"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
-“The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30
"The problem with the kids today is that they think the world owes them a living!"
-Everybody's Grandpa everywhere
Your Gramps was wrong. The world does owe each and every one of us a living. For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that "the world" means all of the people on the planet. All of the people on the planet owe you a living, just as you owe all of those people.
We do not have to sell our labor to each other. We do not have to kill ourselves at occupations, simply because our less-technologically-advanced ancestors had to. We have reached a point in the development of our society and it's technological aptitude where there is no reason for all of us to occupy a 40-hour-per-week job. There just isn't that much that needs to be done. We create useless occupations to ensure that we cling to the old paradigm (ever have to deal with a commissioned salesperson?), just because that is the way it has always been done. We are seized with indignant rage when we see the unemployed. We call them lazy and useless. Sounds good to me.
And all of these useless jobs are designed specifically to serve a single purpose:to preserve the power of the powerful. In other words: keeping the wealth in the hands of the wealthy. Your job is not going to make you rich. It is going to keep you in your place. And the place of millions, even billions of us, all over the world, is to die in poverty.
We continue to murder the poor using labor largely because the tiny number of people who have the power to change this don't want it to change. They don't believe it is in their interest to do so. Poverty kills by making healthcare unaffordable, by mandating malnutrition, by enforcing ignorance. There are many excuses made for this, but they are all insufficient. The paradigm of labor is used as a weapon of social control by the oligarchs, providing just enough income to make the poor cling to their jobs, but not enough for them to break out of their situation.
There is a solution to all of this: The practice of selling labor needs to end. Production for profit needs to end. Manufactured scarcity needs to end. Put the means of extraction, production and distribution in the hands of all of us, in the form of collectives. Convert the basis of the world's economy from profit to need. Design and produce for need rather than wealth-creation and the need for useless labor goes away.
This creates a society where only a few are needed for work. So, the paradigm becomes part-time work, work-as-needed or work on a rotational basis. The vast majority of one's time becomes free to pursue whatever the heart desires, rather than doing what must be done simply to survive.
We have the means to do this, and each and every one of us owes it to all the others to make this happen. So, yes, the world does owe you a living. Demand it.
-“The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30
"The problem with the kids today is that they think the world owes them a living!"
-Everybody's Grandpa everywhere
Your Gramps was wrong. The world does owe each and every one of us a living. For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that "the world" means all of the people on the planet. All of the people on the planet owe you a living, just as you owe all of those people.
We do not have to sell our labor to each other. We do not have to kill ourselves at occupations, simply because our less-technologically-advanced ancestors had to. We have reached a point in the development of our society and it's technological aptitude where there is no reason for all of us to occupy a 40-hour-per-week job. There just isn't that much that needs to be done. We create useless occupations to ensure that we cling to the old paradigm (ever have to deal with a commissioned salesperson?), just because that is the way it has always been done. We are seized with indignant rage when we see the unemployed. We call them lazy and useless. Sounds good to me.
And all of these useless jobs are designed specifically to serve a single purpose:to preserve the power of the powerful. In other words: keeping the wealth in the hands of the wealthy. Your job is not going to make you rich. It is going to keep you in your place. And the place of millions, even billions of us, all over the world, is to die in poverty.
We continue to murder the poor using labor largely because the tiny number of people who have the power to change this don't want it to change. They don't believe it is in their interest to do so. Poverty kills by making healthcare unaffordable, by mandating malnutrition, by enforcing ignorance. There are many excuses made for this, but they are all insufficient. The paradigm of labor is used as a weapon of social control by the oligarchs, providing just enough income to make the poor cling to their jobs, but not enough for them to break out of their situation.
There is a solution to all of this: The practice of selling labor needs to end. Production for profit needs to end. Manufactured scarcity needs to end. Put the means of extraction, production and distribution in the hands of all of us, in the form of collectives. Convert the basis of the world's economy from profit to need. Design and produce for need rather than wealth-creation and the need for useless labor goes away.
This creates a society where only a few are needed for work. So, the paradigm becomes part-time work, work-as-needed or work on a rotational basis. The vast majority of one's time becomes free to pursue whatever the heart desires, rather than doing what must be done simply to survive.
We have the means to do this, and each and every one of us owes it to all the others to make this happen. So, yes, the world does owe you a living. Demand it.
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