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The World Owes You A Living

WISE WOMEN

Most leftists are uncritically statist, merely complaining that the government is controlled by the wrong people and doesn't do enough of the right things. And though the left of course wants to redistribute corporate profits to workers, it shows little interest in attacking the authoritarian structure of the workplace or the puritanical assumptions of the work ethic.

Their Libertarianism and Ours
by Ellen Willis

As it happens, there are no columns in standard double-entry book-keeping to keep track of satisfaction and demoralization. There is no credit entry for feelings of self-worth and confidence, no debit column for feelings of uselessness and worthlessness. There are no monthly, quarterly, or even annual statements of pride and no closing statement of bankruptcy when the worker finally comes to feel that after all he couldn't do anything else, and doesn't deserve anything better.

--Barbara Garson

If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How
intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around
your neck?

Linda Ellerbee

The dominant work ethic in the United States is founded on the presumption that people will not work unless forced to do so by sheer life-and-death necessity. Does this imply a belief in the value of work or, beneath the surface of this loudly asserted attitude, possibly just the opposite?

Lynn Chancer

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

A backlash is brewing, and its name is leisure.

Desiree Cooper

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie
down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and
never have lived.

Gertrude Stein

As to the great mass of working girls and women, how much independence is gained if the narrowness and lack of freedom of the home is exchanged for the narrowness and lack of freedom of the sweatshop, the factory, the department store or the office?

Emma Goldman

The problem is that if societies produce obedience by withholding core self-esteem, they are likely to discourage its mending, replenishing, and healing, too. The idea of intrinsic worth is so dangerous to authoritarian systems (or to incomplete democracies in which some groups are more equal than others) that it is condemned as self-indulgent, selfish, egocentric, godless, counterrevolutionary, and any other epithet that puts the individual in the wrong. If people feel they have a value that needn't be earned, the argument goes, how can they be made to work? Why should they continue to strive at all?

Gloria Steinem,
The Revolution From Within

Now society needs ten percent of its population in some kind of conflict with the law or else a multi-billion dollar industry falls down.

Anne Cameron

The imagination needs moodling, - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Brenda Ueland

What we lack is not so much leisure to do as time to reflect and time to feel. What we seldom "take" is time to experience the things that have happened, the things that are happening, the things that are still ahead of us.

Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Virginia Woolf

You cannot decree women to be sexually free when they are not economically free.

Shere Hite

'Democracy on the shop floor!' God forfend we should dream of the abolition of the shop floor, let alone struggle and plan for its abolition.

from
The Perspective Of Winning
Selma James

But NPR, when it came to describing the cause of the inadequate safety net benefits, turned to a business-friendly Brookings Institution economist, who basically said this was because states want workers to look really hard to find work, implying that the problem of unemployment was the lazy workers who need to be motivated by scanty benefits to look for their next job.

Can he be serious?

Can anyone who has studied economy and politics not know that the inadequate safety net is a product of the owning class' fear of losing control of the means of production? Most any CEO will admit that the all-encompassing value placed on work is necessary to produce wealth.

How can the Brookings economist not understand that the American work ethic is a mechanism of social control that ensures capitalists a reliable work force for making profits? At the risk of oversimplification, it is impossible.

from
Damn Lies
December 12, 2001
By Marta Russell

TED RALL: One of questions people ask me is: Why aren't there more women cartoonists? I always answer: Hell if I know. I'm a guy. Since you're a female cartoonist, please enlighten me: Why aren't there more women cartoonists?

STEPHANIE MCMILLAN: I don't really know either. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that many women who have relationships and/or children are often overburdened with housework and taking care of their families in addition to their jobs, and don't have time to do much else (especially something that's rarely economically productive). How much art and literature throughout history has never been created because so much of women's time is taken up with life-maintenance stuff? I imagine we would have a very different culture if it weren't for that.

Recent research has found that men are seduced by the technology itself. They tend to get into the faster-race-car syndrome, bragging about the size of their 'discs' or the speed of their microprocessors.
Women tend to take a more practical approach. They generally think that machines are meant to be used, and don't really care about what's inside the box. They just want it to work, and to get things done.
In another intriguing study by the Center for Children and Technology, men and women in technical fields were asked to dream up machines of the future. Men typically imagined devices that could help them "conquer the universe," whereas women created machines that "meet people's needs." The study concluded that "most women, even those who are technologically sophisticated, think of machines as a means to an end," whereas men think of the machines as an extension of their own power...

As the early market has been predominantly males, the next wave of computer purchasers and users must necessarily be more and more female.
This means that the practicality of computers is becoming as valued as their speed and power. Software content is as important -- if not more important -- as hardware innovation. In short, we're at a cultural turning point. There's an opportunity to remake the culture around people's needs, instead of the machine.

from
Looking At Technology Through Women's Eyes
by Robin Abrams
Former Vice President, Apple Computer Corporation

What if he spoke so little of the war and of his life before it because he simply couldn't remember it? There are men who were treated for anxiety neurosis by electro-convulsive therapy, or deep narcosis, the sleep cure, who completely forgot the cataclysm that sent their synapses gibbering out of control. The treatments made them stop weeping and stammering, made them manageable, silent, obedient. Who cared if they stopped laughing as long as they stopped crying? A zombie, provided he is neatly dressed, punctual and punctilious, is a useful individual in our society. He pays his taxes, commutes every day, does meaningless monotonous work and does not complain. And if he no longer dances with his little daughter held high on his shoulder, or makes up nonsense games for her to play, or puts her to sleep when she is tearful and overtired, if he does not hear her nervous vomiting in the night because he is too drugged to wake, who will give a damn? The child like him is 'highly-strung'; the inherent defect runs in their genes. What runs in our genes, Daddy, is humanity, which will not survive except by extraordinary shifts in this inhuman world.

Germaine Greer,
Daddy We Hardly Knew You