Employment: Tool Of The Machine

by Cary Whitehead

Animals, wild creatures totally governed by instinct, busy themselves with
providing for themselves, but they are not said to work, much less to be
employed. We were once the same. The effort we made to live was part of living.
We were free to live, or die. We instinctively and urgently wanted to live, and
reproduce so as to continue life, and from that the effort to do so naturally
followed. This effort became known as work when that freedom was lost to us
and we were forced unwillingly to labour for masters, indirectly of our own needs
and harder and longer than those needs once required.

Then, when the majority were no longer forced to work for a minority of humans,
we all, in our various ranks, became obliged to work for the competitive money
economy of the Machine. This is known as employment, work for money, the
sole means of purchasing survival. We can not now live without money, which is
obtainable only from the Machine; therefore we are obliged to go cap-in-hand to
the Machine for employment. The Machine is responsible for deciding what work
shall be done, for it holds the purse-strings and, according to profitability,
determines how much money we shall be paid for that work. We are responsible
for securing the Machine's employment of us, doing its work to its satisfaction,
and living according to what the amount of money it pays can buy back from it.

Inwardly, we are all free to decide whether or not to conform in our minds to
this automatic system. Outwardly, what freedoms we have are automated, and
severely limited. We are 'free' obediently to submit to the Machine's education,
or otherwise apply ourselves to gaining its approval and privileged employment,
and to live in a style which this economic level makes appropriate. We are 'free',
having accepted a lower level of employment and a more cramped economic
style of life, to unite with fellow workers to bargain for 'fair' wages and
conditions using the threat of withdrawing our labour. We are 'free' to decline
employment and face starvation or, in the case of the rich nations, to live on the
lowest possible income paid by welfare or charitable institutions to the
unemployed. We can develop ways of supporting and enriching life
independently of the Machine and its money economy, but we can do this only
on the margins of reality while still being basically Machine-dependent.

We are not free to decide overall what work shall be done; to do work that the
Machine disallows, however humanly vital; to survive or prosper when unwilling
to do the work which the Machine allocates or allows, in the way it requires; to
live as or where we wish, or live at all, without the Machine's money; or to
demand work which the Machine is not willing to provide. We are free to prosper
by limiting our ambition to self-interest, but since our work is mostly imposed on
us, or enticed out of us, we are not free to feel the enthusiastic goodwill which
goes with good labour voluntarily contributed to the common cause. There is all
the difference in the world between giving our effort in that spirit of willing
responsibility and toiling unwillingly in our own defence or purely for selfish gain.
We are carried along by the autoprogressive, money economy tide, our reality a
day-to-day practical and political adjustment to its waves. Some of us resist and
hold back against the tide, but mostly the economically strong push forward,
pressing back the weak. We have not yet acquired that enlightenment which
would give us the collective will to swim against the tide and to break its power
over us.

Our deeply ingrained concept of employment, which translates the combined
effort for the well-being of whole humanity into the separated individuals need
for a specific Machine job, is as ridiculous as our concept of reality. And the
practice of one human employing others for profit is morally akin to slavery, a
creator of inequality. It is our present reality, almost unquestioned, that we need
employment to survive, and the Machine is the only employer. So we work for
the competitive money economy, keep its lores and look to it for survival of our
species, when its objective is not whole human survival; it is not interested in
humanity at all as a morally aware intellectual race, only in autoprogression of
itself by human agency.

Consequently, humanity generally depends for its continuing life on employment,
which accrues to its detriment and possibly to its eventual destruction. The
Machine cannot of itselfdo anything. It directs but must rely on humans to act.
Mostly we do anything that the Machine requires us to do, whatever it may be
and whatever the circumstances. We don uniforms, gain degrees, take office,
accept rank, make and use weapons, bulldoze rainforest, build nuclear power
stations, compete with each other, cheat one another, argue with one another,
crush one another - all for automatic reasons.

Just as the concept of employment is an economic phenomenon, so is the
occurrence of unemployment. It is the logical accompaniment of competitive
inequality, a necessary casualty of money-economic recession, the low point of
cyclic automatic activity as it oscillates between rest and the full generation of
energy, naturally, like winter as opposed to summer, but with the difference that
whilst we cannot control the seasons, we can and should control our own
economy, or management. Each time a cycle touches bottom enough
determination and energy has been gathered to begin striving towards the top
once more. This activity characterises instinctive life, which has no motivation
but the impulsion of energy to act and react, reflected in the explosive birth of a
life-form, then of its seed, its implosion to death, and the explosive re-birth of its
seed.

When there is unemployment we cry out for jobs. It is the cry of the mentally
blind, mesmerised by automation into believing they are unable to take
responsibility for their own affairs into their own hands. We are asking
employment of the very automatic economy which has carelessly caused our
unemployment. That we do not prevent unemployment is because we have no
control over money-economic recessions. This in turn is because recessions are
part of an instinctive cycle which we aid and abet, and to ask instinct to
contradict itself is asking the impossible. We shall get rid of unemployment only
when we have thrown out the concept of employment; when we have subjected
our instinct to the full wisdom of our intellect, so giving human life its true
motivation.

Unemployment is part of the myth of the money economy which insists, when in
recession, that there is no work for many of us when there is work in plenty. The
reason behind this is that, according to the current rule, we may not work except
for money. So when there is no money to pay us we may not work. What is
the real difference between times of full employment and massive
unemployment? In terms of humantruth there is no real difference. The work
needing to be done is the same, needful resources are the same, and our
capacity for labour is the same. It is only an artificial economic difference that
creates this human suffering. Let me repeat - in a humantrue society such labour
would be done as was necessary to provide all needs, and needs would be
simply provided. The money economy is an unnecessary and inhuman
intervention which upsets this straightforward voluntary equation.

Humanity in general accepts automatic reality without question, but we do vary
in our reactions to the effects of automatic policies on people. Now a little about
the political division between Right and Left(more to come later). Generally
speaking the former supports the authority of the Machine over the people, and
the latter champions the rights of the people against the Machine. The majority
of those on the Left are the least rewarded, least privileged and most vulnerable,
the manual workers, whose rights are represented by the trade union movement,
a movement whose influence has been very much reduced in recent years. This
movement has opposed employers, but not the Machine. It has accepted that its
members are employed by the money economy, and that its job is to make their
employment secure and to raise their rewards and privileges to the highest
possible level. This has relieved or re-distributed but not eliminated poverty; it
has changed but strengthened the Machine by spreading the practice of
consumerism; and it has had no good effect on the cycles of periodic prosperity
and recession, except that in periods of recession the wages of union members
may not be reduced out of hand and workers either continue on full pay or are
made redundant and receive very much lower welfare payments. By no means
all workers now belong to unions, however, and in the case of non-members
wages are again at the mercy of market forces.

What I am trying to demonstrate is that humanity can not be benefited
effectively by automatic means, only by ridding itself of the Machine. The
Machine is a system for serving the automaton by way of many institutions, of
which the trade union movement is one. In times of comparatively full
employment all our work is devoted to the Machine, whereas we should be
devoting ourselves to overthrowing the Machine. As it happens, some
unemployed people have found that by rejecting normal automatic standards
they have converted their state of unemployment from one of deprivation to one
of new opportunity for understanding themselves and their world. They have
discovered something better than working for the Machine. This is but a short
step from realising that the Machine is unnecessary and that only it prevents us
all voluntarily working for humanity.

The institution of employment, then, is a strong factor in our failure to realise
humantruth. It has the effect of continually reinforcing our automatic
conditioning, often for reasons which seem good. All who are employed are busy
fulfilling some function of the Machine, more or less. By this means most are also
fulfilling a family responsibility. To be humanly, companionably satisfactory is to
be content with one's lot. To be satisfactory in automatic terms is to fulfil one's
function to the best of one's ability. Those who go against automatic reality
appear, in this light, to be recklessly trying to upset the applecart, failing in their
private responsibilities by publicly opposing the Machine.

Automatic functions are separated and competitive, not co-operative. Each tends
to deal with its own matters within its own strictly limited boundaries. All vie with
each other for resources, priorities and profits. So they tend to occupy fully the
conscious minds of the humans engaged in them. If all these functions were for
one common human purpose they would have to take criticism of the Machine
seriously, for they clearly do not work for human good. But they all do work for
their own different, specific, competitive, automated purposes, which make
sense only to minds which remain submerged in the automatic chaos.

The individual whose reasoning questions this reality might be heard, but in the
end those who listen have to return to their automatic functions, and if they are
to give these functions their full attention, as they must do for Machine-success,
then they do not normally allow such critical comments to penetrate beyond the
periphery of their minds. What is required, and what this book aims for, is
abnormal human effort to break this deadlock.