Peer2Politics

Two years ago, we launched October2011.org with “History is Knocking.” We asked if the time might be right for a larger mass of people to rise up against the corporate control of our government and US imperialist policies. We were not certain what the answer would be, but six months later hundreds of thousands of you did rise up in Occupy Encampments across the nation. Many more were inspired to join the work on a broad variety of injustices in their communities.

“Division of labor” drives both economic production and technological progress. Adam Smith illustrated the basic principle in his classic tome Wealth of Nations with a description of a pin factory, where each task was divided into standardized steps to be completed more cost-efficiently by different people. And the economist Leonard Read relied on the same idea with his classic story of why no single person alive knows how to make a simple, ordinary wooden pencil

“Labor is different from other factors of production in one regard. Owners of land and capital will dispose of their full supply, guided only by one consideration: Revenue maximization. If labor were governed by the same law, workers would work as much as they were physically able to on a sustainable basis. But in fact there’s a backward-bending supply curve of labor because, unlike using land and capital, expending labor — at least after a certain point — is unpleasant. Labor, unlike a piece of land or a lump of coal, has to be persuaded to supply its own productive services — to crawl out of bed in the morning and go into a place it would rather not be.

 

With Amazon’s business model on the rise, it is important to seek out an inside view of life as an Amazon worker. These curious retail-warehouse hybrid jobs are becoming a staple of many middle American communities. For that reason, we would like to collect stories from Amazon workers, just as we have done with workers of Wal-Mart, Target, Whole Foods, and other important companies. If you are a current or former worker at an Amazon fulfillment center and you’d like to share your story, you can send it to Hamilton@Gawker.com.

 

“It’s been clear to me that our economy has been sick for a long time,” he began, introducing a theme he would hammer home throughout the speech. “For too long, the hardworking and rule-abiding had seen their paychecks shrink or stay the same, while the rule-breakers raked in huge profits and wealth,” he said. “It made our economy sick, and our politics sick, too.”

 

A few years back, President Barack Obama claimed that America was experiencing “structural issues with our economy.” It wasn’t simply that inflexible Republicans were standing in the way of prosperity but that “a lot of businesses” had become more efficient. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM,” he went on, “you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

  

TZM Interviews is a new form of dialog that brings proactive, visionary and inspiring people into this conversation about how the scientific method for social concern applies to global sustainability

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“What happens when this commodity-machine —now conveniently locatedout of the view of most of us— breaksdown, as environments give out,markets crash, and/or sweat-shopworkers scattered across the globesomehow refuse to go on?”Hal Foster, 2003.

It's tempting to look for glimmers of sharing in distant history. Europe's empires tumbled like dominoes, save Denmark, which ceded rulership to the commons and is now one of the longest lasting monarchies in history (h/t Jeremiah Owyang). The French Surrealists valued collective meaning so much that they concocted the exquisite corpse, an art form still practiced 100 years later. Meanwhile, revisionists try to recast "mortgage" to mean "co-ownership" with a bank.

Below we are re-posting the second paper of the very timely discussion on how to form truly global unions -instead of international federation of national unions. The discussion has been recently launched by the New Unionism Network and you can read other papers here.