The Employment Machine Stops

Following from E.M.Forsters short I'm beginning to see the nature of the employment machine having made a stand against it in June. It is particular revealing at the moment because the machine is in big trouble anyway. I've been "unemployed" before (like when I was born ;-) ) but this time it's a full study in contrast to having been employed for almost 10 years and is being backed by a lot of research which I aim to compose into some form of book/novel.

What is emerging to my mind is that it really is a kind of "God delusion" of its own. You only need to hear the pronouncements of politicians to see that they are the most deluded on this subject.

Apparent as the economy slows we need to spend more to make more jobs so that we can work more. What if we don't want to work more? Can't we use the same logic to say that if we spend less we won't need to work so much?

But we got a society hooked on credit and over spending so clearly we do want all this stuff. But we have all the credit because our pay cheques aren't in yet and that is because we don't work hard enough. So depends how you look at it - we like spending, but we don't like working 20hrs a day to pay for it all.

It shows up other absurdities. Each year the economy becomes 4% more efficient (stats I got from some European government annual employment publication). That is what gave my last boss such a headache - each year we just got better at what we did. Normally they promote you to keep you bad at what you do, but the company only had 8 people so they were stuck. Instead the bosses had to outlaw efficiencies to keep the work rate down using the ISO9001 to fix inefficient work practices. Layers of management were also introduced to slow down communicated and increase paperwork, checking and delays. It was straight out of Parkinson's criticism of the UK civil service. It reminds me also of the economist Thorstein Veblen who argued that economy is the process by which human productivity and creativity is stifled to maintain the possibility of class. It sounds absurd until you actually see it happening.

Reading Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" I can further believe it. In something like Smiths own words (but I've not the quote with me at the moment) the division of labour will reduce labourers to the very lowest that they can possibly be. Meaning that the reduction of labour to small repetitive tasks will atrophy people to the state of vegetable existence. He thought the resulting wealth would stimulate the arts and compensate in leisure time for this unfortunate side effect.

There is so much to write I could keep going and do the book - so I'll stop here. Anyway back to 4%: if things are becoming more efficient why do we still do basically the same hours work per week as we did 10,000 years ago? This is a very hard statistic to calculate (this one is crudely based upon work on foraging communities I've a lot more work in this direction). But, if you think about it there are only so many hours in a day and we would be hard pressed to work much harder than we do!

One answer is that we consume so much more. There's a limit to how much we can eat (altho in America they are pushing that one!). So it must be the gadgets we own. There are only so many clothes we can own, tables, cars, houses, TVs, phones ... Some people do try and earn and spend as much as they can. And when you can't buy any more you can start buying designer stuff which is made in the same factories just sold much more expensive. Society really has reached about the limit of consumerism I think. I'm sure it can be pushed further. What we need is another indispensible gadget like the mobile phone that we simply can't live without and we can start a new industry and put ourselves back to work - for a bit until efficiency makes us redundant again. I wonder how far this can go.

Maybe we've found out since the "unbelievable" economic growth experienced in the last 10 years has been just that unbelievable - it was all a lie. The growth in UK has been 80% in the public sector. I don't know if that is true in US. That is The government made the jobs! Easy credit has created a bubble that has enabled us to keep making jobs for ourselves without having to actually pay. The money in our pockets has been flowing from the bottomless pit of banks via credit cards into shops and into our wages. It's all an illusion.

What the world needs is an economic system that actually factors in freedom from the economic machine because it simply can't keep creating jobs forever, while at the same time becoming more efficient at 4% a year.

And ignoring all this said, it is personally much more obvious. Why do we spend so much time at "work". Can't we do all the things we do at "work" in our free time? We spend huge amounts of time outside the machine but we probably are so deluded that we don't notice.

Sleep is non-economic. Yet the alarm is set by the economy.
The toilet is non-economic.
Sex is non economic. Except for those who want to pay for what is free to everyone else.
Eating and digestion are non-economic.
Breathing is non-economic.
Love for our parents and family is non-economic.
Love for our fellow people is non-economic.
DIY is non-economic. Except for the things we get from the shops - unless our mate can get them for us.
Gardening is non-economic. ditto.
Playing a musical instrument ...

I can go on endlessly. Yet despite it's small involvement in life we are dominated by money, the work we do to get it, and the things we can buy with it. The politicians talk like the economy was an important part of our lives - its almost irrelevant!

It can never happen - this is just an exercise to escape the delusion - but everything that everyone does as part of the "economy" could be done in our free time. We would not have any money from looking after the old person for a day, or attending an accident in the street, or teaching a kid to count, or planting a row of potatoes so we wouldn't know if some people were just sitting around doing nothing while we did all the hard work - but actually that isn't the point of work it is! The point of work is the looking after the old person, the attending the accident, ... All this could be done as part of our lives, as the things we do as members of our communities and for our fellow people for no other reason than what else is there to do but hang out with our fellow people and live together? This is life.

Put the specks of economy on and you become a politician and suddenly it all changes. You get absurd claims like we need to spend more to make jobs and you won't even realise what a clown you look. Problem is most of us don't see what clowns the politicians and economists look because we too are under the veil of economy. Down the job centre believing that we need a "job" to get "money" before we can "live" as though they handed out "life" at the job centre or over the counter of the high street.

It is a very long and complicated story how we got into this Alice in Wonderland topsy turvey world here in the west. There is no way back now, we have got to learn to live with the machine we built. The sad thing is that the rest of the world is slowly being drawn into it. Enclosure acts in India forcing farmers off the land they've occupied quite sustainably for hundreds is not tens of thousands of years onto the dole queues is the start of the upside down world where we look to politicians and economies to give us life - when the blood pumps through my veins not theirs!