Jobs

December 9th, 2008 Posted in Critique, Jobs Seroquel For Sale Acticin No Prescription Buy Lasuna No Prescription Buy Online Shallaki Buy Motrin Online Levlen For Sale Zimulti No Prescription Buy Vantin No Prescription Buy Online Elimite Buy Topamax Online Prinivil For Sale Lotensin No Prescription Buy Prozac No Prescription Buy Online Hyzaar Buy Karela Online Doxycycline For Sale Serevent No Prescription Buy Erythromycin No Prescription Buy Online Maxaquin Buy Zoloft Ultram Online Vasodilan For Sale Female Viagra No Prescription Buy Lynoral No Prescription Buy Online Erythromycin Buy Evista Online

Transition at the top. Two sets of senior cadres, one incoming, the other outgoing. Concern is not over unemployment. All of these people have alternate places. No matter the election outcome, they all keep working. Money will be rolling in.  They’ll be earning a living. Food, housing, clothes, travel, medical care, entertainment, all the necessities covered.

They are in a coveted spot, a base of comfort and security. It has three levels: economic income (eat good), social prestige or honor (feel good), political power (do good).  It doesn’t assure beyond itself. No matter socio-economic position, we all share in the  openness of the next minute; the tough moments of illness and death, the element of chance and fate. But to be on the up side is still a definite advantage. And these revolving elites have it.

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But my interest here is in the job switches.  At time one  you are a senator, governor, investment banker, university president, a general in the army,  at the next time  you are a cabinet level officer, an executive counselor to the president, the president himself.  Their opposites are moving on to universities, think tanks, law firms.  A life of lucrative lectures, fabulous book deals.  Concurrently they become television talking heads, and consultants for a fee. .

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A job is a particular kind of activity toward a defined end and purpose. It usually implies an employer, an initiator, who sets the goal and the organization and the conditions of the work. There is a contract, work exchanged for wage, salary, fee.

The job is a way to connect with society’s economic system. A product is made, a service given, and in return one gets  money and the ability to demand goods and services in return.

Money, once in circulation, follows its own logic.  As gift, inheritance, as dividend and interest, as advantage in exchanges, as savings, as debt and leverage, as insurance payments for death, injury, disability, unemployment. Dependence is rewarded  by a share in the income of another.  Job of work is not the only way to accumulate moola. But that is also another story.

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What one does, one’s preferred job, is not randomly determined, but neither is it fixed and beyond our wishes. . For all of us there is a complex of opportunity, talent, training, experience and our own will.  An element of lottery of which we are only dimly aware. It is like finding a mate.  For the individual wending his/her way the discovered links to a socio-economic place and to another person feel like  miracles. But from the side of the group this is a sorting out. It has  a logic and  a pattern.

There are two sides to any job–activity required by biological and ecological necessity (labor) and activity generated by psychological preference (work). Different kinds of pleasure and pain. Direct versus sublimated. Digging up the earth for planting or for a road or for the foundation of a house against working out in the gym.  Both exercise: one against the demands of the environment, the other in service to the self. Jobs usually contain aspects of both.

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Some kinds of jobs offer limited access to the mass of applicants.  More are attracted to the work than there are places available. Many who identify with a particular job  are unemployed or underemployed.  The wage for the work  might not cover one’s needs. Actors, for example, especially those starting out.  The line through to a singular career, the repetition of jobs of the same kind of work, may be socially hazardous, very problematic.  Many do not attain the ideal of steady work in the position they want. The actual career is something else.

The political life has a similar pattern but it is not articulated in the same way in language and myth.  The young actor knows the drill. The young politico’s position is more nebulous.  There are after all more theatrical stars than presidents of the United States.  But both  careers require compromise from the vast majority. Making do with less. All the elective and appointive offices as way-stops. All the odd pick up jobs. Many workers  frozen short on the way to the top.

So for the actor there is a second job: in restaurant, in office, blue collar or white collar, any kind of labor to get through to the time of real work. One lives in parallel worlds: the as if (the struggle to get to one’s real work) versus the nightmarish now (what one does to stay alive meanwhile.) (It is not always a bad dream, sometimes only like dead-heading or mildly boring.)

For the politico this second job is in law, finance, military, teaching. Outwardly it seems to be the primary career, but the politico is distinguished from the rest by a poorly hidden wild ambition.

But for most of us there is a unitary work reality.  The job we have now is within our preferred (or finally accepted) career line. We might get incremental promotions. We improve and hone our skills. and our worth to our employer and the strength of our trade union might get us an ascending wage over time. But the blow-out moment of sudden achievement of the longed for place of the actor and the politico is replaced by the hope to hit the number or to win the big prize of the state lottery. The desire to go up and up, if it exists,  becomes a fantasy.

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There is another way: the avocation, sometimes downgraded to hobby (an avocation that is treated as not serious.)  The one job world while secure has a monomaniacal quality. Most of us need to sublimate in more than one direction. So the idea of the second job that connects us to another part of ourselves. It is separate from the need to earn money.  Its only connect to money is in the cost of required material and space.  This supposedly gives us the freedom to project self to the external object. The doing that expresses the hidden self. Commercial compromise is rejected.  (Vacation is a form of  unrecognized avocation. Popularly thought of as not work everyone recognizes that it is only another job with an alternate set of rules.)

This separation of loved work from the question of money seems to me an error.  It is the dilemma of the fine artist whose primary task is the confrontation of self with the intractable object–which in a way exemplifies the general problem we all face. Can one work for self and for market at the same time?

For the moment let us compromise and say that avocation and job are both work.  One for self, the other for another. Let the money roll or not.

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Unemployment is the question of the day.  If the wage is one’s only connect with the economic system it becomes a very serious  biological and social issue.

The self-reliance of the productive adults of our society upon whom the continuity of our species depends is challenged in a very fundamental way. The retreat to hunting and fishing and gathering and herding and vegetable plot is almost impossible for those who follow the urban way.  Beside lacking the training and experience of the rural way there  is not enough space or time or resources for all of us to make an old style living. So everything turns on the  patch-up the specialists can concoct for the post-modern socio-economic world that we have constructed. A patch in and on the historical present.

 We have been arguing that the patch-up is part of the system. It continues apace with the ups and downs. We even have a class of specialist economists  dedicated to this task–hampered and infiltrated by the ideologues and the special interests and the lobbies–but with remarkable success so far in avoiding a second Great Depression. Broadening  the resolutions to questions of necessary and productive work makes sense. Introduces a new phase and possibly a new type of cadre–maybe people closer to the ordinary experience.

 The sociological consequence of the crisis unresolved is the recognition of the need for critique and dialogue which will include canvasing  the possibility of trading in the way of the patches for a new suit.

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Caught out.  Stay  self-reliant. Do not confuse a flaw in the economic order with a flaw in yourself. Yet avoid blaming others. If the system is broken we are all responsible. After all it is our economy.