For Labor Day, a few links to share

Labor day, when bankers and lawyers stay home and nurses and stockers and truck drivers just keep on laboring away. The hypocrisy of modern American “capitalism” is disgusting. So instead of ranting, I’m going to just share a few links to promote a few thoughts.

Let’s start by tipping our hats to the late and amazing thinker David Graeber. If you don’t have all his books, you should. And read them carefully. From 2013’s esay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant, “In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.” Just click the link up there and download the article. Then get the book he wrote a few years later.

Maybe a soundtrack would help? Thom Dunn’s cover of “Connolly was There” is just right for Labor Day - and May Day.

Meanwhile, on the topic of BS jobs, I just stumbled on a lovely meditation on labor and class set entirely in the video game Red Dead Redemption (of which I know nothing). “Does capitalism make Non-Player Characters of us all?”

Those of you who actually labor are probably working today, on Labor Day. The management and rentier class are mostly out and about enjoying a day off with pay, and the most reprehensible are posting happy bullshit affirmations on their social media to status signal to everyone that they have no anxiety about the future of our country, the climate, or even basic civil rights.