NYT: Reification in the Cubicle of Hell

A good case for the full human being encompassed in work, expressed as fully credentialed academic abstract writing vs. motorcycle maintenance.

I saw much of this in action yesterday while helping do a bronze pour for a Wyatt Earp sculpture, in a tiny bit of reciprocation for a morning's mold-making instruction, at my neighborhood worker's co-op art foundry (one under immediate threat, of course, from gentrification- a fact so unsurprising I could barely muster a sigh). The foundry had the feel of a competent auto shop, an ambitious boat yard, a promising internet startup, even a good art school: supremely functional dilapidation, playful productivity, deceptively organized disorganization.

Everyone there knew off-hand that bronze casting was 5000 years old, that the tools and thinking were both ancient and as challenging as ever. One guy mentioned that he'd once spent six months learning flint-knapping, noting that it was among the most intensely concentrated activities, the most intellectually demanding in some ways, that he had ever done.

Unfortunately, like a lot of New York Times articles like this, the piece is politically toothless, while nodding ever so tentatively and slightly to Marx. To accomplish better human lives in a basically market economy, political policy driven by a relentless form of mass democratic pressure would have to transform the present of managerial and capital power. While he portrays an internal corporate power structure's erosion of cognitive autonomy, the author mostly frames this as a personal path- a mistake, I think, common to educated people who after all had full choices about their life paths.

I will echo his bleakness about academic careers; for all the blather about the information economy, less that 30% of credentialed community college instructors in Seattle, for example, even have an opportunity for tenure track. The same is true of universities, which is about a third of what it was 20 years ago nationally. It has gotten to the point in the humanities that I cannot easily recommend someone go into teaching as a single career in any field, considering the historically distorted price of college. (And yet the tuition for a single student at a private college can be higher than the salary paid to a full-time adjunct instructor.)

A final factor is whether technology centralizes or decentralizes individuals' economic power over their own lives.

I need no riches to pursue my career as an artist, in spite of my laughable income, because the personal rewards and interest are enough, and I have enough self-delusion to believe that I am fairly near to figuring out how to eventually maintain a somewhat decent life. But my political beliefs are strongly affected by this: I'm interested in good economic, social, environmental and cultural outcomes, whether most Americans benefit not only in prosperity but in humanisitic terms. For the course of my whole life I have not seen evidence that free markets in the present conception, one where vast amounts of capital are heavily concentrated among nonresponsible actors, benefit most of the people of the country in terms of services, salaries, and real goods. Careers paths are widely disappearing. This is all while the nature of work for most people - people not in the social class where you can choose between a doctorate in philosophy and owning a motorcycle shop - just seems to get worse and worse, less leisure, more stress, less autonomy, a deepening message that we are all disposable, always replaceable, all a burden on someone else's bottom line.

The evidence that the Market alone- that baleful, jealous, mythical god- can properly value an earth in balance, vibrant culture, satisfying work, and lives well lived, has escaped my attention.