staff feared was for more dubious purposes). Slack, now the global standard for team communication, allows employers to monitor private chats by default. And, last month, Amazon filed a patent for a piece of wearable tech that would enable them to track warehouse packers’ hand movements on the job—an obscene intrusion into employees’ autonomy, but one that is in keeping with the tendencies of a company for whom human employment seems to be simply an annoying step on the way to full automation.   
Downward-Facing Capitalist Dogma
Josh Hall
The Baffler
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 In Greek "necessity"- anangke, serves also as the word for "force," "constraint," "compulsion," violence, and "duress." Aristotle felt the need to eliminate the sense of "violence" from the word, when he used it in the context of the "necessity of being" in the Metaphysics. Apparently the Greeks understood very well the connection between necessity and violence, and the requisite that a citizen be a man of leisure indicates that necessity had passed from his life, and he could avoid violence in his thought and behaviour. Freedom to the Greeks could only exist after the conquest of necessity, which demeans man, causing him to have to live with force and violence, his very existence under duress. In that condition he could not be political. Under the pressure of necessity, he [sic] resorted to violence.
Earl Shorris, Scenes From Corporate Life
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 The 20th century income distribution system has broken down irretrievably. Globalisation, technological change and the move to flexible labour markets has channelled more and more income to rentiers – those owning financial, physical or so-called intellectual property – while real wages stagnate. The income of the precariat is falling and becoming more volatile. And chronic insecurity will not be overcome by minimum wage laws, tax credits, means-tested benefits or workfare. In short, a basic income is becoming a political imperative.
Guy Standing
The Guardian
Thu 12 Jan 2017
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