Noam Chomsky on the Division of Labor
Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.
Selling out.
Consider a craftsman who builds some beautiful thing. Humboldt says if he does it under external coercion, like pay, for wages, we may admire what he does but we despise what he is. On the other hand, if he does it out of his own free, creative expression of himself, under free will, not under external coercion of wage labor, then we also admire what he is because he’s a human being. He said any decent socioeconomic system will be based on the assumption that people have the freedom to inquire and create — since that’s the fundamental nature of humans — in free association with others, but certainly not under the kinds of external constraints that came to be called capitalism.
Old news: We've been programmed to commoditized our time and “do what we love” instead of doing what pays, then doing what we love in with the rest of our non-fungible time.
Repeating basically Adam Smith, Dewey said, Politics is the shadow that big business casts over society. He said attenuating the shadow doesn’t do much. Reforms are still going to leave it tyrannical.
https://chomsky.info/warfare02/
Thought: Instead of fighting for women to have equal opportunity of work and equal pay, we should be fighting to bring both/all parents home from work (regardless of gender) to spend time with their significant others and families and to choose to work as desired. Let technology increase the efficiency of labor for the benefit of labor rather than enslave labor to technology.
https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/4/17/23667770/child-care-crisis-prek-family-immigration
Thought: Instead of fighting to give black people equal access to land as a wealth-building asset to catch up with the current regime of landed aristocracy, we should be fighting to tax the unearned increment from land so that housing inventory is released back into the market at affordable rents for everyone.