Most of Western Europe is considered Socialist by American standards. Some facts so you can compare:
EU (European Union) has mostly free health care, so you don’t have to worry about paying for your health;
Most companies provide 2 weeks paid holidays in winter, 3 weeks in summer;
Pay is between minimum 800 dollars a month (crappy job) to about 2,500 dollars, engineer boss;
40 to 45 hour work week, sometimes overtime. Companies fire, but there must be serious reasons.
So compared to the US I know that in the US:
US you have to pay for your health, or at least many companies no longer offer free health care;
US companies offer very few paid vacation days;
pay is between 800 dollars to 5,000 dollars a month (higher end is larger);
60 hour weeks are not uncommon. Companies fire you when they wish.
So there you have your EU / USA comparison. What do you think ? Who do you think is better off ?
Also it seems like the US is slowly acquiring all the disadvantages that the EU had while maintaining their own disadvantages: for example house rents and house prices have gone sky high just like Europe, well paid work is increasingly hard to find just like Europe, gas prices up, generally slow economic growth etc. It may just be an impression, but I think the US is not what it used to be. Any ideas, am I completely wrong ?
the EU is living in a fairy land world, their system will not survive, it will succumb. Work is hard work constantly, there is no free lunch, no free health care, you must deserve and work for everything. Their Socialism will collapse just like the USSR. You kick people out of a job if you don’t want them anymore, simple as that. They must constantly be threatened of being fired to get them to do anything, man is a lazy piece of crap.
Work doesn’t even exist anymore today. It is mostly a farce, an old cultural structure that keeps on surviving because of cultural inertia. With technology applied to economy there is enough wealth to allow most people to live well with minimumn work. So both the USA and EU will become workless societies ( or the work that is done is a fake job).
the US capitalism is old and no longer valid. It was valid when they were the only rich country, not in a globalized economy. They must introduce the socialistic structures of the EU.
The USA is a unified, homogeneous nation, invoking one constitution, boasting military superiority, muttering one pledge of allegiance, vilifying one president, having one language has official language.
The EU is comprised of almost 27 independent states, speaks 20 official languages. doesn’t have a centralised military force, doesn’t have a common news-paper, its constitution is defunct and the southern states feel underappreciated. It does have Borat, though.
I find it interesting that Norway has been statistically proven to have the smallest infant mortality rate, is considered the best place to raise children, and has A lower crime compared to most of the world. It is not a member of the European Union but runs its own socialist system where even your funeral is paid for. Socialism combined with democracy and a healthy homogenous culture appears to be the key to a successful civilization.
So you have multiple truths. They are all true and all false.
This is the problem with social sciences - economy - politics. They are not a science, you can’t do experiments and have repeatable results. Take for example the concept that some scientists have that we live in an “infinite resource” society because of technology. For example in 40 years from 1920 to 1960 the entire USA was built up with malls, homes, industry, highways etc. And this with much older technology and a smaller population ( and a few wars here and there). The same can be said of Germany and Japan from 1945 to 1965, hence we have huge resources that could produce huge amounts of wealth, hence infinite resources. But then why can’t it be done ? Because of cultural inertia, because of politics, because something always can’t work. So it may be true that work really doesn’t exist, most work is becoming a futile farce, what do lawyers do ? what does the videogame industry produce ? etc. But work is more and more a cultural entity, almost an artistic entity, a behavior, a way of life, it produces mostly symbols, the Japanese salaryman stays at work until midnight ( and so do some Americans) because of its symbolic meaning, not because they are “producing” anything except for hot air and useless meetings.
But any attempt at figuring it out will fail, just like Marxism failed and often the myth of market economy.
So EU and USA are different because work has a different symbolic meaning, hence a different behavior, but the USA buys the Mercedes because the end product is independent of all the hype and crap.
Anyways in the USA and increasingly in the EU, work is becoming polarized, if you could cut it being just good a few years back, it will no longer be enough, now it is becoming either all or nothing, either you have a PHD and work 80 hours a week and walk on water, or you work at McDonalds, the middle ground is decreasing.
Isn’t it incredible how important “working hours” are ? Wasn’t the debate on the french 35 hour week incredible ? Why is time so important ? Because most companies don’t know what to do with their employees, so they invent useless activites, but what is important is that they occupy as much time as possible. I mean with all the scientific research, sociological research, optimizations in production and office processes that have been invented, the most important thing still is time. That is the only thing that can be measured, no company gives a flying **** what people actually do in the time, just as long as the time is put in. And in fact make deadlines shorter and shorter so you are forced to work 24 hours a day, but yes we are advanced, we have advanced economists, sociologists, technologists. What a farce, what a failure. Sometimes time is important on jobs, many times it means nothing at all.
"But any attempt at figuring it out will fail, just like Marxism failed and often the myth of market economy. "
For every example where time is meaningless there is another counter example where it is everything. No amount of reasoning or analysis can figure “work” out because it is a human activity, a cultural activity, and it constantly changes. In the future we may really end up working 20 hours a day on telephones and internet, on jets flying around the world because that is how it may evolve. Then again some say “there has never been so much work that must be done as today” and others say “there has never been so little work that must be done as today”. Again multiple truths, they are both true and false, go figure.
One possible interpretation is to view work and consumption or consumerism as one and the same. We produce information (music, movies, web pages etc.) and consume it at the same time. It is a cycle, an assembly line, you write a program at work or fill in the forms and watch the movie at home, but the cycle is continuous, a vist to the mall is actually work, the division between work and free time is artificial.
One interesting effect of the internet is that INFORMATION (MOVIES, BOOKS, INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTIONS) IS BECOMING WORTHLESS. There is so much available now on the internet (peer to peer networks just makes it worse), alot being created for free (like this crap I write) that in the end we will enter the “WORTHLESS INFORMATION” ECONOMY. Who owns all the intellectual contents of these forums for example ? Free for all, copy and write your college thesis.
Gilles Deleuze claimed that machines only produce production, never an end item or product. In other words, desire is not a lack or need as usually conceived, but rather desire is production. There is essentially no distinction between the car and human, work and rest, because both are machines and form the mechanical process of desiring-production. This desiring-production can never be fulfilled because it is like the “will to power”, it is not a will for power, but something that can never be attained. Desire is a creative force, not a consumption. Capitalism is schizophrenic in so far as it appears boundless and subverts all oedipal structures: state, church, society, etc, are all undone by capitalism. But capitalism must fall back on to a state form in order not to self destruct, whereas the schizophrenic continues to wander. That is why capitalism makes consumption central and you are correct in asserting that the two aspects are one and the same.
The military is the perfect incarnation of useless work and trivial tasks. When we have nothing to do details are arbitrarily made up: fill those sandbags, clean weapons, pick up trash. On the other hand there are times when the chain of command admits there is nothing to do and we just take days off of work or get paid to do nothing at all. Corporations can be much more convincing in this regard because they can fool you with constructing ad campaigns, design work, employee picnics, or just giving you solid useless paper work to make you think you are working.
If work is a culture and not a true output, why not make work constructive? Many civilizations were big on monument building. Entire kingdom communities would often build cathedrals for instance. Are not the elaborate sky scrapers and highways of our cities an instance of building for the sake of building? When we create big cities we must craft assemblages to accomodate certain city needs that were previously unthinkable: parking garages, street lights, overpasses.
It is like saying can an atom understand and see the molecule to which it belongs ? can a neuron understand the brain - thoughts containing it ? So it is with social sciences, a single mind trying to understand millions of minds acting together. But this implies that there is some kind of regularity only we can’t see it; maybe a future supercomputer could see human societies scientifically.
I doubt that societies can be analyzed at all; they are the sum of millions of quirky individual decisions, quirk events, they are not an object of scientific investigation. For example, 20 guys threw down the twin towers and had a huge effect on the world economy and society. A pure quirk of event…
I got a better idea, create huge traffic jams, huge commute times to work , 4 hour commute time so that will keep those people busy all across the American and European cities. cool. And in fact I think the commute times in European cities are worse than in the States, but the EU has more public transportation.
I mean put all the offices right in the middle of big cities this way it will create huge congestions, this is real progress. I mean we can practically send a complete virtual reality across the internet today, but companies still insist on this idiotic model of work, where you have to drive 2 hours to the office show that you are working so the boss can be sure and then another 2 hours back home. What an idiotic model, today we have all the technical know how to do loads of better things with all that time, LIKE ACTUALLY DO SOME USEFUL WORK INSTEAD OF DRIVING, SAVING ON GAS, TRAFFIC, AND DECREASING THE PRICES OF HOUSINGS NEAR THE BIG CITIES WHERE ALL THE IDIOTIC OFFICES ARE!.
All problems today are increasingly systems problems, economic - social and political problems. We have the technical know how but we are still in the dark ages with our mentality, culture, politics.
Well what did Germany or Japan produce from 1965 to 2000 ? what did the USA produce from 1960 to 2000 ? I mean for example the problem of housing should have been solved long ago, housing should be the cheapest thing around in the western world. Why isn’t it ? because the system has feedback loops that prevent the creation of too much wealth; is this intentional ? I think it is intrinsic to the capitalist system, but then why didn’t the USSR solve the housing problem ? Go figure…
The human brain - mind is, contrary to what most people think, the simplest item in the universe. We have a quantized language that breaks up reality into a relatively few tokens, a language that is just a sequence of symbols that are really always saying the same thing (aka nothing really meaningful), a few emotions and a few sensations. That’s all. We also have consciousness that is a monolithic slab of pure existence, it is as if we really live in a small mathematical equation, everything very obvious and determined. Probably one of the most simple items in the universe. We are actually a very simple circuit, a rock is much more complicated and interesting since it has no regularity at all and we humans are pure regularity.
Well time is money. So the future of work will be to just keep people at their desk for 8 hours a day not doing anything at all, just a total non activity - zen style. That is the work that will be done in the future. Why ? because people can’t be given free time, they don’t know what to do with themselves, people are crazy and dangerous so you have to lock them up somehow. They will always choose the worse activities if given too much time, the most violent and perverse because they get bored, especially if they have big idle brains.
Corporations have always known this, that is why they keep on increasing the working hours: as a means of control of people. Alternatively you could design a system with alot of bottlenecks so people remain locked up in traffic jams for hours a day, locked up in lines for basic services, etc. This is a good way to control people also. What is being produced is pure time, the passage of time is what must be produced. But then the universe itself is always working, 10 to the 200 picoseconds of time are contained in the universe ( time times every point in space), but then if you just eliminate people you get an infinite amount of work done, aka infinite resource society.
Interesting theory. So we got reductionism upside down: the assemblage of or sum of complex items create a very simple end item. So molecules which are complex create less complex neurons and millions of neurons create a very simple mind - conscious like item. So our brain - mind - consciousness is one of the simplest items of the universe even though its internal circuits and constituent parts are extremely complex. So then societies are even simpler than minds since they are made up of millions of simple minds. Maybe society is really simple in that it has no logic at all, but you say logic represents simplicity, so then maybe societies have a very simple logic as explained in any sociology book. Or maybe just look at a typical highway and you can see how simple social networks are, they are just a bunch of metal cans (aka cars) rolling down roads.
So physics - the universe - reality goes from very complex ( the smaller the constituent items) to very simple, but with the arrow pointing the other way around of what we usually think. From extremely complex quantum virtual particles to complex atoms to molecules to minds which are the simplest and most obvious structure. Or is it that a complex mind sees itself as simple ?