Technology and Labor
The core of this page is derived from a comment on the dialectical futurism post the meaning of work. by ?mv. I've transported it here because I think there's some meet here that merits greater attention, and because I think it's worth using the wiki as a forum to expand and escalate this discussion. --tychoish
Really nice post, it gets deep very quickly which makes in very interesting to me. I find it especially interesting that in short work and being stuck in a place are very similarly connected. After all if you didn't have to move for work you wouldn't be stuck in a place that work resides, that thought reminds me of my family and how they came to the US for work not because the US was this awesome place, just that there was little work in their home country. That being in an obvious scarcity based economy, labor is scarce and so were the resources that my family came to extract or produce. Certainly raises ideas about the immigration reforms that are deeply needed today, though that is a topic for another day (I was at a Student Immigration Movement rally yesterday so it's frsh in my brain).
However how to bring about change in an adopted location that is not "home" or familiar is, I think a constant challenge for any revolutionary. Now I haven't read your writings but I am going to go out on a limb ,after reading parts of "Mars," that your science fictional novel seeks to address this question, may not entirely answer it but engage with it nonetheless. I think story is one of the most powerful ways to engage and discuss problems in our society, though when science fiction goes to far it can become cultish and lose real life application (for a number of reasons, I know/knew many trekies that were too deeply involved in the plots and stories that addressing the issues raised were lost by lack of social interaction, not saying this represents a lot of people but is a stigma that exists).
With that being said I always think back to modern day revolutionaries such as the Zapatistas, FARC, etc, which really focus on be active where you are and don't move elsewhere just to be active. If work takes you to a new location be active in that location, establish yourself where you are and not plan to be. That idea is much easier said than done, I can attest to it, social aspects of where I have been influenced my decisions to move elsewhere not for work but really for the wrong reasons. It's funny that you bring up academics cuase that is the environment where I took the model of be active where you are to heart, I was in school and sought to bring about change there. There were many outlets, the bigger challenge was knowing eventually I would leave and need to reestablish an active base, which is exactly what I did when I moved to the city. So in long/short we are social beings and should be active where we are and not where we imagine to be.
Post-scarcity world and labor is a much larger question, but I think there are elements of it in todays political economic structures and previous ones. There were many errors perse with the Soviet Union and it's model of socialism/communism (I separate them intentionally as they can/do mean different ideas). The unfortunate part is the "experiament" of a socialist system was too short to draw any major conclusions from on a post capitalist world. I had the opportunity to take a course named comparative socialist systems, where we thoroughly reviewed the systems within the Soviet Union, Asia and efforts attempted in the Americas. I point to these systems becuase under a socialist system, economically value is determined differently than in the "western world" though scarcity of resources plays a role in a socialist system it is not the determining factor in creating value of commodities. So it is not a perfect post-scarcity world but at least one that we can use in getting an idea of that world. Labor will exist but would be a smaller part of our everyday lives (if we use the labor movement as an example of seeking to lower the amount of working hours per day per person). We also would see to a point that the environment would not be so harshly harmed as extraction of resources would not be based on a market based approach (eliminating the scarcity). I think in a workplace we would have mini-democracies much like worker-cooperatives (in the US there is no really good example of this outside of coffee shops, book stores and copying centers to name a few) like Mondragon which is a worker collectively run company. Though I don't provide a specific answer, this is what I like to add to the discussion here.