Not so.
Admittedly if I'd known it was going to take this long I'm sure I could have learned quite a lot of German in the fifteen odd months since I heard about these guys, so poo-poo on me for lack of effort. But Lift09 has come and gone with the gents of the Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur appearing again and I still can't seem to find a copy of das buch in englischer Sprache. Can anyone point me in the right direction or should I be dragging my lazy ass down to the Learning Annex in lederhosen?
Bah, anyway you should watch their talk. Maybe if they get more hits from this side of the pond some clever multilingual person will get to work enlightening our grubby North American minds with some forward thinking ideas on the nature of work.
5 comments:
I'll give the book a read, but just going by the talks alone there doesn't seem to be anything terribly innovative or new with these ideas. Really this is no different from espousing Marxism with a fair bit of slacker/hippie rhetoric bolted on for good measure. Effectively mindless leftist drivel for those that don't want to think too much about the underlying schools of thought and the fundamental issues involved.
The fact they do not outright eschew capitalism and instead collectively organize sustainable funds through the ZIA suggests that while they do not wish to be part of the system, they are content with existing in a bubble within it, effectively the closest thing to a cop-out imaginable. Perhaps they are pragmatic enough to realize that carving a niche out for themselves is the most they will be able to accomplish, with the rest of the system effectively viewing them as something of a curiosity, if not a general pariah.
Rather than parroting the usual Marxist rhetoric of capitalism ultimately destroying itself, their primary objection seems to be against the societal necessity for a post-industrial work ethic. The fallacy here of course is that not all work ethics are derived from the protestant work ethic, and those that question its necessity are rarely those that have any real standing in the system in the first place. Fundamentally this is not so different from your run of the mill remedial labourer lamenting being kept down by the system through an impotent haze of bong smoke. Rather than self-serving rhetoric, the business end of a 9 iron is a much more productive instrument with regards to encouraging productivity and impacting change.
Anyways, if you have recently developed in interest in social philosophy, political ecology, etc., I also encourage you to read through some of Andre Gorz's writings. Unsurprisingly, most of the "research" in this area has been conducted by contemporary french philosophers. Asian cultures on the other hand which have never identified with the protestant work ethic still end up having similar issues. The NEET and freeter issue for example becomes a more ingrained and long-term problem, particularly in societies that have uniformly adopted post-industrial capitalism while traditionally employing opposing systems. These groups likewise are generally the ones peddling this type of idle rhetoric and advocacy of low-impact change, that is, the few of them that actually have enough conviction and drive to do anything about it.
On the other hand, capitalism employed in such a way that it is simply thinly-veiled statism is equally despicable. If you want to see the fruits of socialism fused with capitalism, simply look south. Blaming capitalism for socialism's failure seems to be a common trend these days.. while conversely, in a real free market, those that attempt to control or meddle with the market will find themselves either enslaved or ultimately destroyed by it. One only has to look at states that employ brands of capitalism without intervention to realize that it is not the system that is to blame, regardless of what sort of work ethic is employed.
Once again a more well thought out response than my original post! I'd never heard of a lot of the things you mentioned, like NEET or different strains of work ethic. I always just figured with a work ethic you either had one or you didn't.
I'll put Gorz on my reading list, but YOU should get your ass writing this stuff somewhere more visible than the comments section mmm?
That presupposes that I have any real inclination to randomly rant about things on my own volition, and more pointedly, that I care to receive feedback. In general I prefer to just read things on my own, make up my own mind about things, and if someone wants to debate something in particular, or is soliciting feedback, that's quite fine, otherwise I don't particularly care.
Additionally, while writing that sort of a comment in english takes about 10 minutes or so, doing so in Japanese would take multiple hours, and I would have to write it in a more accessible way if I know that people who are going to be reading it have a fundamentally different background. All of which is time I could use for more effective things, like napping.
Besides, these are the sorts of discussions that are better done at a smoke-filled bar, cigar in hand, rather than in some bloody input box of despair. The only real exceptins are when engaging with the geographically challenged. Locality of reference and all that.
In any event, if I'm not at the office, I have little to no use for computers in general, and certainly no desire to piss about idly on the net. That's what waiting for builds is for.
Somehow I suspected you would say something like that :)
Out of curiousity, is there something about cigar smoke that makes it less impotent than bong smoke? :P
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