ugh.
we require only a miniscule fraction of the
population to carry out the useful work that is required to make society
function. of the population at large, there are more volunteers than
there are useful positions. the jobs that people do not volunteer to do
are mostly not useful - which is why people don't want to do them. for
the few exceptions, we could rotate the labour around to the point where
we're working a few hours a *year*. keynes suggested a few hours a
week, but the technology is way beyond that point, now. i see no reason
to think this reality of volunteers existing to do meaningful and
necessary work because they want to will ever change.
what
that leaves is millions of people that really have no social value
beyond that which we contrive for them. what's the difference, in terms
of social value, between working as a server or in a supermarket and
living on disability? there isn't one. neither produces anything of any
kind of value. while there's no doubt that a retail worker fits the
definition of "nothing to sell but labour", they don't belong to the
productive class. in terms of actual contribution in terms of producing
something valuable, the reality is that they're just as "parasitic" as
welfare recipients. a really disturbingly high amount of our workforce
exists as an appropriating "middle man" between producers and consumers.
the cashier at the grocery store is stealing profit from the farmer
that made the food, while the sales person at the clothing store is
stealing profit from the workers that made the clothes. so, proletariat
by definition, but not proletariat in substance. a union of service
workers is a bourgeois union.
when you look at the
actual producing class, most of it isn't even on this continent.
technological shifts may be in the process of relocalizing production,
but it will not create new jobs (unless you count robots as people).
so,
there is no longer a concern of the productive v. the unproductive.
almost none of us are actually productive. what we need to do is find a
way to distribute goods fairly amongst the unproductive, and that's not
going to be possible until people come to terms, "en masse", of the
uselessness of their daily existence. that is, we will not revolt until
we understand how unproductive we really are, and how that makes us all
equally entitled to the benefits of technology.