antipope | the success of a social system can be measured by how well it
supports those at the bottom of the pile—the poor, the unlucky, the
non-neurotypical—rather than by how it pampers its billionaires and
aristocrats. By that rule of thumb, western capitalism did really well
throughout the middle of the 20th century, especially in the hybrid
social democratic form: but it's now failing, increasingly clearly, as
the focus of the large capital aggregates at the top (mostly corporate
hive entities rather than individuals) becomes wealth concentration
rather than wealth production. And a huge part of the reason it's
failing is because our social system is set up to provide validation and
rewards on the basis of an extrinsic attribute (what people do) which
is subject to external pressures and manipulation: and for the winners
it creates incentives to perpetuate and extend this system rather than
to dismantle it and replace it with something more humane.
Meanwhile, jobs: the likes of George Osborne
(mentioned above), the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, don't have
"jobs". Osborne is a multi-millionaire trust-fund kid, a graduate of
Eton College and Oxford, heir to a Baronetcy, and in his entire career
spent a few working weeks in McJobs between university and full-time
employment in politics. I'm fairly sure that George Osborne has no fucking idea
what "work" means to most people, because it's glaringly obvious that
he's got exactly where he wanted to be: right to the top of his nation's
political culture, at an early enough age to make the most of it. Like
me, he has the privilege of a job that passes test (a): it's good for
him. Unlike me ... well, when SF writers get it wrong, they don't cause
human misery and suffering on an epic scale; people don't starve to
death or kill themselves if I emit a novel that isn't very good.
When he prescribes full employment for the population, what he's
actually asking for is that the proles get out of his hair; that one of
his peers' corporations finds a use for idle hands that would otherwise
be subsisting on Jobseekers Allowance but which can now be coopted, via
the miracle of workfare, into producing something for very little at
all. And by using the threat of workfare, real world wages can be
negotiated down and down and down, until labour is cheap enough that any
taskmaster who cares to crack the whip can afford as much as they need.
These aren't jobs that past test (a); for the most part they don't pass
test (b) either. But until we come up with a better way of allocating
resources so that all may eat, or until we throw off the shackles of
Orwellian Crimestop and teach ourselves to think directly about
the implications of wasting a third of our waking lives on occupations
that harm ourselves and others, this is what we're stuck with ...
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