Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1813-1815

In the realm of ends everything has either a price or dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else which is equivalent; whatever is above all price, and therefore has no equivalent, has dignity....

...Autonomy lies at the root of the dignity of human and of every other rational nature.

Immanuel Kant, 

Metaphysical Foundations Of Morals

What gets me is that so many anti-UBI arguments posit that there'll be a class of useless parasites, hanging on to the bottom of society, that we'll

have to feed. The evidence suggests that very few people will take that route.

Meanwhile, a society of forced subordination to rich people tends to accrue power to the buyers and sellers of people– corporate executives– and therefore we end up with useless parasites at the top of society.

If we're going to have a few moochers, I'd rather have them at the bottom not bothering anyone than the current arrangement, where they're at the top and run everything.

Michaelochurch

The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.
Leo Tolstoy

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1810-1812

And how do you get the laborer to take lower and lower wages?

Through extended unemployment to create desperation and job insecurity. Through shredding the social safety net to create desperation. Through the destruction of collective bargaining. Through keeping minimum wages lower than a living wage. Through taxpayer subsidies to businesses enabling them to underpay workers, like food stamps. And now, through creating a system of worldwide wage arbitrage between the top industrialized nations and the third world in a race to the bottom for all.
noinks
comment on
Why Don't We Pay People Enough? 8 Facts About America's Struggling Working People
AlterNet / By Bill Quigley

 Central to its philosophy is the assumption the market drives not just the economy but all of social life. It construes profit-making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of agency. It redefines identities, desires and values through a market logic that favors self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos and unchecked individualism. Under neoliberalism, life-draining and unending competition is a central concept for defining human freedom.

As an economic policy, it creates an all-encompassing market guided by the principles of privatization, deregulation, commodification and the free flow of capital. Advancing these agendas, it weakens unions, radically downsizes the welfare state and wages an assault on public goods. As the state is hollowed out, big corporations take on the functions of government, imposing severe austerity measures, redistributing wealth upward to the rich and powerful and reinforcing a notion of society as one of winners and losers. Put simply, neoliberalism gives free rein to finance capital and seeks to liberate the market from any restraints imposed by the state. At present, governments exist preeminently to maximize the profits, resources and the power of the wealthy.
Henry Giroux,
Neoliberal Fascism and the Echoes of History

The State of the Economy
by
Louis Jenkins
   
There might be some change on top of the dresser at the
back, and we should check the washer and the dryer. Check
under the floor mats of the car. The couch cushions. I have
some books and CDs I could sell, and there are a couple big
bags of aluminum cans in the basement, only trouble is that
there isn’t enough gas in the car to get around the block. I’m
expecting a check sometime next week, which, if we are careful,
will get us through to payday. In the meantime with your one—
dollar rebate check and a few coins we have enough to walk to
the store and buy a quart of milk and a newspaper. On second
thought, forget the newspaper.
From Sea Smoke (Holy Cow Press, 2004) 

 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1807-1809

When I was growing up the portraits I found of working-class people were always very animalistic. The characters were portrayed as violent, physically dangerous, not very bright, and unreasonably angry, as if there were no reason for their anger. When I write these characters I try to take you inside what it feels like to be treated with contempt and to have such a narrow range of possibilities out.

That no-way-out is really the difference between boys and girls in working-class culture, because a working-class boy could run, or could when I was growing up. He could go West and change his name and start a new life for himself, and I know boys in my family did that. There is nowhere a girl can go. The only runaway position is prostitution and that can kill you about as fast as a violent uncle or a crazy daddy.
...
It was almost like I was a boy because I was being judged on intellect rather than the other standard for girls, which was to either marry well or to become a famously successful high-class whore. But the options for marrying well are limited, and if you’re as angry and damaged as most working-class girls are you’ll marry the first mean-assed boy who takes you up, so the next thing you know you have three babies and he’s broken your jaw. They always break your jaw.
Dorothy Allison: Tender to the Bone
By Amy Wright

 Social scientists have found that when aspiring intellectuals face highly restricted employment opportunities, they often take refuge in extreme politics. In a 1996 study, the sociologist Jerome Karabel sought to identify the circumstances under which intellectuals, from would-be academics to writers and artists, embrace or rebel against the status quo. “Especially conducive to the growth of political radicalism,” he wrote, “are societies in which the higher levels of the educational system produce far more graduates than can be absorbed by the marketplace.” 
Gray Matter
By NEIL GROSS SEPT. 30, 2017
New York Times

I never did like to work, and I don’t deny it. I’d rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh – anything but work.
Abraham Lincoln

 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1804-1806

I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read, I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley and Joyce, I moseyed around having thoughts and feelings, oh lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings… I hope some kids still have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming, rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle into them. Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.
...
The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.
Ursula K. LeGuin
[thanks to Maria Popova, Brain Pickings]

 The same situation can breed support for radical movements of the left. Poor job prospects for American thinkers during the Depression helped draw many into socialism or communism. More recently, the sociologist Ruth Milkman found that well-educated millennials were overrepresented among Occupy Wall Street activists. These young people had spent their lives diligently preparing to enter the knowledge economy and became disillusioned when, after the financial crisis, it all seemed to be crashing down.
Gray Matter
By NEIL GROSS SEPT. 30, 2017
New York Times

In our jobs and professions we have the experience of being special to a number of people. And much of our identity and sense of ourselves depends on that relationship. If we stop working, we find out how much we have depended on being so important to others.

But there’s another, not so obvious, dimension of being special: being distinguished in our misfortune or our misery. A victim is somebody special. I’m so unlucky, I’m so very ill, I have so much pain, that person really did me wrong and hurt me so much. Any one of these assertions may be true, but when we begin to build our identity on it, we’re in trouble. For instance, we can let a difficult childhood define our lives and control how we relate to others long after we have grown up. My suffering is unique. I had the worst childhood of anyone.
We are in Training to Be Nobody Special 

By Sandy Boucher

Dec 06, 2017

Tricycle