Work and worth, again.

After spending a lot of time listening to slightly out of date pop hits at work, I have come to the conclusion that it is not in fact "going down for real" and will go so far as to say that Flo-Rida has never done anything "real" in his artistic career.

I talked about work and worth the other day and one of my friends pointed out that there once was a time, not even that long ago, when futurists predicted that technological advancement would mean that the average person had to work much less for the same result, and that this has clearly not become the case.

The surface reasons for that are simple, wages haven't kept up with price of necessities, and even less so with education and housing, combined with an increasing pushback against the idea that the government should take a direct role in caring for it's citizens, means we work more to achieve less, we are more vulnerable to unforeseen emergencies, and more reliant on credit and loans than ever before to accomplish anything financially significant.

This is all intentional of course, and the progress we have made towards the system as it stands now has been done as methodically as if it had been planned for decades.

I am not saying someone sat down forty years ago, or whatever, and mapped out how our particular brand of predatory capitalism will oppress the worker, no one had to really, I have written a number of times that I view our system as a living organism, the "brain" in this case being the oligarchs who run the country, doesn't actually make the day to day decisions any more than you make the conscious choice to pump blood or fight off infection. Once we embraced this system we basically set up an immune system designed to keep the laborer laboring, because to do otherwise would threaten the organism as a whole.

The big lie that we live with, one of them anyway, is that unfettered Capitalism rewards work with reward, we ate that lie up for years and look where we are, all it really does is reward work with more work, it would ideally exist in the 1800's before emancipation, but it doesn't strictly need a slave labor force, just something it can treat similarly, economically speaking that is. Labor saving, or rather output multiplying, advancements are anathema to our brand of Capitalism as it only works when it's labor force is too busy to consider it might have other options and are unable to be financially mobile. So it needs a force that is both too busy to think, and too poor to take time off, to survive.

Who does this benefit? The rich obviously, but the system doesn't really care about individuals, even those at the top, the individuals care about the system of course, they benefit from it in ways that we at or near the bottom can scarcely comprehend, and to be honest those at the top don't fully understand how they benefit, or even that other people don't benefit from the system. The system isn't built to care about the lower classes in it, and doesn't have a way to report that the lower classes aren't happy, why would it? You don't need your blood to be happy, you just need it to be working. So we rely on things like the stock market reports and the monthly employment figures and as long as one goes up and the other down, then it is assumed that the system is working as intended and to the benefit of all involved.
It is extremely easy to fool oneself into thinking that is correct too, I mean the GDP keeps growing and there is more wealth out there than ever before, the fact that the wealth is increasingly more concentrated than ever before is not something reported on the Dow Jones every hour and is easily ignored.

Of course, the system more or less rewarding sociopaths doesn't help either, those at the top largely don't care about those at the bottom and wouldn't even if they knew how their labor was being abused.

So how does it change? Massive widespread action from the bottom up, there are a number of people in the system who are increasingly aware of how it works, or doesn't, for the vast majority, The Toddler is one of those and ran on changing the system in addition to his promise to eradicate anyone with skin that isn't white or orange. Of course, he is one of the sociopaths who benefit most from the system and it is clear he will do literally nothing to fix things. Bernie Sanders was a bit more believable, as were large parts of the Democratic platform this year, however things like raising the minimum wage, student debt forgiveness, and employment programs don't really change the system, it perhaps works a little less efficiently for those at the top, but the changes would likely be minuscule and those at the bottom would only notice marginal, if that, improvements to their standard of living, for example if I started making fifteen dollars an hour and didn't have to worry about my student loans, I would still be paying 75% or so of my income towards rent and utilities and would be almost as unlikely as before to be able to do anything socially mobile with myself.

The only solution, other than Full Communism Now, which I suspect would be terrible, is a Universal Basic Income tied to the cost of housing in a per county, or neighborhood, basis. Removing the worry about how to keep a roof over ones head and staying warm means that people then have a real choice between free time to do things, working for money that actually has a chance of making real improvements in their life, or a combination of the two.

Suddenly the idea of labor saving, or output multiplying, technological advances becomes desirable again from a systemic point of view, with fewer people choosing to be in the labor force, it only makes sense to replace that with automation or other upgrades, and for the individual those same advances make doing things like creating art, or research, or starting a business something that is actually within their grasp.

The idea that worth is found through work is one that belongs to a time when work could actually lead to something worth being proud of, an actual indicator of progress towards a goal, rather than treading water. Treading water keeps you alive sure, but you still don't get out of the ocean unless you swim or someone rescues you, and you get tired pretty quickly...

UBI is not something we are likely to see anytime soon, it shatters the building blocks of our current system and despite the fact that it probably would lead to unprecedented economic development, that development would not be concentrated enough to fit the needs to the system as it stands, which requires a massive underclass working to support a few hundred billionaires. I'll settle for modest improvements that we have seen actually have a chance, and perhaps one day, as more of those improvements roll out and lives improve even a little, we'll get the chance to really make change. I mean, to abuse a metaphor, one plank of wood doesn't help the person treading water that much, but it keeps them afloat a little bit longer, and with enough of them you can build a boat.

Admittedly that is tough while at sea, but come on, it's a metaphor.