sam rick

While the concepts of complete fulfillment and unrestrained enjoyment fostered a hope that unshackled the forces of progress, the idolization of progress leads to the opposite of progress. Arduous labor for a meaningful end may be enjoyed and even loved. A philosophy that makes labor an end in itself leads eventually to resentment of all labor.

— max horkheimer, eclipse of reason (1947)

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The point is that today the apparatus to which the individual is to adjust and adapt himself is so rational that individual protest and liberation appear not only as hopeless but as utterly irrational. The system of life created by modern industry is one of the highest expediency, convenience, and efficiency. Reason, once defined in these terms, becomes equivalent to an activity which perpetuates this world. Rational behavior becomes identical with a matter-of-factness which teaches reasonable submissiveness and thus guarantees getting along in the prevailing order.

— herbert marcuse, “some social implications of modern technology” (1941)

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The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be. For to the extent that asceticism moved out of the monastic cell and was carried over into the lif e of work in a vocational calling, and then commenced to rule over this-worldly morality, it helped to do its part to build the mighty cosmos of the modern economic order - namely, an economy bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanied, machine-based production. This cosmos today determines the style of life of all individuals born into this grinding mechanism, and not only those directly engaged in economically productive activity. It does so with overwhemling force - and perhaps it will continue to do so until the last ton of fossil fuel has burnt to ashes. The concern for material goods, according to Baxter, should lie on the shoulders of his saints like “a lightweight coat that one can throw off at any time.” Yet fate allowed this coat to become a steel-hard casing. To the exent that asceticism undertook to transform and influence the wolrd, the world’s material goods acquired an increasing and, in the end, inescapable power over people - as never before in history.

— max weber, the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism

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If one acquires the habit of contemplating vast horizons, overall views, and fine generalisations. one can no longer without impatience allow oneself to be confined within the narrow limits of a special task. Such a remedy (a liberal education) would therefore only make specialisation inoffensive by making it intolerable, and in consequence more or less impossible.

— emile durkheim, the division of labor in society

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biteofpythias:

tax cuts tax cuts tax cuts. it will all trickle down eventually! oh and unions are horrible.

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thesociologist:

mrsoptimistic:

Yes. :)

It has been slightly over a year since his passing on the 27th of January, 2010. But the tragic things one read on the newspaper everyday only tells us that the society needs more men like Mr. Zinn. Everyday.

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senator virgina lyons presents anti-corporate constitutional amendment

In Vermont, state senator Virginia Lyons earlier today presented an anti-corporate personhood resolution for passage in the Vermont legislature. The resolution, the first of its kind, proposes “an amendment to the United States Constitution … which provides that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States.”…The language in the Lyons resolution is unabashed. “The profits and institutional survival of large corporations are often in direct conflict with the essential needs and rights of human beings,” it states, noting that corporations “have used their so-called rights to successfully seek the judicial reversal of democratically enacted laws.”…Thus the unfolding of the obvious: “democratically elected governments” are rendered “ineffective in protecting their citizens against corporate harm to the environment, health, workers, independent business, and local and regional economies.” The resolution goes on to note that “large corporations own most of America’s mass media and employ those media to loudly express the corporate political agenda and to convince Americans that the primary role of human beings is that of consumer rather than sovereign citizens with democratic rights and responsibilities.”

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