http://erispandora.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/marxism-2-0-the-dangers-of-the-venus-project/
I've been debating with an anarchist blogger who says that TVP/RBE is Marxism - you can see the exchange through the above link.
I'm only interested in whether the aims of TVP/RBE are desirable and achievable. Labels don't really help. The writer has a tendency to claim that the RBE has certain attributes that s/he finds undesirable, and claims that proponents of RBE actually welcome those attributes. The other possibilities are that our system does not have those attributes, or that it does but we don't find them desirable (in which case we would seek to remove them). And of course there could be a straightforward disagreement over the desirability of the attribute.
Saturday, 7 August 2010
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
Motivation in an RBE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Daniel Pink talks about motivation in this 18 video given in Oxford (England). He shows from scientific research that motivation comes from Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose - being able to work under your own authority, building your expertise and working for something bigger than yourself. It is well worth watching. He cites global concerns like Wikipedia and Google in his presentation.
Daniel Pink talks about motivation in this 18 video given in Oxford (England). He shows from scientific research that motivation comes from Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose - being able to work under your own authority, building your expertise and working for something bigger than yourself. It is well worth watching. He cites global concerns like Wikipedia and Google in his presentation.
Smoking is good for you
Smoking is good for you. It creates jobs on tobacco farms, in cigarette factories, and in advertising and retail. The illnesses it causes need treating in hospitals and this creates work for doctors and nurses, ancillary staff in the hospital, and the people who design and build hospitals. It makes work for the people who make anti-cancer treatments. It even makes work for road sweepers and others dealing with smoking litter, and of course the people who work in industries that make lighters, matches, ash trays etc. Paradoxically, it also benefits the people who work in the 'stop smoking' industry: Those who give advice and hypnosis counselling, those involved in the manufacture of nicotine patches and gum, and those pretend cigarettes that help you give up the real thing. it's all economic growth.
The government, realising the cost to businesses of progressively banning cigarettes, has postponed the enactment of the Tobacco Act passed by the outgoing Labour Government which would see further restriction. (This is not a party political statement - the same paradoxes apply in a monetary economy whoever runs it).
Lunacy. In a sane world, if people really wanted to smoke, provided they knew the risks, no-one would absolutely want to stop them, but if people didn't have to have jobs to get money to access the essentials of life, who would work in an industry that both wants you to smoke and wants you to stop smoking. In a sane world, where only work that has a social return is done, there would be less work to do, and less stress - and less smoking to palliate the stress. (Whilst tobacco can hardly be seen as one of life's essentials, and thus the nutrients to grow it would be prioritised to food, there would be no moral reason for preventing its use.)
In a world without money people wouldn't have to be bonded in slavery paying back loan with interest. No-one would need to sell anything, including tobacco, and therefore no-one would need to push anything through advertising. The only 'advertising' would simply give information about the product/service.
The government, realising the cost to businesses of progressively banning cigarettes, has postponed the enactment of the Tobacco Act passed by the outgoing Labour Government which would see further restriction. (This is not a party political statement - the same paradoxes apply in a monetary economy whoever runs it).
Lunacy. In a sane world, if people really wanted to smoke, provided they knew the risks, no-one would absolutely want to stop them, but if people didn't have to have jobs to get money to access the essentials of life, who would work in an industry that both wants you to smoke and wants you to stop smoking. In a sane world, where only work that has a social return is done, there would be less work to do, and less stress - and less smoking to palliate the stress. (Whilst tobacco can hardly be seen as one of life's essentials, and thus the nutrients to grow it would be prioritised to food, there would be no moral reason for preventing its use.)
In a world without money people wouldn't have to be bonded in slavery paying back loan with interest. No-one would need to sell anything, including tobacco, and therefore no-one would need to push anything through advertising. The only 'advertising' would simply give information about the product/service.
Turkeys voting for Christmas
Andrew Gilligan, writing in The Sunday Telegraph, opined that Civil Servants ("Sir Humphreys") will not co-operate with moves to make the Civil Service more efficient by sacking civil servants. This is so obvious it hardly needs saying, but of course journalists get paid for writing so they write.
Peter Joseph says in 'The Zeitgeist Addendum' (possibly quoting someone else) "Human employment is in direct competition with technical development". May be technical development isn't quite the issue here, but why would Civil Servants or anyone else deprive themselves of a living by cutting out their own jobs in the name of efficiency? We need to decide what things need doing for our race/planet to thrive, and set about getting them done in the most efficient way possible - ie with the least human effort, which means machines and automation. Being deliberately inefficient so as to create work so that people can get money and thereby food is plainly diametrically opposed to being more efficient. We don't need Mr Gilligan to tell us this, but he has to eat too.
Peter Joseph says in 'The Zeitgeist Addendum' (possibly quoting someone else) "Human employment is in direct competition with technical development". May be technical development isn't quite the issue here, but why would Civil Servants or anyone else deprive themselves of a living by cutting out their own jobs in the name of efficiency? We need to decide what things need doing for our race/planet to thrive, and set about getting them done in the most efficient way possible - ie with the least human effort, which means machines and automation. Being deliberately inefficient so as to create work so that people can get money and thereby food is plainly diametrically opposed to being more efficient. We don't need Mr Gilligan to tell us this, but he has to eat too.
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Even the crash makes work - pointless work - for people to do
Prof Niall Ferguson's TV programme, The Ascent of Money is being shown again on TV at the moment. In the first episode, he shows how the poor people of Memphis are loaned money to buy a car, but they can't afford to pay back the loan so the loan is 'restructured' and the car repossessed and put back on sale possibly in the same dealership that sold it to the first hapless customer.
The people restructuring their loans go to see lawyers, who are in effect paid to change a subprime loan that should never have been made by the bankers, into a loan that has some prospect of being paid back. There's also work for auction houses selling the same cars over and over again as they cycle round from individual to bank to auctioneer, to car dealer, to individual ...
Nothing productive, nothing worthwhile, all just games with money, moving cars around physically, nd admin as the 'title' to the car changes hands.
The people restructuring their loans go to see lawyers, who are in effect paid to change a subprime loan that should never have been made by the bankers, into a loan that has some prospect of being paid back. There's also work for auction houses selling the same cars over and over again as they cycle round from individual to bank to auctioneer, to car dealer, to individual ...
Nothing productive, nothing worthwhile, all just games with money, moving cars around physically, nd admin as the 'title' to the car changes hands.
Public vs Private Sector
An article in The Week (10 July 2010) which was presumably quoting from a newspaper columnist - it may be Eamonn Butler in The Guardian - it's unclear - said of the 600,000 people public sector employees forecast to lose their jobs - "with nearly half a million jobs now being advertised, even in these uncertain times, there's plenty of scope for committed people to find work."
The forecast is for 1.3 million jobs to go in both sectors, but the article also quotes the Office of Budget Responsibility's forecast of 2.5 million new private sector jobs by 2014. The article doesn't attempt to decide whether these 2.5 million jobs are new additional - ie whether we are to deduct the 700,000 (1.3 million less 600,000) or it has been deducted.
It's a fat lot of good callibrating all this in "jobs" as if any one job is equal to any other job, and here we have the tacit assumption that private sector jobs are better than public sector ones. "Committed" people in the public sector will of course go out and get a new job in the private sector. What it is they were doing in the public sector or will be doing in the private sector is entirely irrelevant, it would seem.
If a job is pointless - having no social return - and is just there to give someone something to do so they can earn money and thereby access to the necessities of life, the 'sector' that it is in is entirely irrelevant. The point is that we should arrange to have done the things that are necessary for our survival and prosperity as a species by the most efficient means possible, and this means de-coupling work from access to the necessities of life.
The forecast is for 1.3 million jobs to go in both sectors, but the article also quotes the Office of Budget Responsibility's forecast of 2.5 million new private sector jobs by 2014. The article doesn't attempt to decide whether these 2.5 million jobs are new additional - ie whether we are to deduct the 700,000 (1.3 million less 600,000) or it has been deducted.
It's a fat lot of good callibrating all this in "jobs" as if any one job is equal to any other job, and here we have the tacit assumption that private sector jobs are better than public sector ones. "Committed" people in the public sector will of course go out and get a new job in the private sector. What it is they were doing in the public sector or will be doing in the private sector is entirely irrelevant, it would seem.
If a job is pointless - having no social return - and is just there to give someone something to do so they can earn money and thereby access to the necessities of life, the 'sector' that it is in is entirely irrelevant. The point is that we should arrange to have done the things that are necessary for our survival and prosperity as a species by the most efficient means possible, and this means de-coupling work from access to the necessities of life.
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Controlling the resource that is human labour
If you've got more than enough money you can lend the excess out to others and get interest. If you're the big four (Rockefeller, Morgan, Baring, Rothschild), then you've got pretty much all the money between you and everyone else's money is on loan from you.
Even for the hyper rich, controlling money is useless - what you want to control is resources, and that is why resources are accessed through the medium of money rather than by birthright or for free. For most people, the main way to get money is by working and thus the resource that is human labour is controlled - helped along by the fact that the money has to be paid back with interest and the interest can only come from the same place the capital did - ie the big 4, basically.
But by the same mechanism, human labour is working against technological efficiency. Technological efficiency is good on the face of it, but if it deprives you of a job then it deprives you of money and therefore of access to resources, therefore you don't want it, even though it's a good idea on paper.
When this problem is spelt out this simply, the stupidity of it is clear.
If money truly represented actual wealth (ie the resources we have to sustain human life on this planet) as many people think it does, then it would make some kind of sense. But it doesn't. It simply represents debt that most people are working to pay back but which in total can't be paid back because of interest. The amount of money in existence is growing independently of the true growth in the economy - ie increasingly efficiently deriving the resources we need to sustain our lives
Even for the hyper rich, controlling money is useless - what you want to control is resources, and that is why resources are accessed through the medium of money rather than by birthright or for free. For most people, the main way to get money is by working and thus the resource that is human labour is controlled - helped along by the fact that the money has to be paid back with interest and the interest can only come from the same place the capital did - ie the big 4, basically.
But by the same mechanism, human labour is working against technological efficiency. Technological efficiency is good on the face of it, but if it deprives you of a job then it deprives you of money and therefore of access to resources, therefore you don't want it, even though it's a good idea on paper.
When this problem is spelt out this simply, the stupidity of it is clear.
If money truly represented actual wealth (ie the resources we have to sustain human life on this planet) as many people think it does, then it would make some kind of sense. But it doesn't. It simply represents debt that most people are working to pay back but which in total can't be paid back because of interest. The amount of money in existence is growing independently of the true growth in the economy - ie increasingly efficiently deriving the resources we need to sustain our lives
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