Yves Smith — Martin Wolf on the Low Labor Participation as the Result of the Crapification of Jobs

The underlying pathology is not hard to describe: employers (enabled by the Fed which has since the 1980s been only too wiling to provide for higher levels of unemployment so as to curb labor bargaining power to keep inflation tame) have succeeded in eliminating labor bargaining power. That program has been aided and abetted by the popularization of libertarian ideologies, which encourage many to see themselves as more in charge of their destiny than they are and thus see success and failure as the result of talent and work, as opposed to circumstance.…

More on precarity and the Anne Case and Angus Deaton study, too.

Naked Capitalism
Martin Wolf on the Low Labor Participation as the Result of the Crapification of Jobs
Yves Smith

Chris Dillow — Complexity & Alienation

Chris Dillow sums it up very nicely. There's a book here in articulating the details and implications.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Complexity & Alienation
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle (UK)

Sandra LaFave — The Marxist Critique of Consumer Culture

Sunday evening reading. Particularly significant is section III, on "the good life," which analyzes Marx's debt to Aristotle on the good life.


The Marxist Critique of Consumer Culture
Sandra LaFave
 | West Valley College

The morphing of Occupy into an alternatives countercultural movement — Back to the Sixties

Government has finally abandoned the public interest for good, Kirkland says. He sees little potential for taking it back.
It’s now “about building self-sufficient communities that can support themselves without the government,” he said. “It’s no longer political. It’s social. 

The Occupy movement, Kirkland says, teaches people how to cope with the absence of government. As social programs, school offerings and health and pension benefits get cut, working-class people will have to learn to take charge of their own communities.

Because of the movement, “they’ll be prepared for when there is no government to serve them,” he said.

Kirkland and Seidewitz do not agree with notions in the mainstream media that the Occupy Wall Street movement has died out.

“The parks were magical,” said Seidewitz, “but they served as a place where we all met each other.”

The encampments were educational. They helped people build connections and form social groups. But camping in a park and talking to like-minded people, she said, can only do so much.
“It’s now about creating alternative media sources, which is easier to do now that we have all these connections,” she said. “We’ve all woken up. So it’s not about a park anymore.”

truthdig
One Year Later: Lessons Learned From Occupy Wall Street
Thomas Hedges, Center for Study of Responsive Law

Chris Dillow — Freedom, Well-Being & Capitalism

Food for thought for the philosophical.

Read it at Stumbling and Mumbling
Freedom, Well-Being & Capitalism (short)
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Marx called it "alienation." Alienation is also a sociological, existentialist and psychological term for a modern maladie.