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.
The Politics of Time: Retrieving our lives
(an excerpt from the section TIME from Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit.)
The protagonist of Fernando Trías de Bes’ The Time Seller decides one day to quit his bullshit job.
This concluding section on The (Hawthorne) Club is long. My argument for the significance of leisure-time at the Hawthorne Works as opposed to work-time has, I believe, wide implications. I first contest the assumptions about home faber, or homo laborans, as popularly understood, here.
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.
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.
Our Postwork Future
A Prospect to Win or to Lose?
by Peter Frase
It borders on a disservice to characterize Four Futures: Life After Capitalism as a
primer on contemporary political philosophy, since Peter Frase, the author,
explodes any expectation of pedantry in his prose, or more importantly, in his
approach to political theory, which he calls “social science fiction.”
Pre-industrial European societies, for the most part, didn’t conceive of time in the abstract as a scarce commodity that indicated when to work and when not, but as an elastic measure embedded in social relations. The seasons determined work: as daylight waned in winter so too did toil.