Thoughts on Work and These Modern Times

Happened upon this today and wanted to make a note to myself...https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

This is the quote I want to remember...

It's even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It's as if they are being told ‘but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?’

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.

Remember how is The Hitchhikers' Guide to Galaxy with "Ship B" (from some fan site)

The Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B was a way of removing the basically useless citizens from the planet of Golgafrincham. A variety of stories were formed about the doom of the planet, such as blowing up, crashing into the sun or being eaten by a mutant star goat. The ship was filled with all the middlemen of Golgafrincham, such as the telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives and management consultants.

And with modern age of financial management tools, nothing is actually made. This style of business men, CEOs and such, don't start businesses to produce stuff, the think of themselves as masters of the Universe and worth their millions. But the irony is the pizza dilivery guys bring more "value added" substance to his (or her) work than any of these jag offs.

Of course this implicates the broader question of work. Why is one job "worth" more than another? Why does Mitt Romney get to make millions from buying, stripping down a company, loading it up with debt, reselling it for more money(somehow..) and HE is the guy who gets paid millions while the home depot employee who loads lumber into a pickup and actually helps somebody get $10 an hour? And with deference to Douglass Adams, why dump on hairdressers and telephone sanitiser when they actually provide something. People with financial derivatives and other crazy money making schemes made of vapor live in luxury?

So who is "worth" more than another? What is worth? What is value? How is work and person-hood connected?

It also leads to the unstated premise that humankind is nothing more than a commodification of our souls. Why do we allow this to happen to us? It is crazy!