Work Does Not Work Anymore

WORK DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE Humans have always worked in order to survive. In the beginning, physical exertion required most of our energy. Without tools even plentiful resources were hard to reach. Invention could make the difference between life or death. The evolution of tools has reached the point where physical exertion can no longer compete with the energy now harnessed by technology. Our new-found abundance elicits praise for technology and higher standards of living. The cost of that increase has not been measured, though the side effects may prove lethal. Work provides the focus of our lives. How we feel about ourselves, how we relate to others, and the means of survival all turn on how we work. Natural selection has prepared us for certain tasks. The most satisfying work calls forth our genetic capacity. The mercurial rise of technology has replaced much of that capacity. Few of us were designed to spend our days staring at computer screens. We can even adapt to that but at a cost to health and sanity. The sea change in the distribution of tasks also foresees a radical change in economic and social organization. Labor has lost so much bargaining power that it can scarcely defend itself against exploitation. A new form of slavery awaits us. Abuse of real wealth, the environment, is and will continue to reduce the standard of living. The war of all against all for the scraps has begun. It will be fought with deception and labor- saving devices, which will again reduce work and make more waste and another lower standard of living for most people. An economic downward cycle will create more pressure against social justice. Capitalism has failed to provide a future and the answer so far has been more capitalism—turning real wealth into paper wealth. Democracy requires economic support. Shifting wealth into fewer and fewer hands eventually destroys equal opportunity and equal social justice. Loss of traditional work that most people could do and employers could not do without is creating a new feudal state—the economically powerful and the serfs who toil for them. The technology that once freed people is now making them powerless again. Look at what is happening to work. Not so long ago, half the population worked on the farm. Less than one percent toil there now. First they left for the factories, many of which have now gone to some other country. With robot technology, fewer people work in the remaining factories. Mega stores have replaced small retailers and the internet has replaced some mega stores. Fewer people who left the factories to become sales people can find that work. Some of them worked in book stores and music stores where people asked them questions about what was new and who played or wrote best. Those jobs are gone. More people work in finance than ever before but service industries require the production of goods that provide the wages for discretionary spending. Someone has to build the house before a mortgage is created to buy it. Occupations that once provided employment are disappearing. No amount of stimulus money from the government can stimulate growth when wages continue to stagnate or decline and more people need government help to survive. Taxes necessary to feed the helpless put a drag on the economy when businesses cannot pick up the slack, continue to avoid hiring, and cut benefits. The trend is fewer good paying jobs, fewer people who can afford the support of the health insurance and retirement that keeps people out of bankruptcy when things go wrong. The independence that once supported democracy and free enterprise is losing to a shift in wealth to the top. Government spending has hidden the fact that the market can no longer support a middle class. Ironically, the government gets the blame, even when it provides the funds for saving those businesses. Government employment has had to take up the slack in the labor market. Without it, the crash would have occurred much sooner. The redistribution of wealth downward through taxes and benefits kept capitalism alive. Now, thanks to billions in propaganda financed by conservative think tanks, redistribution down is a communist plot and distribution up is on God’s agenda. The budget deficit that borrowing money to fight two wars instead of raising taxes created is now the conservative excuse for further tax cuts for the top. Politicians did not raise taxes because that would create an outcry against the wars so profitable to the military-industrial complex. Blaming the deficit on so called entitlements like social security that people worked all their lives contributing part of their wages excuses further desecration of labor. Conservatives do not care about the outcome. They either get their tax cuts or they allow government to fail and money takes complete control, preferably both. On whose back will deficit reduction fall? That is the big question no one touches. Obama is trying to spread the pain. The top wants to put it on the rest of us. Liberals are at a great disadvantage. They cannot make the promises we all want to hear because the economy is not merely suffering a cyclical downturn. The problems are systemic. The constant reduction of wages and degradation of resources in a competition to be better than other people creates the war of all against all that blocks the kind of sharing and cooperation needed for future generations to survive. The big debt we are creating goes beyond numbers in a budget. Our means of adaptation are at risk. People’s short term memories have already forgotten that the problems addressed here were accelerated under eight years of Bush and his conservative friends. Only a sea change in our ethics and morality can save our children. Most reforms fail as a result of greed. As in George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, it does not take long for the new leaders to take up the tricks of the old leaders. That will continue until we change peoples’ relationship to resources. That requires a fundamental change in the concept of property. Basic resources must not be held as private property. Oil, steel, water, coal, natural gas, and other commodities required for manufacturing and universal support are too precious for distribution under the profit motive. Private ownership creates a divisive conflict of interest that fuels the war of all against all. Capitalism here undermines the efficiency required by natural selection for survival of the species. Capitalism’s fundamental premise turns real resources into ephemeral (paper) wealth. The more consumed, the more money generated. No incentive for conservation is possible. Competition turns on reducing the cost of extraction of the resource which in turn mitigates against labor and often other resources, like water, used in industrial processes. Management of resources for long-term adaptations would require a panel of experts on the best use of a resource, a constitutional guarantee of equal rights to purchase the resource from the government for approved uses (making taxes unnecessary), and a political system that oversees the legitimacy of the administration, the public being the shareholders of the peoples’ resources. There may be better ways to organize distribution but all ways require the ethics and morals of people who resist white supremacy in all its class rendering forms. Greed kills everything. Since we are what we adapt to, killing greed requires an environment where none can exploit anyone else or accumulate the property that all need to survive. Only the few who create (the Beethovens and the inventors) do not rely on resources contributed by government and other people. Taxes should level the opportunity field with free education, health care and retirement, all of which everyone needs. Private property—your house and the things you can use exclusively—will be influenced by the market, as will the use of public resources. Markets that waste resources must be taxed accordingly. Again, ethics are everything for success of the public good. An independent judiciary (under separation of powers) and a bill of rights are essential. Leaders must work within the rule of law. This is particularly important because extortion is profitable where morality and government do not overcome it. Price fixing, price gouging, inadequate wages, and Ponzi schemes create inequities that also fuel the war of all against all. What I reference as skimming contributes to the income gap. Multiple layers of organization or management, like HMOs and similar organizations, only manage money. They contribute nothing to the delivery of services. They receive big rewards for designing schemes that deliver less for more. A sea change has already occurred and it drives the conflicts that stand in the way of long-term survival. Technology has made it possible to access resources once out of reach and it has destroyed a good deal of real wealth in the process. The means of feeding and housing people in numbers once unimaginable cost a great deal in critical resources. The short fall is reflected in budget deficits and poverty. The present means of production and distribution cannot be sustained. The question now is who will suffer the consequences of our destruction of wealth. The answer for a would-be elite is the creation of the old feudal class system of lords and ladies owning everything worth owning and everyone else living at subsistence levels. Historically, that has happened to many cultures old enough to exhaust their resources through overpopulation even without technology. Their current embrace of technology will exhaust their more difficult to extract resources. After a short period of prosperity for some, overpopulation supported by technology will return the culture to poverty. Overpopulation is the source of most conflicts and greed insists on growth. To insure survival of the species, natural selection tends to propagate excess births and then eliminates the excess in a remorseless competition. This once drove genetic evolution in the direction of improved adaptations. Thanks to technology’s ability to destroy species and traits without regard to long-term consequences, civilization has little chance without limiting population to sustainable levels while all share in any shortfall in resources. The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. Roosevelt only partly succeeded. WWII created the employment needed to end the depression. Politicians fearful of losing their jobs to a new depression have kept us on a wartime budget ever since. The New Deal support systems were, and are, still needed. The economy has never really been sound. War budgets end up undermining an economy. It is a very inefficient form of socialism. Instead of spending billions on a fighter plane that performs poorly in terrorist conflicts and produces very few fobs, the money should be spent on efficient housing, transportation, education, and the nonpolluting fuels that make efficiency possible. The source of our confusion about these obvious conclusions is our adaptation to the wrong thing, our technology instead of the environment that designed our genome. For that discussion, I refer the reader to my book, Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud.