Unemployment as an ideal
When I was a kid, there was a radio show that started every day with a “good morning” to unusual occupations like “washing machine nut screwdriver” and “crosswalk painter”. It was funny, but even then it bothered me.
Think that someone, somewhere, gets paid to mold plastic pikachus. It’s a profession that could disappear from the face of the Earth and no one would miss it. Even kids who want plastic pikachus wouldn’t mind, after all, these toys just wouldn’t exist and kids would turn their attention to some other plastic crap.
Therefore, why should a human being as intelligent, as curious, as creative, and shrewd as any other person, throw away all these traits and devote most of his life and healthier years to injecting yellow plastic into a mold? Why does society require someone to dispose of their life in this way?
“Because society doesn’t care”, one might say, but that’s a lie. Society cares. Society cares so much that it considers it essential that every (poor) human being in the world has a job, however irrelevant it is.
In a society shaped by work, having a job is essential. It’s required. It’s what defines you as a human being. It doesn’t matter your hobbies, your tastes, or how you use your knowledge and creativity in your free time. It matters how you earn money.
Machines emerge every day that make human work easier, while we condemn millions of people to mediocre and unnecessary jobs, such as sweeping streets and washing dishes.
Imagine if, by inventing the mechanical loom, all workers in the textile sector started to work less? Imagine thousands of farmers, who when purchasing tractors, could cross their legs and enjoy the landscape while these powerful machines do the heavy lifting.
Of course, that’s not what happens. All the benefit derived from these inventions, and thousands of others, is privatized and capitalized. The owners of these machines become even richer and the workers become unemployed.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a society in which the benefits of inventions were collective? Where the emergence of every new technology and technique was celebrated by everyone, with the immediate reduction of work?
More free time for more people to do whatever they want also means more people dedicated to creating and inventing new techniques and technologies that will set even more people free. A virtuous cycle.
Our society could aim to replace all mediocre jobs with better machines and better solutions. Instead of a society that dreams of having employees, a society without employees. As Bob Black emphasizes in “Abolition of Labour”, we face unemployment, but it should be an ideal.
Recently I published the science fiction series Dandelion (only available in Portuguese). The first book, Hanging Gardens, deals precisely with the tragedy of a future society, which has achieved so many advances, but which has never surpassed the perpetuation of work. In the plot, unemployed people take to the streets to fight for jobs. Because that’s what people do. Alienated, they do not demand equity and the end of a caste society, they ask for jobs.
We were well tamed.
