Chloe

My grand-daughter is hopelessly doing tele-interviews with robots in the vanishingly small chance that she might get a job

Which set me thinking.  With all this unemployment, furloughs, shut downs and restrictions, there is very little that we actually need that we can’t get.

The people who are in the supply chains through which we get what we need are employed; everyone else is unemployed, ergo, mostly we can perfectly well do without what they would be employed to carry out.

What they do - their outputs - are not necessary to our survival, it is that their wages are necessary - necessary to generate the purchasing power to buy for all the things that we don’t actually need, that in turn provides employment and wages to those producing even more stuff we don’t actually need. And of course generating the profit that float the enterprise for who they work, and provide the government with the taxes they need to run the country.

In short we have the most part of the population spending the greater part of the short time they going to live doing things that are often mind-dumbingly boring that are largely unnecessary, And spending a large part of the remainder of their waking hours commuting to the office or wherever to do all those unnecessary jobs, solely in order to earn wages and generate profits.  

So then I read or hear, once we are over the corona-virus scare life can return to normal; and I think, “is there not some better system to which we might choose to return.

So I turn to my marxist journals and websites and I read through reams of what is wrong with the present set up, and what a better world would look like.  And what I find is world with no sexism. no racism. no intolerance, all of which though admirable in themselves are irrelevant to the question of how we might construct a better world in which all work would be that which is necessary and pleasant to do. (William Morris)