“In activity man feels himself free, unlimited, happy. Activity is the positive side of one’s personality…. And the happiest, the most blissful activity is that which is productive…. Hence this attribute of the species – productive activity – is assigned to God; that is, realized and made objective as divine activity.” – Ludwig Feuerbach
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“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’ Then God said, ‘I give you every seed bearing plant on the face of the whole Earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the Earth and all the birds of the sky and all the creatures that move on the ground – everything that has the breath of life in it – I give every green plant for food.’ And it was so.” – Genesis 1:28-30
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“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. 19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’“This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” – Luke 12:18-21
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“If you see the poor oppressed in a district, and justice and rights denied, do not be surprised at such things; for one official is eyed by a higher one, and over them both are others higher still. The increase from the land is taken by all; the king himself profits from the fields.
Whoever loves money never has enough;
whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.
This too is meaningless.
As goods increase,
so do those who consume them.
And what benefit are they to the owners
except to feast their eyes on them?
The sleep of a laborer is sweet,
whether they eat little or much,
but as for the rich, their abundance
permits them no sleep.
I have seen a grievous evil under the sun:
wealth hoarded to the harm of its owners,
or wealth lost through some misfortune,
so that when they have children
there is nothing left for them to inherit.
Everyone comes naked from their mother’s womb,
and as everyone comes, so they depart.
They take nothing from their toil
that they can carry in their hands.
This too is a grievous evil:
As everyone comes, so they depart,
and what do they gain,
since they toil for the wind?
All their days they eat in darkness,
with great frustration, affliction and anger.” – Ecclesiastes 5:8-17
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“Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.” – Frederick Douglass
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Normally I would not begin with so many quotes, but why say it differently when it has been said so clearly already? Let me explain why I have chosen these quotes.
Everyone feels in themselves their worth when they are at work. This is what ties us most directly to humanity, because what makes us distinctively human is our ability to bring order out of disorder. To apply category, logic, reason, and purpose to indifferent objects is the uniquely human task set to us by God in Genesis. We name the animals, categorize them to better understand them, how and why they were made, and it is for our survival and enrichment that we cultivate the Earth. If there were no humans to do this work, existence itself would be meaningless. We are the universe understanding itself; made of dust taken from the ground and the stars (proof). Although my last post could be taken to say that this work is a morally negative act, I mean the opposite. What I am attempting to say is that the work itself is good, but the regulation of our relationship to the objects we are stewards of through the economy has turned the work against us. This is because the relationship is no longer stewardly, it is exploitative. We exploit the environment for our personal luxury. We do not cultivate, we own. This is the purpose of the first four quotes.
Now the last quote and the quote from Ecclesiastes start to pick at another aspect of the problem: labor. The way corporate business works in our economy is to destroy the relationship between us and our work, that which God has given to us as our uniquely human task. When you work for someone else for a set wage, the value of your work is always greater than your earnings. Were you to work the exact same job for yourself, you would take home exactly how much you had earned for the corporation. Some will defend this relationship as fair on the grounds that without the corporation the organized work of many would be impossible, and I consent this point. However, I am not saying that everyone working in an organization should earn the same wage, I am saying you should earn what you produce. Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has 114.4 billion dollars. To put that in perspective, if Jeff worked at $15/hr. it would take him 870,624 years of working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to earn all of his money. No one can earn that much money, other people earned it for him. In harsher words, Jeff stole other people’s labor. At the end of their last quarter, Walmart made $5.8 billion dollars as a corporation. Those earnings are passed on to the executives and shareholders of Walmart. If Walmart took 3 billion of those earnings and paid it out to their employees, they could give all 2.2 million of their employees a raise of $5,454. This is not annual income, this is quarterly income. This is why Frederick Douglass, a man who intimately knew the evils of slavery, called wage labor slavery.
This goes further. In 2010 the Supreme Court of the United States of America came down on the side of corporations in the historic Citizens United vs. FEC case. This case allowed corporations the unfettered ability to donate to political elections in the name of freedom of speech. Politicians are now able to take massive donations from corporations which do not represent the people. Politicians are now representatives of corporate interests, not that they weren’t before 2010, but it is now official law. The power of the people to stand up to corporations which only want to exploit their labor for the enrichment of their shareholders is null and void. If we want to eat, we must work for the corporations and enable their exploitation of mother Earth. The GDP must grow because if it does not, those with power will not ‘trickle down’ enough money for us to survive. Indeed, people are already dying.
I firmly believe there are ways to do this better, but inaction is getting us nowhere.