That's just the way it is - But don't you believe them

Standing in line marking time
Waiting for the welfare dime
'Cause they can't buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old ladies' eyes
Just for fun he says: "Get a job"

In the LODE project of '92, the emerging thread linking people in 22 places along the LODE-Line that links the two cities of Liverpool and Hull was the fact of the increase in productive power pressing on population. People were losing livelihoods and the purposes of these economic environments were not structured around the needs of people, of wage earners.

Unless you are a landlord or an owner of a means of production, having a job is a basic necessity for survival in the economic environments most of us inhabit. 

The lack of a job, for the majority of people on the planet, undermines everything that people require. In the "rich" countries of the world (richer for some), and it is only the control of immigration that maintains the difference in wages between rich and poor countries, together with an "average" level of productivity generated by those collective industrial organisations that create the national wealth.

The elephant in the room! 
The wage gaps between rich and poor countries exist not mainly because of differences in individual productivity but mainly because of immigration control.

In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, often represented as a pyramid with the more basic needs at the bottom, including physical existence and survival, means that people in rich countries worry about migrants undercutting their wages and/or taking their jobs. This is a reasonable concern, but . . .  

The First International

For the political purposes of certain sections of an industrial working class in the late nineteenth century in Europe there was a different and practical response to workers from abroad taking your work whilst you were withdrawing your labour in strike action, the creation of an international organization. 

The Preacher and the Slave

"You'll get pie in the sky when you die"

Joe Hill's song The Preacher and the Slave tells us that we will have to wait until we die before we get "pie in the sky". So, what have we got to lose? Let's organize!

Other songs by Hill include "The Tramp", "There is Power in a Union":

Would you have freedom from Wage slavery? Then join in the grand Industrial band!

"The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.

Songs for freedom and the ballad of "Joe Hill"

Entertainer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson's political philosophies and outspoken views about United States domestic policies, and his support for Communist countries and movements, were the subject of great concern to the United States Government, during the Cold War.

He was denied a passport by the U.S. government curtailing his career significantly. In 1957 international support for Robeson resulted in a concert at St Pancras Town Hall. Robeson was able to speak with the compere Alfie Bass, and then sing six songs to the audience of a thousand people in London, while he was still stranded in New York. This was a first. A concert achieved through telecommunication via the brand new transatlantic telephone cable.

Slavery remains, as does resistance to it. There are more humans in forced labor in the twenty-first century than were transported by the Atlantic slave trade (See Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People, by Bales, Trodd and Williamson, Oxford, Oneworld 2009). The International Labor Organisation found that there were nearly 21 million people in forced labor in 2012, of whom 2.2 million were in labor forced upon them by the state (prison work) or rebel military groups. Of the remaining 18.7 million, 4.5 million were involved in commercial sexual exploitation and 14.2 million in forced economic exploitation. 

See Forced Labour and Human Trafficking: Estimating the Profits by Patrick Belser, 2005, International Labor Organization, Geneva.

For comparison, 12.5 million Africans were enslaved and transported through the Middle Passage.

For Indigenous and African slaves, modernity meant not only actual death but also "social death." Treating slaves as part of Nature rather than Society was a successful move for investors. For that success to multiply, more workers needed to be found, their broken bodies cared for, and their communities supported by work that was forever unpaid. In other words, capitalists needed more labor and needed it to be educated and maintained as cheaply as possible. From this imperative emerged an entire regime of cheap care, one so vital to capitalism's ecology that its history has been all but erased. 

The work of care, for young and old, infirm and sick, learning and recovering, makes capitalism possible.

The demands for this care to be performed cheaply helped to refashion older patriarchies and produced modern categories of sex and gender difference in capitalism's ecology. In Europe, a generalized wage cut in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries affected all workers but women especially, who received just a third of the already "reduced wage." They were also still expected to tend to labor at home, and indeed the domestic sphere was a conscious invention of early capitalism. Burdens of work, care work, and community support fell increasingly on women, whose social position came to be policed, just as work in the cane field was.

Patriarchy isn't a mere by-product of capitalism's ecology - it's fundamental to it. So crucial was "womens work" to the rise of capitalism that by 1700 it had been radically redefined. Women's labor became "non-work" - rendered largely invisible, the better to cheapen it. In 1995, researchers hazarded a dollar value for women's unpaid work. A United Nations team suggested that all unpaid reproductive labor, if compensated, would be valued at sixteen trillion dollars. Of that, eleven trillion represented women's unpaid work. This was about a third of the world's total economic activity - a figure that would have been higher had banking not already taken a larger and larger share of the world's economy. 

The sections above, on modern slavery, women's work, care and the domestic sphere, are quoted from pages 30-32 in the book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.

Palm oil was supposed to help save the planet. Instead it unleashed a catastrophe.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel asks the question:

How has capitalism devastated the planet—and what can we do about it?

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated the Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analysing today’s planetary emergencies. 

Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism.

  
Cheap energy - from forest to mine!

In the chapter devoted to Cheap Energy, Moore and Patel write:

People have been fighting for centuries over the fuel and construction material that wood can become. It's worth mentioning all this because it's too often forgotten that capitalism's energy revolution began not with coal but with wood - and with the privatization that forest enclosure implies.

The reason to look at energy in Europe lies in the different use of fuel - a kind of cheap nature - as an intrinsic part of capitalism's ecology.

Cheap energy is a way of amplifying - and in some cases substituting for - cheap work and care.

If cheap food is capitalism's major way of reducing the wage bill, cheap energy is the crucial lever to advance labor productivity. The two can function as a logical sequence, even if the actual history is more complex.

First, peasants must be ejected from the commons. These new workers must find some wage work in some form.

Second, the workshops and factories that employ these workers have to compete with one another.

And while there's a long history of bosses' overworking their employees, the competitive struggle between capitalists is ultimately decided by labor productivity - that is, the production of more commodities per average hour of work - as something determined by machines.

But capitalist machines function because they draw on the work of extrahuman natures, and these have to be cheap, because the demand is limitless. For this reason, the enclosure of terrestrial commons coincided with the enclosure of the subterranean world.

At the very moment when peasant life was turned upside down in the sixteenth-century England, the country's great coal mines were pumping out coal by the thousands of tons. Here a new layer of cheapness emerges in our picture of the world: capitalism's global factory requires not just a global farm and a global family, but a global mine as well. (pages 164-5)

The Labour Theory of Value.

The price of gold & the cost of labour!

These two consecutive scenes from the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a 1948 American dramatic adventurous neo-western written and directed by John Huston, and was a feature film adaptation of the enigmatic author B. Traven's 1927 novel of the same name. In this story about two financially desperate Americans, who in the 1920s join old-timer Howard (Walter Huston, the director's father) in Mexico to prospect for gold, these early scenes in the film sets out a critique of capitalism, in tune with anarchist leanings of the author, and then an exploration of the conditions that expose human frailty, in the face of greed and acquisition, that lead to a loss of values. The old-timer contributes the voice of experience, and also a sense of alternative values that, later in the film narrative, include both a respect for the natural environment and the life lived free from a disabling greed for wealth, property and possessions, way beyond any individual's essential and reasonable needs.

Nature is more than a resource pool or rubbish bin! But, what happens when the metabolism of humans in the web of life becomes governed by the demand for profit?

Today Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world's solar panels combined, thus wiping out all the gains of the many years of green energy innovation.

The cryptocurrency Bitcoin now produces as much CO2  each year as a million transatlantic flights!

The Anthropocene? Or, the Capitalocene?

Standing in line marking time
Waiting for the welfare dime
'Cause they can't buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old ladies' eyes
Just for fun he says "Get a job"

That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
But don't you believe them

They say hey little boy you can't go
Where the others go
'Cause you don't look like they do
Said hey old man how can you stand
To think that way
Did you really think about it
Before you made the rules
He said, Son

That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
But don't you believe them

Well they passed a law in '64
To give those who ain't got a little more
But it only goes so far
Because the law can't change another man's mind
When all it sees at the hiring timeIs the line on the color bar 

That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
But don't you believe them

"The Way It Is" is a song by Bruce Hornsby. It was released in August 1986 as the second single from the debut album by American rock group Bruce Hornsby and the Range; The Way It Is.