Collective Effort
How much labor - work - activity is serialized, is additive, adds up to something, adds up to more than its single parts today ? Not much, and in fact there is a very precise, but hidden as usual, invisible, intentionality to create a lot of work that doesn’t add up to anything, but in many cases subtracts down from what is already present. For example, wars in general subtract down from what is present by breaking things up and in fact the US spends billions upon billions in a kind of collective effort that on one side adds up to a power relationship and statement of status, but on another side breaks up material constructions.
Why is this so ? Why is there such a great aversion and brainwashing today for anything that can possible add up to something more, for anything that creates “common wealth” and more for the “common good” ? To atomize and divide people from each other, to create a psychological and social environment where people are constantly in conflict with each other, instead of building things together, instead of building a better world for the “common good”.
If work or everyday activity was not geared to useless conflicts, to fights essentially, to much ado about nothing we could create a huge amount of wealth for everyone.
Some examples of work that doesn’t add up to anything can be millions of lawyers, and eventually billions to regulate all kinds of conflicts based on all kinds of ever increasing complex laws, thousands of new imagined (and therefore invented as in a self fulfilling prophesy) sicknesses and therefore drugs that subtract down from an already fragile person and conflicting and conflicted minds and social patterns of behavior. Like if you are not fighting others you end up fighting yourself, or maybe you end up fighting both yourself and others in a never ending infinite recursion. What else ? Maybe millions of psychologists trying to fix up broken minds and brains, breaking them up even more and therefore needing even more drugs, psychologists, new sicknesses, and psychologists themselves needing other psychologists (and lawyers themselves needing lawyers) creating millions of “new jobs”, millions of “new, advanced, service economy jobs”, that are oh so needed, and oh so useful.
But if you stop one minute to really think: a company or entity or economic unit that has for example 100 workers, each working 8 hours a day for something that adds up, for something where each effort is adding up and helping to construct something larger, with all the know how and technology available, how much could really be produced ? A mind boggling amount of wealth and well being for everyone.
Imagine 8 hours of work of just 1 person in that company that is really used completely for a precise sequence of actions, physical and information manipulations that are actually really constructing, that are precise and efficient (just like building a Skyscraper or in manufacturing processes, or in SPACE PROGRAMS) instead of wasting it on fluff, office politics, fighting each other and oneself and everything. Now multiply it by 100 workers, each really working, as in adding up, as in serializing effort, as in a collective effort that is building something larger than the parts.
In fact, manufacturing is a kind of collective action but there is a tendency to consider it as some kind of bad activity, something not worthy, something that must be hidden as opposed to wall street hustlers, doctors making millions, house flipping, financial “services” and “products” (nothing more idiotic on earth, financial products as if they are an entity and not one giant mega ripoff of everyone against everyone).
Science and Technology are in a sense serialized activities, add up to something, although the way that people want to apply it becomes a theater of huge never ending conflicts (also thanks to the crappy cumbersome “democratic process” where everyone wants to express their opinion always against everyone else in a never ending fight that just dissipates effort and energy), atom energy yes or no, global warming yes or no, etc.
Now imagine a society with millions of workers all (but even a very small percentage, even maybe just 10% would already create a mind boggling amount of free wealth in the end) putting effort into serialized, collective actions, where things add up.
But the present economic system along with all of its ideology and brainwashing has created and wants to create a completely atomized, divided society of everyone against everyone, millions of useless jobs that just add to the conflicts, that create ever more useless jobs (like all the office idiots responding to blackberries and creating useless meetings, etc.) instead of large, ambitious public - private projects that add up to the wealth of everyone.
Facebook is a good example: get millions of people to waste their time on so many single events, on so many short sentences and thoughts (the shorter the better, long - complex thoughts tend to add up to something, are serialized) on all activity that doesn’t add up to anything.
That is why I insist on large scale projects that add up, Skyscrapers, Rockets to Mars, High Speed Trains, BUSes, but the amount of brainwashing most of the world has undergone against anything that serializes and adds up effort is way too great for any possible hope that any of these projects ever take off, especially in the USA.
Obama, should have said “By the end of this decade, by the year 2020 we will put a Man on Mars, we meaning only the effort of the USA, and we will create all the companies and entities (public and private, as in private capitalist corporations that can make profits on it too) that are needed to do this, to advance civilization”.
He didn’t say this, he said, we need “more entrepreneurs” and “small businesses”, we need more “innovation” and “education” (never explaining what on earth these abstract words mean, and they mean nothing, it is an excuse to not propose anything at all but fluff), more “flexibility” (which means hire and fire, always changing jobs and kinds of jobs so any possible serialization of effort, effort that adds up, is killed from the outset), etc.
This is the battle ground: serialized - collective effort that adds up, or an atomized, divided society of lawyers, doctors, hustlers, etc. that subtract down.