Fuck work
Posted by Nick Phillips on March 14 2008, 07:25 » Uploaded 14/03/08 09:21

An interestingly hard-hitting rant for a US newspaper (the protestant work ethic and the social stigma over welfare are certainly more pronounced in the states than in the UK).

A few choice excerpts:

Doing More With Less
In defense of creative loafing

By Franklin Schneider
Washington City Paper March 5, 2008

I was so understimulated [in my full-time job] that I needed sensation, any sensation. Heroin would have been ideal, but most of the time I settled for Taco Bell. Same with intermittent shopping sprees. When you’re miserable, you buy things. It’s the American Way; whatever your problem, there’s a product that can solve it. Have a bad day? Buy some jeans! Just realize that your best years are a distant memory? Buy a big car! This is why a lot of people who make six figures still live check to check—perhaps this 50-inch plasma screen/Louis Vuitton bag/waterfront condo will make my soul hurt less?

But once you’re off the hamster wheel, you find you no longer need to overcompensate. You don’t need consumable solutions because your essential problem—your life sucked—is solved.

[...]

Given a choice between getting a check every week for doing nothing and getting a check every week for flushing 40 hours of the prime of their lives down the toilet, they chose the latter. I mean, what kind of self-hating, masochistic Protestant bullshit is that?

Not only do I feel no guilt whatsoever about sucking from the state’s teat, I feel that I’m absolutely entitled to it. First of all, the employer that fired me pays for half of my unemployment, and fuck them.

Second of all, it’s really my money in the first place. See, your employer never pays you what you’re worth—there’s a surplus, some of which goes toward overhead and various other business costs, and the rest of which is kept as profit. (This is what Marx was referring to when he talked about “exploitation of the workers.”) A tiny fraction of this surplus—which, again, has been skimmed off of my labor—is put into a government-mandated account to go toward unemployment checks for fired workers. So yeah, it’s my money. Give it back. And since most people’s lives are so devoid of meaning that they’d rather go directly into another shitty job than be forced to confront the sheer emptiness of their existence, most of that money never even gets distributed.

 

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=34682

» No comments received for this post.

[Please note: posts which consist solely of material copied from other sites won't be archived, as there is little point. The "permanent" post option is for material which isn't stored anywhere else].