"We make personal choices all the time. Some are designated to involve us the more and some are designated to almost take us out of the loop altogether. The latter might well be to eliminate a person’s involvement and is a good plan for any business to work economically and keep a competitive edge, I am sure.
The ultimate goal birthed through the Industrial Revolution was to minimise the need for skilled workmen and women and wherever possible to replace them with machines to produce the goods needed for a global feed into the economy’s insatiable appetite for making money, and are we not still moving constantly along that same trajectory? Is this not the very nature of technology in industry?
Objectors then became classified as Luddites––degenerates who hated technological progress. Even though crafting artisans were well in the majority and supported the conservation of a traditional working culture in every craft of the age, there would be no democratic vote for it.
It was never a democratic consideration but more a control of the workforce being shunted head-on into the factories that needed cheap, controlled and compliant labour on minimum wage. "
I wish that industry would deliver on the promise of cheap, reproducible goods that require minimal effort to produce, we could live in a fantastic utopia where human beings work crafts and our needs are met for peanuts. Unfortunately this is not condusive to social control, people with too much free time build guillotines. So instead they turned us into cogs.
Is it possible for a society full of cheap goods and no resource scarcity to have meaningful work? Or does the necessity imbue the object with significance?
I was reading bookchin talking about artificial scarcity. He thinks that there is actually no scarcity, so any hoarding of resources while others go without is immoral to him. I’m not sure I agree, but it would be nice to see what a society without scarcity might look like. At least without scarcity for vital things like food, shelter, and medicine.