With the new clothing of the 21st century human labour will out-compete the machine because:
Human life and wellbeing will be safeguarded
** Ample land, water and other critical resources will be available for essential food production;
** People will not be poisoned by industrial processes;
** There'll be less superfluous consumption and production and therefore more leisure time;
** We'll be more satisfied with our products because we will design and make them;
** The monotony and drudgery of mass production will be reduced;
** Local production will result in the decentralisation of power and wealth in society.
** The imperative to condition us with advertising and 'education' will no longer exist.
Huh?
ReplyDeleteHuh?^2
ReplyDeleteI have absolutely no desire to learn how to use a sewing machine.
ReplyDeleteI just threw out a sweater my mom knit for me 20 years. I never wore it, but I felt guilty getting rid of it. Store-bought clothes for me.
maybe there are limits to capital deepening?
ReplyDeletemaybe, through expansion of global credit and international vendor financing, this limit has for years been stretched far beyond its limit?
maybe the substituting of credit expansion for investment and wages has arrived at a global limit?
so maybe we have entered a synchronizing global recession
in which local cooperatives and forms of council communism, at least for a period, can/will replace that which has been.
maybe the present world conjuncture is presenting a still not so recognized discontinuity/opportunity?
just a notion.
I will not knit your socks!!!!
ReplyDeleteJuan, spot on!
ReplyDelete"maybe the present world conjuncture is presenting a still not so recognized discontinuity/opportunity?"
Or maybe we're on the verge of a 'phase transition' in capitalism?
"But if, in the prodigiously rapid vibrations of its last phases, thought should consider to act as the universal solvent which it is, and should reduce the forces of the molecule, the atom, the electron to that costless servitude to which it has reduced the old elements of earth and air, fire and water; if man should continue to set free the infinite forces of nature, and attain control of cosmic forces on a cosmic scale, the consequences may be as surprising as the change from water to vapor, of the worm to the butterfly, of radium to electrons. " Henry Adams
"...loss of autonomy in order to maximise the services of megatechnics, carries with it one further condition: one must not demand any goods other than those the machine offers in the current year, nor must one seek to reain, beyond the appointed half-life, any goods that have proved sufficiently durable and attractive to be preferable to those offered. This means that one must not demand any other kind of life than that which can be lived, as directed, within the current fashionable frame. To have a life that is in any way detached from the megatechnic complex, to say nothing of being cockily independent of it, or recalcitrant to its demand, is regarded as nothing less than a form of sabotage. Hence the fury evoked by the Hippies..."
The Myth of the Machine by Lewis Mumford. 1970. ISBN 0-15-163974-4. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. New York. Page 330.
Steve said: "Store-bought clothes for me." That figures. You're a government economist!
ReplyDelete...but...but...but... then we'd all look like those hippies in the attached picture! Never mind the practical and realistic objections. I protest on aesthetic grounds!
ReplyDeleteYNS protests on aesthetic grounds. Okay. Let's see your designs ;-)
ReplyDeleteSomething like in the picture above? But generally Iàm just a jeans and cheap tshirt kind of guy.
ReplyDeletenotsneaky