How to end domestic servitude
Today I found myself in the local supermarket counting the number of shelf feet displaying home cleaning products. The total came to 60 feet, four shelves tall. I then walked over to the shelves with kitchen utensils and gadgets – 25 feet.
Abigail Susik’s recent essay devoted to Silvia Federici’s work delved into her evocative response to an inquiry about threats to social reproduction. She approached the subject in a wholistic manner:
I call it a war—a war on people’s reproduction. Wherever you turn your eyes you can see that.
Western Electric’s sponsored leisure activities for the workforce
After writing the text below (the excerpt from the Section called The Club) I came across a Hawthorne Club brochure (n.d. but certainly post-WWII) which described the organization of the Club and its many leisure-time activities.
A section from Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An argument for the Utopian Spirit
Witnessing a murmuration can be startling and pleasurable. Starlings, an otherwise unremarkable little bird, when amassed in the hundreds, create a fantastic airborne display of agility and coordination that seems to defy the limits of natural phenomenon.
My parents were children of Polish immigrants. They came of age in Chicago in the early 1920s and got married in the mid-30s. So by the time they got married they had both been working for close to 20 years. My father had numerous jobs from chauffeur and car mechanic (in the 20s an indispensable skill) to carpenter and picked up numerous other skills along the way.
Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An argument for the Utopian Spirit.
Climate catastrophe and civilization collapse (CC2) is not the future. It is our reality today. We are at the beginning of a calamity that will only get worse, if we are to believe the scientists who have been warning us of this disaster for many decades.
Berkeley’s Missing Link Bike Cooperative – A closure in the context of a larger cooperative vision
by Bernard Marszalek
The Berkeleyside story on Missing Link going out of business after 50 years
INTRODUCTION
Missing Link Bike Co-op – founded 50 years ago – was a Berkeley institution much like the Cheese Board Collective.
A brief encounter with a Classical Land in early Spring, 2016
Excerpts from a Journal
Athens
Tourists in Greece, for the most part, are isolated from the reality of the “Crisis” – as the Greeks refer to their current desperate economic situation.
One summer during my youth I was hired to work the assembly line at a television manufacturer. This was in the days when America had a manufacturing base and actually produced consumer goods.
Comment (slightly revised) to Uneven Earth (Oct. 23, 2020) posting titled: “Make life, not work: democratizing, decommodifying and remediating existence”
Nov.8, 2020
This document, Work: Democratise, Decommodify, Remediate, let’s call it DD&R) was produced, I believe, by a consort of young women economists and as such it has some value as a welcome discordant note in an otherwise monotonous economic chorus of mainly male sycophants of neo-liberalism.