In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell sums up perfectly the insanity of capitalism, this paragraph in particular
In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell sums up perfectly the insanity of capitalism, this paragraph in particular
In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
Yes, with three caveats:
In the end, you would only substitute the tyranny of the bourgeoise for the tyranny of interventionism
The funny thing about asking, who watches the watchers? is that people seem to take that as license to not watch anything. But I'll give you an answer that's less glib than the question.
Overwork is arguably the biggest cause of political disengagement. When you're working two jobs and barely scraping by, you don't have time or energy to understand what's really going on. If you read the entire essay, Russel also points out that overwork pushes people to passive forms of leisure—he was writing a hundred-odd years ago, so he talked about the cinema and the radio. But the passivity of engagement with the world is much broader than that; it also causes passive engagement with world affairs, i.e., news as entertainment.
It should be all of us watching the watchers, but we don't have time or energy.
As for your first two questions, you're effectively conceding that industrial work is slavery.
OK, let's suppose that all governments are oppressive and all work is slavery. How do we stop being slaves to our work and stop being oppressed by our governments?
The Marxist-Leninist real world examples have only switched out one kind of slavery/oppression for another. I am not asking who watches the watchers as any kind of excuse or glibness. It is an honest question
Ensuring that people have good working conditions and they're not exploited is actually the opposite of tyranny.
Absolutely. But is working a half-day for full wages a decent working condition that should be provided to all workers? And again, who is going to enforce that rule?
Yeah, while I am sympathetic to the point, this thought experiment is easily observable to not be anywhere close to how the world actually functions.
But yes, Capitalism is functionally a manifestation of various forms of material and labor scarcity. It is trivial to demonstrate that markets break down at both scarcity extremes.
Yeah, that adds some spice to the discussion! How does the scarcity of pins and labor fit into the scenario? And how does the perspective change as we enter a post-scarcity world?