Monday, December 12, 2011

Em defesa do desemprego?

Unemployment Is The Cure, por Paul Hertzog (P2P Foundation):


So ultimately it comes down to this. For the employers, which is to say, predominantly large hierarchical structures that exist by skimming surplus value off of their workers’ work and simply paying them some portion of that value as a wage, there is an “employment crisis.” However, for the people, a job merely serves as a conduit for income, and consequently, the crisis is not an “employment crisis” but an “income crisis.”

This is a crucial point, so I’ll make it again another way.

An Employment Economy has to make people think of their “income crisis” as an “employment crisis.” An Unemployment Economy has no such necessity.

An Unemployment Economy begins with the premise that people perform best at activities in which they enjoy intrinsically and for which they volunteer. This self-selection principle is a key ingredient of current open-source coding economies, and was even used by Google to allow it’s employees to self-direct a portion of their daily work-time. Self-selection is not volunteerism; it’s compensated work. Otherwise someone is still exploiting you and getting the benefit of your labor, only for free.

Furthermore, calling it an “employment crisis” implies that the solution is to create more employment, but calling it an “income crisis” implies that the solution is to create more income. This can be done in a variety of ways, many of which have nothing to do with getting a job.

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