by Jan Lundberg

Working is almost always in service of the rich, in order to make a surplus beyond oneís own needs. It can be claimed that the poor benefit from the work as well, as in the distribution of "crumbs" or services available to one and all, such as prison and the military. What a coincidence: it is the non-rich who are in prison and the armed "services."

Public education, cheap oil, and other dreams
If one believes war is perfectly acceptable and necessary as a cost of civilization, then the pacifists must be anti-civilization. Be that as it may, there are other services or utilities that supposedly benefit everyone, such as educational institutions. But the fact is that these schools basically train workers, and the main major is wryly called "upward mobility."

With the end of cheap oil as of the 1970s, the easy entry into the middle class and upper-middle class no longer exists. Work has gotten longer, and few households can afford anymore a stay-at-home spouse or parent. It should be understood that cheap oil cannot be deemed as existing today when so many hidden costs and subsidies mask its real adjusted price.

People were taught a few decades ago that working people would eventually average a 20-hour work week. That bubble of propaganda and sci-fi hooey has been burst, but almost no one has reacted. The reason people increasingly doubt "progress" is that they know resources have been depleted, the land is increasingly all fenced or paved, and people have had to work more and more in order to buy less and less. The gap between the rich and poor has gotten to this: the U.S.ís top executive class earns 450 times the amount an average worker makes. Government is not about to change this relationship, and people arenít going to fight back until they feel hurt badly enough.

Alternative "working"
Today the "need" to work is pervasive, and understandably so. One needs food, one needs to earn money to go to college, one needs to pay for transportation, etc. And one who does not work enough, when that person, for example, has a child to support, is a person widely considered wrong or bad.

But those realities do not mean that there are not ways of cutting back on mind-numbing work thatís inefficient or too favorable to the boss. Nor does the necessary aspect of work today mean that the current system involving work is the only way to have a culture or society. How is it that sometimes there are no bosses, as in todayís affinity groups that, for example, save a stand of trees threatened by industry? Suffice to say that much of what is widely assumed today is questionable.

Community service can become an entire alternative system to capitalism and other unfair schemes that do not lift everyone to a better standard of living. By "standard of living," we should not consider only material measurements such as the proportion of the citizenry hooked up to electricity. And we must include other species, with whom we share the Earth, as the community. A standard of living that values any harm to the rest of lifeóthe environmentóis an unsustainable sham. Poor peoples may have no dishwashing machines, but spend more time with family. This does not benefit the owners of banks, so the International Monetary Fund undertakes to remake local economies to export the wealth or to create the demand and infrastructure to import dishwasher machines.

"Everyone Can Cut Potatoes" is the name of an essay by Solomon DeMontigny, a do-it-yourselfer activist and performing artist in Arcata, California. He started a bicycle-powered delivery service for his baking business. In his essay about everyone being able to help prepare a meal, his point was that we can cooperate and voluntarily have fun, while providing for our common needs.

If that sounds Utopian, he is at least right in keeping with village life where traditions hold sway and the society is healthyóand people act as one for the greater good. Solomon works, but he knows that it is so wasteful, when people are not voluntarily contributing freely if they are not liberated from forced labor. And in his regular job the learning period did not last long. He is now "sacrificing" in Americorps in order to attend Dellí Arte, the renowned theater school in Blue Lake.

A shining example of working for community instead of a wage is an activist in southern California devoting his life to spreading Permaculture and learning about sustainable living. He is taken care of even in this cold, cash-and-carry economy, because of his helpfulness, positive attitude in sharing his skills, and contributions to the community such as putting on seminars for the public.

Better than work
Many works have been written on community and anarchy, and many studies have been done on traditional societies whose peoples have been indigenous thousands of years. Analysis of the "work" factor has not been neglected. But almost never do the grade schools or the bastions of employmentónotably the mainstream pressóinform us that hunters and gatherers spend only a few hours a day a few days a week gathering food and setting up shelter. [Our Magazine Resources section has some references, but books are better on traditional cultures, and abound at libraries and used-book stores.]

One can easily confirm that there was no equivalent of "work" in languages separated from the dominant civilization of work. It is true that being a hunter and gatherer is not possible almost everywhere due to trashed ecosystems and too many humans. But this does not mean we should just keep on doing what we are doing in order to shop. There is work but there is the alternative form of it which could prevail again: community service (not the court-imposed community service). People can also maximize personal relationships for sharing and needs; regimented service would not necessarily be in service of the community if itís a concentration camp. The IRS wishes to tax bartering, but itís hard to track. Not shopping so much is a threat to the economy as dominated by the rich.

So, when some service to the community is necessary, especially in order to secure food from damaged land that must first be depaved, for example, we need not call that work. It is rather "getting food together"ócommunitying!    

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Economic news: Young job seekers get squeezed out
Younger workers who once expected to ride the wave from the economic surge are instead taking some of the biggest tumbles in the recession. The trend alarms economists because youth unemployment can hamper income and advancement later on. The jobless rate for those ages 20 to 24 hit 9.6% last month, while those 16 to 19 are seeing unemployment rates topping 16%, according to the Department of Labor. Thatís far above the national jobless rate of 5.8%. - FROM USA TODAY, JAN. 28, 2002

Editorís note: In Daniel Quninnís My Ishmael, it is explained that a vast labor surpluses resulted many decades ago when young people went right into the job market. So, after society observed persistent and growing unemployment in a rising population, what formerly sufficed as compulsory education no longer lasted long enough. Therefore the age was moved to keep the youth in school and away from competing for too few jobs. Then once again the time was extended, leaving us with 12 grades. For a few decades now the youth have been told that in order to get a decent job, still more school is necessary, although the university-level training is seldom directly applicable to jobs.

In reality, the amount learned in 12-years plus at school can be learned in a much shorter time period, but the youth are being kept away from their homes (why?), kept off the streets (one can guess why), and out of the employment line. The latest statistics reveal why.

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