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Money, Work, and Mass Extinction: Transformational Degrowth and The
MONEY, WORK, AND MASS EXTINCTION: TRANSFORMATIONAL DEGROWTH AND THE JOB GUARANTEE A DISSERTATION IN Economics and Social Sciences Consortium Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by BJ UNTI B.A., Portland State University, 2006 Kansas City, Missouri 2020 MONEY, WORK, AND MASS EXTINCTION TRANSFORMATIONAL DEGROWTH AND THE JOB GUARANTEE BJ Unti, Candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2020 ABSTRACT This dissertation is composed of three independent essays. Each essay traces social and ecological crises to capitalist institutions and proposes how a job guarantee (JG) can be adapted to resolve them in the context of degrowth. The first essay focuses on the relationship between economic growth and ecological destruction. In a monetary production economy, there is a trade- off between employment and the environment. To reconcile social and ecological goals it is necessary to decouple employment from growth. A JG makes this possible. The outlines of a simple two-sector model show how a JG can be used to maintain full employment and facilitate a reduction in aggregate output. The JG offers individuals a way to opt out of monetary production and thus, presents a pathway to fundamentally transform the economy. The second essay considers the diverse variety of strategies and policies that have emerged in the degrowth movement. These are classified into two categories. Top-down approaches insist that centralized policies relying on government control are necessary. Bottom- up approaches insist that transformation must stem from the decentralization of power and the expansion of individual autonomy. -
S688p6 1920.Pdf
-- A Political Guide for the Workers Socialist Party Campaign Book 1920 Prebared by the Department of Labor Research, Rand School of Social Science A. L. Trachtenberg, Director Published by The Socialist Party of the United States 220 South Ashland Boulevard CHICAGO, ILL. 1920 CoPYnIoAT 1940 BY Tm SOCIALIST PARTY OF TAE UNITED STATES CHICAGO, ILL. Printed in the U. S. A. 7 FOREWORD %F This little book is the joint work of a number of con- tributors, which has been compiled under the general editorship of Alexander Trachtenberg, Director of the Department of Labor Resewch of the Rand School of Social Science, and James Oneal, member of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist party. Benjamin Glassberg of the Rand School also rendered valuable assistance in the editorial work. Among the contributors to the volume are Morris Hill- quit, David P. Berenberg, Evans Clark, Roger Baldwin, Solon DeLeon , Lewis Gannett, Benjamin Glassberg, Bertha Hale White, William Morris Feigenbaum, Alex- ander Trachtenberg, James Oneal and Irwin St. John Tucker. The book il the result of a request made by the Na- tional Executive Committee that the Research Depart- ment of the Rand School of Social Science co-operate in the preparation of material for it. The editorial committee believes that the book marks an advance over the bulky campaign books that have been prepared in the past, in that the material is much less in quantity, it is presented in a more popular style, statistics have been reduced to a minimum, while the information will prove of service to party speakers and editors and at the same time serve as a propaganda book among the workers. -
Sisyphus and the Labour of Imagination: Autonomy, Cultural Production, and the Antinomies of Worker Self-Management
Sisyphus and the Labour of Imagination: Autonomy, Cultural Production, and the Antinomies of Worker Self-Management Stevphen Shukaitis1 Abstract Is there any radical potential left in the notion and practices of worker self-management? What I want do in this essay is to try and see if it is possible to distill something of a radical kernel from the many difficulties and complications that confront it, particularly within fields of cultural production. How can self- management contribute to what Jacques Ranciere describes as a movement not of slaves filled with ressentiment, but of people living and embodying a new time of sociability and cooperation, creating resources and skills that can spread out from this, rather than being caught and contained by the conditions of is own creation? Drawing from my own experiences working in Ever Reviled Records, a worker owned and run record label, I want to ferret out--conducting something akin to an organizational autoethnography--hints as to whether or not self-management could be useful for radical social struggles today. Introduction Let us imagine, for a change, an association of free men working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force…. The total product of our imagined association is a social product…. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product -
The Economic Foundations of Contemporary Slavery by Justin Guay
TOPICAL RESEARCH DIGEST: HUMAN RIGHTS AND CONTEMPORARY SLAVERY The Economic Foundations of Contemporary Slavery By Justin Guay “Slavery existed before money or law” (Hochschild 2005). Indeed the “peculiar institution” is one of humanity’s oldest. It has, however, evolved and manifested itself quite distinctly in different periods of history. In contrast to historical views of slavery that are associated with Chattel Slavery, numerous forms fall under the umbrella term of contemporary slavery. The United Nations (U.N.) Working Group recognizes such radically new forms as: child labor, children in conflict, trafficking in persons, sexual exploitation, and the sale of children. The International Labor Office (ILO) approaches the topic through the lens of forced labor. The ILO recognizes slavery and abductions, compulsory participation in public works projects, forced labor in agriculture, domestic workers, bonded labor, forced labor imposed by the military, forced labor in the trafficking of persons, as well as some aspects of prison labor and rehabilitation through work. A linking factor between these varied forms of contemporary slavery, according to the U.N. Working Group, is the role that poverty plays in creating vulnerability. This link is echoed in the work of Kevin Bales, arguably the world’s foremost expert on contemporary slavery. According to Bales, contemporary slavery is “the complete control of a person, for economic exploitation, by violence, or the threat of violence.” Using this definition, it is possible to explore the economic links that all forms of slavery, despite their unique characteristics, share. Economic conditions are decisive in the formation of slavery. Chattel slavery emerged as a disturbing manifestation of a push for labor-intensive goods created in the new world. -
Smoked out of Its Hole
VOL. 7 , NO. 4 6 . NEW YOR K, WED NESD AY, AU G U ST 1 5 , 1 9 0 6 . ONE CENT . EDITORIAL SMOKED OUT OF ITS HOLE. By DANIEL DE LEON HE tri-State Labor demonstration arranged to take place in New Castle, Pa., on “Labor Day” under the auspices of the Industrial Workers of the TTT World, bids fair to be more than a flash in the pan. It bids fair to prove an unerring shot, a shot that hits the vitals of the combined powers that ride to-day upon the back of the Working Class. It bids, accordingly, fair to go far towards clarifying the vision of the wage slave masses of the land by enabling them to detect the nature of the combine that oppresses them. In the struggle, at present going on in the land, for organizing and drilling the Working Class, a certain cry has gone up intended and well calculated to confuse the masses. The cry is that the I.W.W. is a Union-wrecking scheme concocted in the interests of the capitalist class. That cry has gone up from the camp of craft Unionism. The proof of the pudding ever lies in the eating. If the I.W.W. is a “Union-wrecking scheme in the interest of the capitalist class,” then the spectacle should be seen of fraternal BENJAMIN HANFORD relations between the I.W.W. and the capitalist press, and, (1861–1910) at the same time, the reverse of fraternal relations between One of the “Socialist” Party luminaries who supported that same capitalist press and craft or A.F. -
The Illegitimacy of Student Debt
Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice 2013 (Whole Number 20), pp. 195-208 The Illegitimacy of Student Debt David J. Blacker University of Delaware Introduction Stadtluft macht frei (“city air makes one free”) was a medieval German motto reflecting the legal situation of many serfs (Wallerstein, 1984, p. 64). If one fled to the city—dare we say “occupy”?—and survived for a year and day, then one was considered liberated from the feudal bonds that had legally tied one to a lord’s estate. Rural serfs were expected to engage in agricultural production, including the customary yielding of a percentage of one’s harvest and/or husbandry to one’s lord. Increasing sophistication in banking and trade allowed labor-hungry cities to begin asserting themselves against the nobility, in large part because of the latter’s chronic thirst for liquidity. This was a key internal contradiction within feudalism: landed nobles’ need for cash, causing them to become dependent on urban bankers and their ilk, which helped accumulate the capital that preconditioned modern capitalism itself. Meanwhile, as per the motto, arising from within the interstices of the feudal contradiction was an enlarged set of liberties for the erstwhile tradition-yoked serfs, formal freedoms that in turn generated their own contradictions. Today, via the global occupy movement, it is apparent that the city air is still capable of at least allowing us to glimpse what freedom might mean; as the chants suggest, “this is what democracy looks like.” Prominent among the concerns of occupiers worldwide is the extent to which educational debt has truncated their possibilities and, in effect, tied them to a certain way of living in a way that is structurally not unlike what faced an eleventh-century European serf. -
Mscoll176-Socialist Labor Party-On1143392688.Pdf (340.5Kb)
State Library of Massachusetts - Special Collections Department Ms. Coll. 176 Collection of Socialist Labor Party pamphlets, flyers, and other material, 1884-1903: Guide COLLECTION SUMMARY Creator: Socialist Labor Party Call Number: Ms. Coll. 176 Extent: 2 document boxes and 1 oversize folder (1 linear foot) Preferred Citation Style: Folder Title, Box Number. Collection of Socialist Labor Party pamphlets, flyers, and other material. State Library of Massachusetts Special Collections. About This Finding Aid: Description based on DACS. Processed by: Finding aid prepared by Deanna Parsi, February 2020. Abstract: This collection documents the campaign, meeting, and rally activity of the Socialist Labor Party in Massachusetts from 1884-1903. SCOPE AND CONTENT This collection contains campaign literature, meeting and rally announcements, platform pamphlets and flyers, programs, ballots, and reports that document the activity of the Socialist Labor Party in Massachusetts from 1884-1903. State Library of Massachusetts – Special Collections Department Guide to Ms. Coll. 176 – Socialist Labor Party Page 1 of 16 HISTORICAL NOTE The Socialist Labor Party (SLP), established in 1876, is the oldest socialist political party in the United States. The SLP presented its first national ticket in 1892, featuring Simon Wing and Charles Matchett as candidates for President and Vice President respectively. Newspaper editor Daniel De Leon is credited with the expansion of the SLP in the United States by using his newspaper, The Weekly People, to reach a larger audience for the SLP’s ideas. In 1894, following De Leon’s lead, the SLP dedicated itself exclusively to its ideal of industrial democracy. In 1893, the SLP published a “Manifesto of the Socialist Labor Party of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts”. -
Wage Slavery
Wage Slavery Don’t get triggered, even capitalists can believe in wage slavery There’s probably a good reason that the term wage slavery triggers you. Big government supporters often use the term to explain why the government needs to step in to create labor that is more fair. Don’t let that stop you from agreeing that there is a problem with labor not matching up to wages. This is your chance to get these people to come to libertarianism. Remember; if you don’t admit there’s a problem, you can’t start on the solution. Know your history The economic history of America, though we are a new nation, is relatively long. We did not always operate in the system we do now. At one time, your bank would monetize your goods. At another time, your job would provide you with housing. The concept of wage labor came shortly after our founding and was not immediately successful. It brought an end to an era of artisan goods. Cicero, of ancient Rome, warned against authoritarian capital, saying, “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” (Cicero) Two modern studies, which you can read in our show notes, say, “slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time" (Margo & Steckel 1982, Fogel 1994). This is corroborated by general observation from that time period, which we have also included in the show notes (PBS, Marx). Frederick Douglass, a former slave, initially supported wage labor, as it came to be called, saying, “now I am my own master,” (Douglass 1994), but changed his mind and said, “experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other" (Douglass 2000). -
Work and Popular Music: the Politics of Cultural Labor and Creative Property
Teaching Media Quarterly Volume 3 | Issue 1 Article 3 2015 Work and Popular Music: The olitP ics of Cultural Labor and Creative Property Matt tS ahl University of Western Ontario, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://pubs.lib.umn.edu/tmq Recommended Citation Stahl, Matt. "Work and Popular Music: The oP litics of Cultural Labor and Creative Property." Teaching Media Quarterly 3, no. 1 (2015). http://pubs.lib.umn.edu/tmq/vol3/iss1/3 Teaching Media Quarterly is published by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. Stahl: Work and Popular Music: The Politics of Cultural Labor and Creati Teaching Media Quarterly Volume 3, Edition 1 (Winter 2015): Work and Media Work and Popular Music: The Politics of Cultural Labor and Creative Property Overview and Rationale Many, if not most, North American students have worked or are working, if not for a living then to supplement funds from families, financial aid, or student loans. The following unit asks students to develop their critical understandings of work as a basic institution of liberal market society through an integrated set of critical course readings, a feature-length documentary film about behind-the-scenes musicians in the recording industry, and a short, highly focused writing assignment. Often in the course of their waged work, students (like most other workers in our society) submit to relations of exploitation, domination, and expropriation. That is, (1) they are being turned to account by others who profit from their labor, (2) they are being commanded and expected to obey without the right to participate in workplace decision-making, and (3) they have no rights to a share in the value they create while on the job, only to a wage. -
Zombies, Robots, Race, and Modern Labour
SASCHA MORRELL Zombies, Robots, Race, and Modern Labour The myth of the zombie, of the living dead, is a work myth.1 [Slavery] reduces man to a mere machine.2 In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the unnamed protagonist is denounced by an African American war veteran as “a walking zombie! … a walking personification of the Negative … ! The mechanical man!” As a black man subservient to white controllers, the protagonist is a non-human “thing” who does the “bidding” of his masters.3 The image recalls the stage of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic at which the slave seems to exist solely for the master, possessing no independent consciousness.4 Ellison’s equation of zombies and robots as emblems of such “negation” was not new. Mechanical men and the living dead had long been working together in U.S. literature of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to embody the dehumanizing effects of racial oppression and (relatedly) labour exploitation. Conceived as soulless bodies or mindless matter, undead and mechanical figures emblematized how slavery and wage-labour relations reduced persons to things. They also registered the mind- numbing effects of repetitive, alienated labour, and of racial ideologies that denied black interiority. These were not their only symbolic functions, of course: in different ways, each figure had been linked variously with anxieties about colonial dispossession, the subordination and objectification of women, ideological indoctrination, market expansion, techno-scientific progress, and the 1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 470. 2 Frederick Douglass, “The Nature of Slavery” (1855): http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/45/my-bondage-and- my-freedom/1512/the-nature-of-slavery-extract-from-a-lecture-on-slavery-at-rochester-december-1- 1850/ (accessed 14 September 2015). -
Noncompete Agreements As Thirteenth Amendment Violations
Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons Faculty Publications 2016 The Paradox of the Right to Contract: Noncompete Agreements as Thirteenth Amendment Violations Ayesha B. Hardaway Case Western University School of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/faculty_publications Part of the Contracts Commons Repository Citation Hardaway, Ayesha B., "The Paradox of the Right to Contract: Noncompete Agreements as Thirteenth Amendment Violations" (2016). Faculty Publications. 1641. https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/faculty_publications/1641 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons. The Paradox of the Right to Contract: Noncompete Agreements as Thirteenth Amendment Violations Ayesha Bell Hardaway* CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 958 I. ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF RESTRICTIVE POST-EMPLOYMENT COVENANTS ...................................................................................960 A. Early Use of Restrictive Covenants in England ....................... 960 B. Original Purpose of Restrictive Covenants in the United States ............................................................................................... 961 C. Extended Use of Noncompete -
LAWCHA 2021 Program May 5 Microsoftword
2021 LAWCHA Conference Workers on the Front Lines Thursday, May 20 6 - 8 pm ET Opening Night Plenary College for All and a National Agenda for Labor in Higher Education This summit brings together LAWCHA members, labor activists, Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE), and union representatives serving a variety of higher ed workers to discuss the College for All bill and how to use it as a foundation for a bottom-up national movement, one that demands fair funding, fair tuition, and fair labor. SFNDHE successfully fought to include labor provisions that prioritize contingent faculty and tenure-track positions in the College for All bill--but there is still more to be done. LAWCHA members, as labor scholars, higher ed workers, and union organizers, have a vital role to play in this national agenda and the federal legislative battles ahead. Endorsed by the LAWCHA Contingent Faculty Committee Higher Education Union Representatives TBA Jalil Mustaffa Bishop, Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Pennsylvania and SFNDHE member Ian Gavigan, PhD candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick Aimee Loiselle, SFNDHE Co-Facilitator and Postdoctoral Fellow at Smith College Eleni Schirmer, PhD Candidate at University of Wisconsin-Madison Moderator: Lane Windham, Georgetown University Friday, May 21 12 - 1:15 pm ET The Personal is Historical: Incorporating Family Legacies and Personal Experience into Labor History Toni Gilpin, Independent Scholar Sergio M. González, Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies, Marquette University Jack Metzgar,