Patriotic Patriarchy: Working for the Man

June 17, 2018 3:03 PM

Utopia and work - "The utopianism of full employment is so entrenched, as a seemingly uncontested common sense, it's difficult to imagine a different utopian horizon. But there is one, which emerges from at least three different theoretical and political traditions." (via)

Contesting the utopianism of full employment with a different utopian horizon creates the possibility of imagining and creating a different world—in which work acquires different meanings, in which the distinction between necessary and surplus is redefined and perhaps erased, and for the first time in modern history workers are no longer forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work to someone else and achieve the right to be lazy.

also btw...

• Elon Musk's Fall from Grace - "What we often mean when we root for Musk is that we want to hasten the coming business-directed energy transition of our industrial system away from fossil fuels. In this, he embodies both a widely-popular yearning for social transformation and the businessman’s stolidity restraining it."

For those condemned to life on Earth, what Musk represents above all is the possibility of a “green” or “renewable”—and therefore “sustainable”—capitalism. Species survival is one way of putting it, but this elides all the details relevant to our political lives. That ambiguity is precisely why the vision is so appealing: it can be both revolutionary and ostensibly consensual. For the past fifty years, after all, among the easiest and most widely accepted formulas for people to work together to change their futures has been through patterns of personal consumption. We invest our savings, purchase private equipment, place our bets in the enthralling spectator sport that is the clash of powerful personalities and organizations—and then we wait...

Musk’s career thus illustrates the central challenge of U.S. industrial planning. Because of taboos against government ownership and income-tax financed public services, the public must find ways of persuading businessmen to manage private property to meet public objectives. Often this leaves us choking at an ideological and political impasse. Rather than have government authorities spend billions to own and operate their own plant under public oversight and administration, we are trapped debating which private profit-making groups the government should support in pursuit of its public-interest goals.

• Marc Benioff of Salesforce: 'Are We Not All Connected?' - "Today in 'private provision of public goods', Salesforce founder Marc Benioff pledges to shelter or house all the homeless people in SF in five years."

There’s a shift going on. When I went to U.S.C., it was all about maximizing value for shareholders. But we’re moving into a world of stakeholders. It’s not just about shareholders. Your employees are stakeholders, so are your customers, your partners, the communities that you’re in, the homeless that are nearby, your public schools. A company like ours can’t be successful in an unsuccessful economy or in an unsuccessful environment or where the school system doesn’t work. We have to take responsibility for all of those things.

This idea that somebody put into our heads — that companies are somehow these kind of individuated units that are separate from society and don’t have to be paying attention to the communities they’re in — that is incorrect. We need to have a more enlightened view about the role of companies. This company is not somehow separate from everything else. Are we not all connected? Are we not all one? Isn’t that the point?

posted by kliuless (5 comments total)

This is a lot of good stuff to chew over. The fertilization of 'the dignity of work' in the US is so ingrained in how we operate. I cringed every time I heard Obama say it. I cringe every time people working two or three jobs to get by are held up as heroes instead of victims. I cringe at this. We're so set up to turn commodities and labor into money that we forgo creating value.
posted by es_de_bah at 4:27 PM on June 17, 2018 [17 favorites]

via Dead Kennedys

I'm working at my job
I'm so happy
More boring by the day
But they pay me
All that time spent going to school
Just to end up following rules

Now it's time to take a break
Don't stray too far or you'll be late
Thank you for your service and a long career
Glad you gave us your best years

posted by swift at 6:16 PM on June 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

Musk has been doing himself no favours bloviating on Twitter - his most recent exchange involves him declaring he's a socialist (and in the explanation revealing he has no idea what 'socialist' means), and Marx was a capitalist (because Marx wrote a book called 'Capital').

(Why do all these posts gloss over how you'd potentially solve the obvious problems of a world without labour? It just makes the argument look short-sighted.)
posted by Merus at 8:31 PM on June 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Why do all these posts gloss over how you'd potentially solve the obvious problems of a world without labour?

There's a difference between labour from which an individual derives the total value (eg I organise my own affairs, I build my own house; I grow my own food; I construct my own clothes; I exchange my goods for services that I am not inclined to perform myself, and vice versa) and labour that is sold to generate a profit for someone else, of which you receive only a percentage of the direct value, translated into wages.

There will never be a world without labour itself, that's the premise for any interrogation of methods for deriving and apportioning benefit.
posted by freya_lamb at 2:17 AM on June 18, 2018 [6 favorites]

Yes! I want to read about that!
posted by Merus at 5:22 AM on June 18, 2018