A few (of other people's) words on Psychology, Economy, Morality, etc.

[Note: at the end of this rant, an amazing essay called "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black has been reposted]

Tocqueville argued that in a nation without a nobility, each citizen is
very insecure because he or she is not as able as the European to blame
an undesirable position on an unfair system of economic distribution.
One who does not hold a high position is fearful that this is due to
personal weaknesses. The level of anxiety over one's social position is
compounded when status distinctions in a society are not clearly
delimited. Insecurity increases because no one clearly knows the
relative status of the other.
The
Frenchman also noted that this insecurity isolates Americans and makes
them more individualistic as they are thrown on their own devices to
work out who has high status and who has low status. This results in a
constant jockeying for position and constant self-praise as people tell
each other that they are worthy of respect. (At the same time,
Americans tend to see comments favorable to oneself as evidence of
arrogance or conceit. Americans like their heroes to be humble. Hence
the importance of material wealth, which lets others know one's
accomplishments without actually having to tell people directly.)

Social commentaries of various European observers on different aspect
of life in America are also revealing: Among the characteristics
ascribed to the Americans are insecurity, boastfulness, thin skin,
rudeness, evasiveness, pushiness, and many other negative
characteristics. All these stem from a basic insecurity bred by the
emphasis on equality of opportunity.

Associated with being capitalist is the value of materialism. Americans
stress materialism; they measure people's worth in terms of their
wealth or position. This emphasis ties in with the importance of money
in American society. And if one's social position is dependent on one's
own efforts, then it becomes very important to have a high economic
position. After all, wealth is the most objective and most obvious
measure of success in the equality-of-opportunity competition.

Another measure of economic success and well-being is the way one looks
physically. Americans are extremely health conscious and place great
emphasis on physical attractiveness. Physically heavier people are
often made to feel socially and personally inferior. (This ties in with
American moralism. According to this thesis, there is "something wrong"
with anyone who cannot use their willpower to solve a problem.)

Unfortunately, the stress on winning the equality-of-opportunity game
measured in terms of money and physical attractiveness reinforces
personal insecurity. Wealth and beauty, after all, can be very
fleeting. Americans usually deny that they are motivated by money and
physical attractiveness, but there is obviously a huge gap between what they say and how they act.

The push for equality of opportunity and the pursuit of money also
lends itself to a high level of crime in the United States. It becomes
so important to be thought wealthy that many people will do anything,
legal or illegal, to obtain wealth. Here criminal activity includes not
only crime committed on the streets but white-collar crime as well.
Moreover, a particularly demoralizing effect of economic insecurity is
to increase the amount of political corruption, as many government
officials, usually underpaid compared to private-sector employees,
accept bribes and other offerings.

Being would-be capitalists, the American people have built their
society on the profit motive. In other words, their institutions tend
to judge what is good in terms of what makes a profit. The mass media offers one example.
Successful programs on television or radio in America are those that
get the highest ratings, that is, those that produce the greatest
profits. The only modification of this is when a program gets a high
rating but offends the moralist values that underlay the racist system.
The end result is that almost all Americans, conservative or liberal,
feel the mass media are unfair and mediocre. Nevertheless, the system
does favor the white middle class because this class outnumbers any
other group and hence virtually dictates the contents of mass media.
This is just one of many reasons why there is actually very little
freedom of expression in the United States.
The system of measuring the value of ideas by their profitability
enforces a dulling uniformity of opinions on Americans.

In 1958 Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro" asserted that American
culture encourages psychopathic personalities. Mailer noted the series
of contradictions (so-called paradoxes) in America, such as an
idolization of violence and the work ethic, a glorification of sexual
prowess and the Puritan demand for repression, and a compulsion to be
"successful" and a belief that the good person should be humble. Mailer
believed that such contradictions could produce a new generation of
psychopaths as "the psychopath is better adapted to dominate those
mutually contradictory inhibitions upon violence and love which civilization has exacted of us."
Mailer noted that in American society many artists, politicians, and
businessmen actually are psychopathic.

It has been written that the hero of our age is the psychopath. Our
society glorifies the victor and who is more likely to be the victor
that the psychopath. A number of studies have been done on children's
attitudes in America, Russia, and western Europe: American children
were more likely to exhibit psychopathic-like characteristics. Russian
children were the most likely to express mutual concern for others.
American children were more willing to engage in antisocial behavior
and were more responsive to peer pressure.

The fact that most white middle-class Americans see themselves as
minicapitalists has ensured an economic system in the United States
that is out of step with current reality. While other industrialized
countries, except South Africa, have been able to modify many of the
inequities of pure capitalism, the United States has failed to do so.
This failure has meant an antiquated form of capitalism with a factory
mentality dominating among American business managers. The world has
moved into a new age of managed capitalism, but the United States has
been so divided by racism that it has been unable to follow suit.

A society controlled by a racist white middle class, is not really a
democracy at all in the Jeffersonian sense of balanced government. This
lack of balance shows itself in many local and state governments
actually taking votes on basic civil rights. For instance, the state of
Colorado actually passed a law denying basic protection for gay people.
The New York City school system voted to fire its superintendent for
trying to teach tolerance of gays in the schools. A society that allows
citizens to vote on whether various groups should or should not have
basic human rights, is a society where civil rights are always at risk
for everyone.

Many Americans argue that local communities should have the right to
vote on what kind of curriculum the schools have. A society that puts
science and social science to a vote, is a society that does not have
much respect for any kind of science.

Pseudo-democracy is also expressed in the schools in the tendency to
encourage students to "express their feelings" about subjects, rather
than to master a body of knowledge and then apply principles of logic
to analyze the subject matter. The end result is a nation of poorly
educated students, who cover their ignorance with vocal bravado.

Americans say they believe in the separation of church and state, but
this is actually a very poor reflection of reality. [Most] Americans
are fond of placing "In God We Trust" on myriads of state objects. They
are also fond of intoning God at public functions and offering public
prayers.

Tocqueville argued that in a democratic country without a nobility,
religion becomes extremely important. Without a religious emphasis,
unbridled materialism and selfishness would completely take over the
nation's values.
For Tocqueville, this was why Americans were so religious. To
counteract materialism, and to create moral unity, Americans created a
civil religion based on a slightly modified capitalism in puritanical
clothing. (It must be emphasized that Puritanism was itself primarily a
restatement of
capitalism.)

Tocqueville missed the main reason for America's emphasis on religion:
racism. Racism is a terribly destructive social force. Constructing a
system based on racism reinforces whites' fears of blacks and
establishes the need for constant vigilance to maintain the system. The
dominant groups not only have to ensure that the social order is
maintained but that the society's values are strictly followed.
America's civil religion sanctified this racist system and provided it
with the strict moralistic code needed for its enforcement.

The civil religion the Americans developed was a very moralistic one.
Moralism sees humanity as primarily motivated by ideas and ideals and,
consequently, harshly and unfairly judges human conduct. The moralist
qualities of Puritanism proved ideal for America's civil religion, for
they had that constant vigilant perspective for moral transgressions
needed for the enforcement of a racist value system. This section first
discusses American moralism and then focuses on the need for
enforcement of this moralism.

Moralistic attitudes pervade American society; they influence virtually
every decision and public discussion taking place in the nation. In
fact, we can say that moralism is the backbone of racism. Moralism does
not apply only to racial norms but to many other norms as well. For
instance, compared to Europe, America is especially harsh on all
aspects relating to sex:
prostitution, abortion, birth control, sex education, and many more.
This obviously stems from Puritanism, but it was given sustained life
because it is a valuable enforcement mechanism for ensuring that all
groups follow the "American way."

A perfect illustration of how deeply ingrained the racist value system
is in America, and the extent to which Americans will go to support
this value system, is provided by the AIDS crisis. Moralistic groups in
America are so powerful that they can block any attempts to discuss
scientifically how the disease is spread. Advertisements that mention
the disease only hint at what actually is happening. Medical references
are so vague as to be useless as information. Without this scientific
information, many more people will die than would have been the case
under a less harsh moral code. Moralistic forces, however, feel it is
of greater benefit socially to let people die of AIDS than to question
the moralist value system regarding sex in the United States. To many
liberals, this way of reasoning seems close to insanity.
Yet
it is perfectly sane when seen from the point of view of the role of
moralistic values in backing the racist system in America.

Another illustration comes from the court system. Americans emphasize
the concept of free will and stick to it unerringly largely because
they want to blame the lower class for not improving its own situation.
The logic of the insanity plea reflects this moralism. With a few
exceptions, the law asks only whether a person knew that what he or she
did was morally wrong. This moralistic approach to psychiatry
completely ignores the role of such forces as compulsions, obsessions,
phobias, and addictions. To consider less exclusive definitions of
insanity would, moralists feel, weaken the basis for American values:
moralism itself. This moralistic value system also explains why the
United States is the only advanced industrial society that retains the
death penalty. After all, how can moralists be lenient on murderers
when murderers freely chose to murder even when they know it is wrong?

The moralistic outlook also explains why many Americans tend to condemn
the unfortunate and poor for not living by middle-class standards.
After all, they argue, given the obvious equality of opportunity in the
society, the lower class freely chooses to stay in its present condition.

With this moralistic outlook on society, it is no wonder that many
Americans are naive about the world. They, after all, live in a world
of moralistic ideals. Indeed, in a defensive system there is a premium
on maintaining a belief system that is one of high ideals. It is much
better and more legitimate to say one's society is based on equality
than on racism. Of course, to maintain this belief, one has to engage
in a great deal of myth making about the social order. For instance,
Americans refuse to consider the impact of social class on their
society, romantically insisting that they treat everyone equally,
regardless of class. It is as if they deny reality by sticking to the
pollyannaish belief that equality of opportunity makes the society a
fair one, when obviously it is not. In fact, racism is the most
important reason for the egalitarian emphasis in white America.

Many other once-puzzling aspects of American life could be cited to
illustrate America's moralism. But the argument must move on to the
need for enforcement of the moralistic code and the values associated
with this.

The need for moral enforcement explains why Americans historically have
been harsh toward atheists. Indeed, former President George Bush
expressed a common feeling when he questioned if atheists were even
American citizens.
Given the religious backing of the "American way," atheists are seen as
a threat to the social order.

A key characteristic of the civil religion and the enforcement system
is the overemphasis on patriotism with its stress on saluting the flag
and singing the national anthem. For instance, one often hears the
meaningless phrase that the United States is the greatest nation on
earth. The intent of America's exaggerated patriotism is to force
people to agree with the "American way." Disrespecters of flag or
anthem can expect harassment, violence, arrest, or all three. The
moralistic code and the need for its rigid enforcement limits the
amount of personal freedom American citizens really have. To challenge
the precepts of Americanism leaves one open to charges of being
unpatriotic, atheistic, or siding with communists [Ed.:
Gasp!].

It takes a great deal of coercion to maintain a racially tripartite
system, and this helps explain America's high level of violence, which
is apparent not only in high levels of personal crime but in racial and
ethnic assaults.
Studying these high levels the final report of the National Commission
on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1970:ix) noted that violence
was as great a threat to the nation as any combination of external dangers.
Related
to this is America's high tolerance for personal violence between
individuals. After all, it takes a great deal of violence to maintain a
racial caste system. Just one example of this tolerance is seen in the
classic American way for children to deal with a bully. Instead of the
school's taking an activist stance against bullying, the person being
bullied is advised to be courageous and confront the bully physically.
The proper way to deal with a bully is ultimately confrontational, but
it certainly does not have to be a violent confrontation.

The need for enforcement of the system of racism explains another
characteristic of American culture: paranoia. The racial system in the
South and North left the American character constantly vigilant for
moral transgressors and other possible threats to the social system.
Witness the society's hostility to any radical ideas, especially
socialism and communism. These ideas are seen as threatening the social
order. This trait is also closely linked to condoning the use of
violence against transgressors of the "American way." For instance,
Americans used considerable private violence against socialists, such
as the Wobblies (International Workers of the World, or I.W.W.), when
they tried to organize workers in the American West.

America's paranoia also extends to foreign policy. Until the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the United States was more concerned than western
Europe about a possible Soviet invasion of Europe. Two other examples
of American paranoia are the Palmer raids and McCarthyism.

Another characteristic related to paranoia is anti-intellectual- ism.
All too many Americans see intellectuals as potential threats to the
racial tripartite system because these people are the most likely to
challenge the system's validity. Therefore it is important to belittle
intellectuals as ivory-tower dreamers, idealists, undemocratic, and
nonpragmatic. During Richard Nixon's presidency, Vice-President Spiro
T. Agnew vented this theme with particular vehemence when he viciously
attacked intellectuals in the news media and universities.

Accompanying the role of anti-intellectualism is the importance of
disinformation in the United States. Disinformation is spread in order
to back up the racist system in all its ramifications. One prominent
example of disinformation is the failure of most Americans to
understand the difference between socialism and communism. Many
so-called socialist governments are primarily capitalist countries with
strong government intervention. But many Americans refuse to make any
distinction between these countries and communist ones. Another example
is the apocryphal stories about welfare recipients driving around in
Cadillacs. These stories are deliberately spread because the white
middle class wants to believe them, and they want to believe them
because they want to maintain the existing racist system of the
distribution of scarce resources.

If one tells Americans that their moral code, compared to other
advanced industrial nations, is too strict and punitive, they usually
respond by saying that Americans are "more moral" than the other
countries, or that America has higher standards. The truth, however, is
that they actually have lower standards because their standards are
racist in nature.

The culturalism of Americans is also expressed in their world history
texts.
These texts are really western history texts. The stress is on Egypt as
the cradle of civilization, and how from this great civilization the
mantle of leadership traveled through the Near East to Greece, then
Rome, up to Great Britain, and over to the United States. In essence,
in this culturalist view, America is the climax of thousands of years
of advanced civilizations.
This is a completely biased approach because it says that western
culture is superior to other cultures. To be non-culturalists,
historians should insist on separating western history from world
history. World history should be truly world-wide with an equal
emphasis on all the major areas of the world.
This idea, however, is opposed by racist moralists, who fight to
maintain their vision of racist America as the greatest nation in the world.

NOTE: In keeping with this "love it or leave it" theme, check this
website out, written by a god-fearing man who blames Arabic/Islamic
hatred on "jealousy," stemming from their "deeply diseased culture":
http://www.jrwhipple.com/war/ (Click on "A Case For War")

The split between the primarily slave economy of the South and the more
mercantile economy of the North resulted in an emphasis on states'
rights that saddled the United States with a very weak government. Many
aspects of American culture stem from this lack of effective
government. To take one example, many people are amazed that the United
States has close to three-quarters of the world's lawyers. A partial
reason for this is America's moralistic attitude, which places heavy
criminal penalties on private vices, with an emphasis on punishment,
not treatment. Another reason is that in a society that places such
importance on material success, there is constant jockeying for
position which leads to conflict. But a more serious source of the need
for lawyers and constant litigation in the United States is that the
government is simply not effective. Compared to other nations, the
United States currently does not have effective policies protecting
employees or adequate welfare policies helping people in need.
The victims of injustice and poverty, or even accidents, have to turn
to the legal system for redress because the political system simply is
inadequate.

Another area in which the United States lacks competent government is
in having effective agencies to check on corruption and crime in both
business and governmental agencies. With few government employees
checking on business crime, Americans find themselves at the mercy of
business ruthlessness. One example comes from the VCR repair business.
It has been estimated that in this field the consumer has a 50 percent
chance of being cheated. A society that takes the motto "Let the buyer
beware" as a guiding principle is one that the average citizen cannot
trust. An example involving consumer deaths comes from eating meat
contaminated with the E. colli bacteria. The government provides too
few meat inspectors and does not supply them with equipment adequate
enough to detect spoiled meat.

In the vacuum left by the absence of government, the mass media have
had to take the role of uncovering business misbehavior. Several
hour-long television programs devote themselves primarily to disclosing
business and governmental abuses and cautioning viewers to be watchful.

A recurring tendency in American politics is political scapegoating.
Popular
analysts never question the system itself (they would be fired if they
did), but merely attempt to find ephemeral causes. A common theme in
America is the tendency for the public to blame elected officials for
any problems with the system. It is much easier to blame politicians
than to accept, for instance, that at times the nation itself becomes
politically paralyzed between opposing groups. Voters blame the
politicians for not carrying out the wishes of the people or for
working for their own personal advancement.
This was certainly the rage in 1992 in the United States. This, of
course, ignores the real paralysis arising from a racially divided
nation and a largely conservative middle class.

American social scientists, who basically accept the American system,
have for decades been trying to discover why Americans have one of the
lowest voting proportions of any industrialized nation. The real answer
is that although Americans love to praise their country and the "American way,"
they
really know the system does not work well. What Americans will not
admit is the extent to which the political ineffectiveness is the
direct result of the inadequate governmental system that the white
middle class itself created. And they certainly will not permit
themselves or anyone else to acknowledge the role of racism in this
self-defeating cycle. American social scientists have not yet fully
realized just how much self- delusion is taking place in American
society. Nor do they realize just how little truthful information
American voters provide pollsters, especially on such key issues as
race. American social scientists continue to use faulty and biased data
to reach faulty and biased conclusions about American attitudes toward
the racial issue.

============================================================================

AND NOW…

Allow me to conclude with portions of a personal favorite of mine: The
Abolition of Work, by Bob Black!

Work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are
essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means,
by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other
means.) 95% of Americans work for somebody (or something) else. People
don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task
all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of
intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of
its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic (playful) potential. A
"job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably
limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to
do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for
the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no
opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who
actually have to do it.

Capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of
productivity and profit to the exigencies (things that require effort;
urgent) of organizational control. The degradation which most workers
experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be
denominated as "discipline." Discipline consists of the totality of
totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework,
imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching in and out, etc.
Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with
the prison and the school and the mental hospital. Work makes a mockery
of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a
democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states.
These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The
authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats
control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who
push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private.
Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities.
All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it
is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and
conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies
and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized
dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find
the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as
you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, prisons and factories came in
at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from
each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss
says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He
tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his
control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the
clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few
exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you
spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every
employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker
is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you
for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for
them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school
receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their
supposed immaturity. This demeaning system of domination rules over
half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of
men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's
not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or --
better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy.
Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are
what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are
you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better
explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such
significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People
who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and
bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the
end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their
aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is
among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training
at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the
system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything
else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely
submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.
Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens
because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship
and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we
keep looking at out watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free
time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly
devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work,
and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way
labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own
expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility
for its own maintenance and repair. Cicero said that "whoever gives his
labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves."

Work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill
most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000
workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two
million are disabled.
Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures
are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a
work-related injury. Thus they don't count the half million cases of
occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on
occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely
scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases
like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die
every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance,
which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced
assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their
depravity whereas coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question.
What
the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have their
lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all.
Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50's.
Consider all the other workaholics. Even if you aren't killed or
crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to
work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about
work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing
one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who
do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of
auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug
addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions
normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work.
Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. We kill people
in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and
Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway
fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or
rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for. Many workers are fed up with work.
There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee
theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the
job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just
visceral rejection of work.
And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents
and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is
inevitable and necessary.

Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose
independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its
political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, sociologists
estimated that just five percent of the work then being done --
presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our
minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Thus, directly or
indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or
social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of
salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers,
lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who
works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle
some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the
economy implodes. Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar
workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs
ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real
estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling.
It
is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is
growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector"
(agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to
those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively
useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public
order.
Anything
is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you
finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs,
even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the
average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past
fifty years? Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself.
No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene
deodorant -- and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An
occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the
auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles
depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we've
virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and
assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the
one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious
tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing.
By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine
the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an
inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern
wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or
two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon,
for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a
heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called "schools,"
primarily to keep them out of Mom's hair but still under control, but
incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so
necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of
the nuclear family whose unpaid "shadow work" makes possible the
work-system that makes it necessary.

Then there's the possibility of cutting way down on the little work
that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and
engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and
planned obsolescence would have a good time devising means to eliminate
fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly
they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. The historical
and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive
technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to
industry, work increased while skills and self-determination
diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated the
degradation of work. It's been said that all the labor-saving
inventions ever devised haven't saved a moment's labor.

Workers of the world... relax!