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In the yearJohn Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking achieved a hour work week. There's every bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more.
In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it. Why did Keynes' promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the '60s—never materialise?
The standard line today is that he didn't figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we've collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment's bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking shows it can't really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the '20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between and gives us a clear picture and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK. Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically.
And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking of ancillary industries dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery.
In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat.
But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking really need to employ.
Still, somehow, it happens. While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
The answer clearly isn't economic: The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s. And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.
Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done—at least, there's only a very limited number of bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking that need to be fried.
Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there's endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it's all that anyone really does.
I think this is actually a bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy. Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: And on one level, this is obviously true.
There can be no objective measure of social value. I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn't seen since I was I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band.
I'd heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.
There's a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?
But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting an bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking, for examplewill want bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking avoid even discussing their line of work entirely bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking or t'other?
Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is. Bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one's job should not exist?
How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: Bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic.
A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking similarly vanish.
Many suspect it might markedly improve. Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions doctorsthe rule holds surprisingly well. Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things bitcoin magazine issue 5 walking be.
This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: It's even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits.
You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care? If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited.
The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class managers, administrators, etc. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3—4 hour days.
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