Re: <nettime> Political-Economy and Desire

[Jonathan Marshall <Jonathan.Marshall@uts.edu.au>]

Morlock writes:

>There is pretty much a consensus that in the first world only about
>10-15% need to work to provide *all* goods and services. Then,
>depending on the system, there are 15-20% of the armed guards (police,
>military, etc), and the rest are sort of ... redundant. Hence
>unemployment and poverty.

Whence the 'hence'? 

I dare say i'm not the only person old enough to remember the days when these kinds of figures about production (not sure where they come from, but lets pretend) were used to promise us all (by whom?) that automation, and the information society, would lead to a paradisical world, in which we all exchanged whatever we wanted to produce in our spare time, and lived freely off perhaps working one day a week, or a couple of hours a week.

The 'hence povery' here seems to me to arise from ignoring the 'structures' of work, 'structures' of ownership, 'structures' of power, and the 'structures' of distribution, amongst a few other things....

jon

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