Here are few of the last paragraphs from an article on the contemporary state of work. Well worth reading the entire piece if you work for a living and give a shit about where we are headed as a society.
;The subjugatory libidinal forces that draw enjoyment from the current cult of work don’t want us to entirely conceal our misery. For what enjoyment is there to be had from exploiting a worker who actually delights in their work? In his sequel to Blade Runner, The Edge of Human, K W Jeter provides an insight into the libidinal economics of work and suffering. One of the novel’s characters answers the question of why, in Blade Runner‘s future world, the Tyrell Corporation bothered developing replicants (androids constructed so that only experts can distinguish them from humans). “Why should the off-world colonists want troublesome, humanlike slaves rather than nice, efficient machines? It’s simple. Machines don’t suffer. They aren’t capable of it. A machine doesn’t know when it’s being raped. There’s no power relationship between you and a machine. … For the replicant to suffer, to give its owners that whole master-slave energy, it has to have emotions. … . The replicant’s emotions aren’t a design flaw. The Tyrell Corporation put them there. Because that’s what our customers wanted.”
The reason that it’s so easy to whip up loathing for “benefit scroungers” is that – in the reactionary fantasy – they have escaped the suffering to which those in work have to submit. This fantasy tells its own story: the hatred for benefits claimants is really about how much people hate their own work. Others should suffer as we do: the slogan of a negative solidarity that cannot imagine any escape from the immiseration of work.
To understand work now, consider the pornographic practice of bukkake.
A far-reaching new study suggests a staggering $21 TRILLION in assets has been lost to global tax havens. If taxed, that could have been enough to put parts of Africa back on its feet – and even solve the euro crisis.
Unused Taxi Driver poster made months ago for SpokeArt’s Scorsese tribute show. The decaying mental state of a New York cabbie seen through his operator’s license.
Photographs of the Iraq War by dozens of the world’s leading photojournalists are on display at 25CPW in conjunction with BDC Founder/Director Mike Kamber’s book release Photojournalists on War.
View the show tomorrow Friday, May 17 and Sat., May 18, from noon-6pm at 25 Central Park West (@ 62nd St).
In 1969, celebrated management theorist Peter Drucker wrote, with respect to the GI Bill of Rights, the passage of which he would years later characterize as perhaps the most significant event of the twentieth century, “We need acceptance of the principle that higher education for every youngster is paid for out of taxes.”1 Hardly a political progressive, this early cheerleader for privatization and pioneer of modern management science here demonstrated that rationality peculiar to the more sophisticated elements of the ruling-class during periods of social unrest. To Drucker, the GI Bill, which by covering tuition costs and living expenses opened the door to higher education for a generation of veterans, signaled the beginning of the “knowledge economy,” the defining feature of late-twentieth century America. Embracing and expanding upon this legacy, he suggested, was a prerequisite for future prosperity.
