As the United States developed revolutionary laborsaving technologies during the 20th century, some people worried.
Although advances in manufacturing and agriculture vastly reduced the manpower needed to produce the same amount of goods, there was a problem. All this technology, it was thought, would give humans a tremendous amount of leisure time. How would people of the future cope with it?
Would any rational person have predicted that we would respond to a reduction in necessary work by simply creating unnecessary work for ourselves — and end up working just as much as if the technological advances had never happened?
As a matter of common sense, that prospect seems unthinkable. But our capitalistic system, which cherishes greed as its primary impetus, never allowed the fruits of those advances to stray far from the owners of the technology. The latter simply fired workers and kept the profits.
The principle of the American economy is that the rich get richer by keeping the benefits of progress, while the rest of us simply try to feed off the scraps that they are willing to throw our way. Work is no longer a way to extract a living off the land, but rather a way to try to pry some money out of the tight hands of the American aristocracy.
And the only way to do that is to do work that will help them get even richer.
The wealthy averted our potential crisis of coping with too much leisure time by simply keeping things essentially the same for us. We still work the same hours for the same pay. In America today, we still either produce or die.
We must produce something, anything, even if it’s not needed — or else we don’t have the right to live. Income supports are attacked as inducing laziness. Only those who are productive are considered deserving of life’s necessities.
It seems idiotic that as a nation, we frantically continue to work at the same rate we used to, even after we already have what we need. And it seems reckless to waste enormous amounts of electricity and natural resources in order to do that work.
So why must we do it? Because an enormous amount of the national wealth is tied up by a small percentage of our citizens, making it unavailable to those who need it. It would be against American principles to share the benefits of production. And as technology drives down the number of workers needed for any given enterprise, those of us who are left out are simply asked to find another way to make money.
Today, American workers are actually in a position where they must persuade people to buy what they don’t need, just so they can keep their jobs. Many lives depend on producing the most worthless, trivial things. And those lives are also tied to the degradation of the environment that results from all this unnecessary work.
The facts related to these points have been published countless times by a multitude of sources, and it would be a crime against brevity to waste precious space in this newspaper repeating them.
But as happy as autoworkers are, for example, when car sales in the United States go up, they’re only working for scraps of the money that goes into the industry. They’re simply fighting for survival, and what benefits them in thousands of dollars benefits the owners and executives in millions.
With the advent of globalization, our nation’s wealthy found they could make better profits by sprinkling even more meager scraps on workers in countries like China and Malaysia. So now we have to stop complaining about exploitation of American workers — and start begging to be exploited again. These days you’re lucky if an employer chooses to exploit you rather than someone overseas.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan — the most powerful banker in the world — recently cautioned Congress not to succumb to the evil temptations of “protectionism.” American jobs should not be protected from going overseas, he warned, because it would lead to disaster for our nation’s bankers — I mean citizens.
Senators asked him what he suggested displaced workers should do. His answer: go back to school and train for a better job. Make yourself more competitive in the job market.
Competitive against whom? Other Americans, of course. Greenspan’s solution is that we simply fight harder amongst ourselves for what scraps are left.
The man is a genius.
Brian O’Keefe can be contacted at [email protected]